John Bolton Wants War with Iran: We Need to Stop Him
Win Without War
WASHINGTON (May 9, 2019) — National Security Advisor John Bolton just threatened war with Iran. He’s sending warships to their doorsteps to “warn” the Iranian government that any out-of-line step will be met with “unrelenting force.”
By itself, deploying aircraft carriers and bombers to a region where the US has been in a near constant state of war for decades might not seem like a big deal.
But alongside Bolton and Pompeo’s consistent moves to destroy any chance at diplomatic solutions — from the US just designating part of the Iranian military a “terrorist organization,” to killing the Iran Deal last year — it’s clear where we’re headed and it’s not looking good.
The Trump administration, led by Bolton, is stoking the flames of war with Iran. And we must do everything we can to stop it.
John Bolton has been obsessed with waging war on Iran for decades. And his latest escalation towards military confrontation relies on the US public being distracted with putting out domestic fires — allowing these huge strides towards war to go unnoticed.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve seen Bolton do this before. The Trump administration is, almost verbatim, using the same playbook used by Cheney and Bolton in the Bush administration to stoke a devastating war with Iraq in 2002.
We all remember how well that turned out, and we can’t let it happen again.
That’s why Win Without War is pulling out all the stops. We are pushing against regime change narratives in the media, against war mongering in the administration, and for anti-war legislation in Congress. We are building a movement to stop the Trump administration — led by John “Bomb ’em” Bolton — towards a needless, disastrous, and costly war with Iran.
ACTION: Add your name: Stop Bolton’s War with Iran!
Win Without War was founded in the lead up to the Iraq War and we’ve been working ever since to never let a mistake like that happen again.
When Dick Cheney tried to start a war with Iran at the end of the Bush administration, we were there and we stopped him.
When Barack Obama chose diplomacy instead, we were there and we helped make history.
And now that Donald Trump and John Bolton are once again trying to start a devastating and deadly war, we’re right here and, with your help, we’ll stop them too.
John Bolton, Pyromaniac
Stephen Miles / Inkstick Media
(May 6, 2019) — Imagine for a minute that your town needs to hire a new fire chief, and after an extensive search, they decide to hire a pyromaniac.
But it’s not just that this new fire chief likes fires, he loves them, and he happens to be really, really good at starting them. And it’s not like people didn’t know this before he got the job.
He had spent years talking and writing about how much he loves fires. He talked about it on TV, he wrote books about it, and he was paid to give speeches talking about his love for starting fires — all because he had these odd theories about how burning down buildings is the best way to save the people inside.
But it wasn’t just talk. He also had a long history of starting fires. He started big fires, small fires, ones that erupt right away and ones that have smoldered so long that they’re still just starting to burn now that he’s the fire chief. Everybody knows this. They’ve watched him start the fires, and thought ‘ya know, that guy really likes fires.’ And now he’s the guy in charge of putting out fires in your town.
I think we can all agree that hiring an arsonist as the town fire prevention chief would be batshit nuts. But it turns out that’s exactly what Donald Trump has done with our nation’s foreign policy when he hired pyromaniac turned fire chief, John Bolton as his National Security Advisor.
You may remember John Bolton as the mustached buffoon who occasionally appeared on right-wing news, explaining why we should be bombing this or that country to bring them peace. After Trump worked his way through his first two National Security Advisors, he got over his dislike of Bolton’s mustache and put him in one of the few positions of real power in the Executive Branch that, for some reason, does not require Senate confirmation, something Bolton has proven utterly incapable of securing.
Now firmly ensconced atop America’s national security state, Bolton has set about his favorite activity, starting fires — all at once, all over the world.
The man who once wrote “To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran,” just as the US and world powers were inking a deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear program, is doing everything he can to put his words into practice.
Having helped pull the US out of the successful Iran nuclear agreement, Bolton has reportedly, single-handedly pushed the Pentagon to draw up war plans for Iran. Someone no one elected, that the Senate didn’t confirm, is instructing the United States military to draw up plans to start a war so bad one general famously quipped “if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”
Short of getting his direct attack on Iran, he’s willing to settle for a proxy war. Bolton has worked behind the scenes to undermine his boss’ stated intention to withdraw from Syria to fulfill his prophecy that “we’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders.”
He’s been part of the administration chorus erroneously saying that the situation in Yemen is all Iran’s fault, seeking justification to continued unauthorized US military involvement there. He seems willing to settle for a war with Iran anywhere he can start one.
But one important point about Bolton is that, like any good pyromaniac, he’s not satisfied trying to start just one fire. It should come as no surprise that Bolton’s latest attempted inferno is Venezuela. The Washington Post brings us all into the room of Bolton’s latest National Security Council meeting in which his aides routinely and hostilely interrupted the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because they wanted to solely focus on “military options,” a euphemistic term for ways to make war.
That’s the thing about pyromaniacs and their cronies, they don’t like it when you don’t let them start fires.
His track record is clear. John Bolton never met a challenge he didn’t want to turn into a crisis. He never met a crisis he didn’t want to make into a war. And he never met a war that he thinks should be ended. If there was a hall of fame for pyromaniacs, John Bolton should be ranked first.
Of course, Bolton isn’t the president, he only works for him. So where is his boss in all this? Trump is playing the back nine with his favorite autocrat of the day while the world turns into an inferno.
Perhaps Trump is simply hoping to arrange a retirement home beyond the reach of those pesky federal prosecutors awaiting his post-Presidency. Maybe he’s thinking about whether he’d like to open Trump Tower Riyadh or Moscow first. Either way, the guy who said “great nations do not fight endless wars” is sitting idly by while his National Security Advisor attempts to start and continue the United States’ endless wars.
The simple truth is that John Bolton is hoping that we’ll all forget that somehow we let a pyromaniac become fire chief.
We can’t let that happen. We need to keep the spotlight firmly on the guy lighting fires around the world. Sooner or later, those fires are going to get bigger, and when that happens, Bolton’s game plan has always been to pretend he had nothing to do with it.
We know what’s going to happen and what he’s going to do. The only question left is what we’ll do in response.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
