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US supports Armenian new government’s efforts – John Bolton

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Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan received today John Bolton, Assistant to US President for National Security Affairs.

The acting Prime Minister attached importance to active Armenian-American dialogue and close cooperation.

Referring to the political developments in Armenia, he said: “The processes that followed the non-violent, velvet revolution of love and solidarity are based exceptionally on democratic values. Now we are working to create and reinforce a stable and institutional democratic country.”

Pashinyan emphasized that Armenia is resolute to move forward along the path of democratic development.

John Bolton, in turn, conveyed warm greetings from US President Donald Trump. He noted that in this period of historic importance to Armenia, they attach importance to the development and deepening of Armenian-American relations.

Bolton congratulated Pashinyan on successfully leading the peaceful demarcating transition.

“The US supports the new government’s efforts aimed at fighting corruption, ensuring transparency of the judicial system and improves the accountability of the government before people, which will lead to the reinforcement of the rule of law and regional stability,” Bolton stated.

Armenian-American relations are of strategic importance for US – John Bolton

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The Armenian-American relations are a priority and important for the United States, US President Donald Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton told reporters in Yerevan on October 25,

The US official said his meeting with Armenia’s high-ranking officials was quite full, a number of issues of bilateral interest were discussed.

“I have already met with the acting Prime Minister, the secretary of the Security Council, as well as the acting ministers of defense and foreign affairs. During the meetings I have stated that the Armenian-American relations are a priority and important for the US. They are of strategic significance for us. We have also touched upon regional issues, including the situation around Iran, Syria. We attached importance to the activeness of economic relations between our countries, increase of the US direct investments in Armenia”, John Bolton said.

He also touched upon the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

“We are ready to have our support in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement since this settlement derives from the interests of not only Armenia and Azerbaijan, but also the US”, he said.

 

United States National Security Advisor John Bolton to visit Armenia

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US President Donald Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton will visit Armenia as part of a regional visit. Bolton said on Twitter that he will visit the region October 20.

“On October 20th I’ll be travelling to Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia to meet with my counterparts and other senior officials to advance American interests on a range of security issues,” Bolton said on Twitter.

John Bolton wants regime change in Iran, and so does the cult that paid him

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John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, speaks during the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at National Harbor, Md., on March 3, 2016. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

by Jason Rezaian,

President Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as his new national security adviser has created a stir among foreign policy experts. He is known for expressing extreme skepticism about international institutions (including the United Nations, where he served as U.S. ambassador in the George W. Bush administration). He has advocated a preemptive strike against North Korea. And he has also repeatedly proposed “regime change” (meaning “war”) in Tehran.

Since the latter issue is one of the trickiest facing the Trump administration, it’s worth taking a closer look.

Bolton’s hawkish views on Iran mirror those of Israel, Saudi Arabia and one of his key ideological partners, the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK).

Today the MEK bears little resemblance to the highly organized, influential and militant opposition force that it was in Iran while seeking to topple the shah during the 1979 revolution. Initially it worked in cooperation with the clerical government. In fact, children of several top officials in the Islamic Republic joined the MEK.

When it became clear that the MEK could no longer coexist with the ruling Islamic Republic Party, some MEK members withdrew from the group, while others were imprisoned. They either recanted and returned to society or were executed.

Those who were left fled to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein, who invaded Iran in 1980, gave them a haven. Many took up arms and fought against their Iranian countrymen, earning the group the unofficial nickname monafegheen, or the “hypocrites.” That title has stuck, and most Iranians inside the country, regardless of their political tendencies, refer to them as such.

The group is loathed by most Iranians, mainly for the traitorous act of fighting alongside the enemy.

But it is the group’s activities in the decades since that have cemented its reputation as a deranged cult. For decades its command center was a compound in Iraq’s Diyala province, where more than 3,000 members lived in virtual captivity. The few who were able to escape told of being cut off from their loved ones, forced into arranged marriages, brainwashed, sexually abused and tortured.

All this was carried out under the supervision of the group’s leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, the husband and wife at the top of the organization’s pyramid. He has been missing since the U.S. invasion in 2003 and is presumed dead. She now runs the group and makes regular public appearances with her powerful friends from the West — such as Bolton.

The group was long a fixture on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations for having killed American citizens. Bolton and others successfully lobbied to have the designation removed in 2012. That did little to change how average Iranians think of the organization.

In the seven years I lived in Iran, many people expressed criticism of the ruling establishment — at great potential risk to themselves. Some hoped for regime change by military force, others dreamed of a return of the monarchy and many more wanted to see a peaceful transition to a secular alternative to clerical rule. In all that time, though, I never met a person who thought the MEK should, or could, present a viable alternative.

But apparently that doesn’t matter to its supporters in Washington.

Of course they were paid for their loyalty. “Very few former U.S. government officials shilled pro bono for the MEK,” said a former State Department official who worked on Iran. Among the long bipartisan list of people who have taken money from the group in exchange for speaking at its events are former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. Bolton, the former official told me, was also paid.

