Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, which left the Arab country in ruin up until today, then US undersecretary of state John Bolton still says it was the right decision.
Despite many now-and-then politicians and military officials in Washington strongly believing that the US invasion of Iraq back in March 2003 was a great mistake, warmonger extremist figures, such as US former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, still defend the attack and believe it was a right decision.
Speaking to NPR’s Steve Inskeep this Saturday, Bolton defended the invasion and claimed that the Bush administration made the right decision; “I think it’s a mistake to treat a 20-plus year period as a block of granite. You accept one piece of it, you accept all of it. I don’t think that’s right. So I think you have to look at a series of decisions – some of which were right in my view, including the attack itself – and the military’s performance was superb. And you have to do it on the basis of how decision-makers face these questions when they’re confronted with them. Hindsight, as the saying goes, is always 20/20,” Bolton said.
When asked that the whole idea of Iraq having and hiding weapons of mass destruction was a lie, Bolton tried to evade a clear response; “Well, it depends on how you define a lie, because if you believe that’s a lie, then a lot of what I hear on NPR on any given day is a lie. To me, a lie is a statement that’s untrue, that’s uttered deliberately knowing it’s false. The administration didn’t lie,” he noted.
Good to mention that in 2003, when the US decided to invade Iraq under the assumption that the country had weapons of mass destruction, Bolton was the US undersecretary of state and therefore had a key role in foreign policy decision-making in Washington back then. The United States invaded 20 years ago, but the US troops never found the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war and instead triggered insurgency, chaos, and instability in Iraq that continues today.
But Bolton is alone in supporting the wrong decision of invading Iraq. In other words, Bolton’s supportive approach to the invasion is while many former and current American politicians and military officials have admitted on many occasions that the whole idea of attacking Iraq under the false claim of WMD suspicions was wrong.
Warmongering and invasion are in Bolton’s blood
Bolton’s support for the use of military force against other nations is nothing new. To read between the lines, the US national security advisor during the Trump administration has proposed the idea of invading Iran and North Korea on several occasions.
Regarding Iran, Bolton has, for years, held the idea that to stop the Islamic Republic from getting nuclear weapons, the US must restore to military force and attack Iran. This is while neither the International Atomic Energy Agency nor any other international body has ever reported any divergence in Iran’s nuclear program toward manufacturing nuclear bombs.
In October 2011, for example, Bolton said that “the only alternative to a nuclear Iran is to break Tehran’s nuclear program through the targeted use of military force.” Trump’s national security advisor also has been among the strongest supporters of attacking North Korea.
In September 2019, Bolton condemned Trump’s policies on North Korea and said the US should restore to military option because North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has made a ‘strategic decision’ to do whatever he can to keep his country’s nuclear weapons”, and expressed grave concerns that Pyongyang “will offer to sell its missiles and nuclear weapons and expertise to other rogue nations”.