Trump's pick of John Bolton as national security advisor seen as war cabinet lining up
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- Published: Friday, 23 March 2018 17:31
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Photo: RHCWashington, March 23 – In the US, voices continue to rise in denouncing President Donald Trump's pick of John Bolton as national security advisor.
The choice by Trump of the hawkish neo-conservative was announced late Thursday, when the US president tweeted that H.R. McMaster planned to resign and that Bolton would replace him.
The selection of John Bolton as national security adviser is seen as polarizing even by Trump administration standards.
Congressional Democrats on Thursday were quick to condemn the US president's decision. Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the pick, with many pointing to Bolton's role in the Bush administration leading up to the Iraq War and some expressing fears over how Bolton might influence U.S. policy toward Iran and North Korea.
With the appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Trump is successfully lining up his war cabinet, wrote Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. The Senator noted that Bolton supports “proactively bombing Iran & striking North Korea with nuclear weapons first without provocation.” We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible conflict, tweeted the Senator.
Representative Seth Moulton, of Massachusetts, called the pick “another step backwards” and Brendan Boyle, of Pennsylvania, called it “disturbing.”
Representative Karen Bass, of California, wrote that John Bolton was being rewarded for selling the lie of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and peddling hatred of Muslims. And Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon recalled that John Bolton once wanted war with Cuba, arguing wrongly that Cuba, too, had weapons of mass destruction.
Well-known US scholar Phil Peters, president of the Cuba Research Center in Alexandria, Virginia, also wrote about John Bolton's negative involvement regarding Cuba.
Peters said in the year before the United States launched the 2003 Iraq war, based on false intelligence assessments about Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction, John Bolton was trying to make the same allegation about Cuba and a supposed biological weapons “program”.
Phil Peters also notes that when President Obama announced the opening towards Cuba, Bolton had called it an “unmitigated defeat for the United States” and had urged instead for increased pressure.
John Bolton will be Donald Trump's third national security adviser in over a year in office. (RHC)
