Former temporary US envoy to the UN John Bolton has used his post-envoy period to become a popular talking head, more so, oddly, in the UK even than here. That headhood reached an apotheosis Sunday when he was invited to speak to the Conservative Party conference. This is the British opposition party which never opposed Tony Blair's war policy, and is still trying to find its way out of its long-term electoral hole. Enter Bolton, to scare the horses, calling for limited military strikes on Iran to deal with its (purported) nukes as well as for regime change, to get rid of the "source of the problem, Ahmadinejad":
The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back," he said.
In case any new people have recently wandered into the room, let's review those wonderful days gone by: the US overthrew at least three governments I remember, all three of them (how odd!) democratically elected: in Iran (things have gone so well there since then), Guatemala (ditto), and Chile. The latter regime change brought to power Gen. Pinochet, who recently died just as he was about to stand trial for the murder of thousands of his countrymen. Most spectacularly, one of those murders took place on the streets of our own capital. Yeah, I miss those kinds of balls, too.
Is Bolton just a wondrously goofy free-lancer? Or, in taking him semi-seriously, do the Brits perceive something we don't, that he's the unrestrained, uninhibited id of the Bush administration, wishing for what his brethren still in power are planning?
Longer view: what makes Bolton and his ilk so bizarre is that, on the one hand, they are the primary believers in American exceptionalism, the notion that something or somebody (God? Satan?) imbued this country with inherent moral good, so that we're immune to the evils and ills that plague all the other nations, no matter what we do (to argue otherwise, they say, is to engage in "moral relativism"). Yet, on the other hand, they most eagerly ignore those very elements -- painstakingly woven into the fundamental document of the nation by our founders -- that sought to keep this country from succumbing to the same ills -- meddling in the affairs of others, centralizing power in the executive -- that drove them to revolution, and to try to make this a nation apart..
But then, ids aren't supposed to be rational.
Isn't that like saying that the source of all that's wrong about the Bush administration is the Postmaster General or the Secretary of Agriculture?
Ahmadinejad doesn't run Iran, and I'm sure that Bolton knows it.
I believe you accidentally ommitted Bolton's name after "UN" in the first sentence of your post.
But the original sin may have been envisioned by Paul Wolfowitz.
http://www.light-to-dark.com/genocide_forgiven.html
We kinda know him, and his unAmerican kind.
http://www.light-to-dark.com/the_third_act.html
Sauce for the goose...
Lots, lots more US-engineered, funded, and armed coup d'etats. A few that come to mind are Brazil in 1964 or so with U.S. Navy poised just offshore, Indonesia in 1958 and the early 1960s, all of the Central American nations, some repeatedly, many of the South American nations (Bolivia as recently as the cocaine coup of the 1980s), various Caribbean nations, Greece in the 1950s and 1960s I think, funding guerilla insurgencies in Angola and elsewhere in Africa, etc.
I don't have time to go further, but all resulted in thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands killed. Most involved lists of "internal enemies" provided to the new junta by the local CIA minions, and these "enemies", who mostly were people working for democratic rule, ended up dead or fleeing. Our proud history.
Even in post-Yugoslavia, just when the newly de-Sovietized Yugoslavia was beginning to make up its mind what to do about its various nationalist regions, the U.S., along with Germany, France, and Britain, were encouraging secession by Germany's World War II ally Croatia, and some of the other provinces. So even the breakup of Yugoslavia into Serbia, was instigated and supported by the U.S. Funny but now a major brand new pipeline carries (or soon will be) central Asian oil through Kosovo, oil that formerly would have been directed through Russia, our old/new rival.
Bye.
If so...(I don't want to go there:)
Still since you brought it up, I had already began to wonder about the frighteningly prophetic story scenarios, previously laid out by certain Science Fiction authors, which describe our current American Dream (Nightmare) of shock doctrine--post 9/11, post criminal Flooding of New Orleans and throughout the current Iraq/Iran war without end.
Chiefly,
*Philip K. Dick [Blade Runner{Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?}, Through A Scanner Darkley, Penultimate Truth},
*George Orwell [1984]
*Richard Condon [Manchurian Candidate]
*William Gibson [Neuromancer Trilogy]
*Richard Hamilton [Greg Mandel series]
*Bruce Sterling [Heavy Weather, Karate Kid]
*Niel Stevenson [Cryptonomicon, Zodiac, Snow Crash]
{And last, but by no means least}
*Jules Verne [20,000 Leagues Under the Sea]
For his part, Bolton seems happier, less constrained, a bit more manic, and, as long as they can continue to do the on camera interviews without the four-point leather restraints showing, ... his caretakers have said he can continue to make such appearances from his hospital room. They feel that these appearances are cathartic in some way, ... and might lead to a full and complete recovery over the long term.
We all wish him well, I feel certain.