Their many efforts failed to the block the nuclear deal with Iran. Despite the long list of nefarious acts still carried out by Tehran, the biggest threat that Iran posed to international security — the issue that our allies and other world powers all agreed needed to be resolved — has been resolved.

Based on U.S. assessments and those of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran appears to be complying with the nuclear deal.

To those who claim that the nuclear deal isn’t working, regime change remains the only solution. For the MEK, and Bolton, if his words are to be taken at face value, the only path to that could be war. The group has long been prepared to do whatever it takes to see that happen, including presenting fake intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/24/john-bolton-wants-regime-change-in-iran-and-so-does-the-cult-that-paid-him/?utm_term=.ba1a62f32c47

Trump replaces H.R. McMaster with Warmonger John Bolton as his national security adviser

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John Bolton

John Bolton

John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, President Donald Trump announced in a tweet.

Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration, is known for his hard-line foreign policy views, and has written in support of attacking North Korea. McMaster’s exit is just the latest in a long line of departures from the Trump White House. Trump had been preparing to replace McMaster for weeks, NBC News has reported.

Rand Paul: Will Donald Trump betray voters by hiring John Bolton?

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john-boltonBy Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)

Rumors are that Donald Trump might pick John Bolton for Secretary of State. Heaven forbid.

One of the things I occasionally liked about the President-elect was his opposition to the Iraq war and regime change. He not only grasped the mistake of that war early, but also seemed to fully understand how it disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East and even emboldened Iran.

We liberated Iraq, but today their best friend is Iran, their second greatest ally is Russia, and their third strongest alliance is with Syria. Trump really seems to get the lesson. Hillary Clinton never did.

Most importantly right now, John Bolton never learned and never will.

Bolton is a longtime member of the failed Washington elite that Trump vowed to oppose, hell-bent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in the last 15 years — particularly those Trump promised to avoid as president.

John Bolton more often stood with Hillary Clinton and against what Donald Trump has advised.

None of this is secret. It’s all out there. Perhaps the incoming administration should take a closer look.

Bolton was one of the loudest advocates of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and still stupefyingly insists it was the right call 13 years later. “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct,” Bolton said just last year.

Trump, rightly, believes that decision was a colossal mistake that destabilized the region. “Iraq used to be no terrorists,” Trump said in 2015. “(N)ow it’s the Harvard of terrorism.”

“If you look at Iraq from years ago, I’m not saying he was a nice guy, he was a horrible guy,” Trump said of Saddam Hussein, “but it was a lot better than it is right now.”

Trump has said U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2003 “helped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper.” In contrast, Bolton has said explicitly that he wants to repeat Iraq-style regime change in Syrian and Iran.

You can’t learn from mistakes if you don’t see mistakes.

Trump has blamed George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for helping to create ISIS — but should add John Bolton to that list, who essentially agreed with all three on our regime change debacles.

In 2011, Bolton bashed Obama “for his refusal to directly target Gaddafi” and declared, “there is a strategic interest in toppling Gaddafi… But Obama missed it.” In fact, Obama actually took Bolton’s advice and bombed the Libyan dictator into the next world. Secretary of State Clinton bragged, “We came, we saw, he died.”

When Trump was asked last year if Libya and the region would be more stable today with Gaddafi in power, he replied “100 percent.” Mr. Trump is 100 percent right.

No man is more out of touch with the situation in the Middle East or more dangerous to our national security than Bolton.

All nuance is lost on the man. The fact that Russia has had a base in Syria for 50 years doesn’t deter Bolton from calling for all out, no holds barred war in Syria. Bolton criticized the current administration for offering only a tepid war. For Bolton, only a hot-blooded war to create democracy across the globe is demanded.

Woodrow Wilson would be proud, but the parents of our soldiers should be mortified. War should be the last resort, never the first. War should be understood to be a hell no one wishes for. Dwight Eisenhower understood this when he wrote, “I hate war like only a soldier can, the stupidity, the banality, the futility.”

Bolton would not understand this because, like many of his generation, he used every privilege to avoid serving himself. Bolton said, with the threat of the Vietnam draft over his head, that “he had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.” But he’s seems to be okay with your son or daughter dying wherever his neoconservative impulse leads us: “Even before the Iraq War, John Bolton was a leading brain behind the neoconservatives’ war-and-conquest agenda,” notes The American Conservative’s Jon Utley.

At a time when Americans thirst for change and new thinking, Bolton is an old hand at failed foreign policy.

The man is a menace.

RELATED: Rand Paul says Republicans’ top priority will be to repeal Obamacare

Our Constitution and our founding fathers were explicit war was not to be fought without the permission of Congress. No matter which party occupies the White House, I will not shrink from my constitutional duty to oppose any advocate for war.

The true statesmen realizes, with reluctance, that war is sometimes necessary but as a country, we should resist any would-be leader who wants to bomb now and think later.

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on changing our disastrous foreign policy. To appoint John Bolton would be a major first step toward breaking that promise.