Hill wins, Bolton gets a big "L" for his forehead

Ah, appeasement...The rumors that started swirling about two days ago were confirmed earlier today when the bu$h administration officially moved to remove North Korea from the "State Sponsors of Terror" list. In a Rose Garden statement, the current occupant also suspended sanctions on North Korea that were enacted under the "Trading with Enemies Act".

Christopher Hill is dancing over the eviscerated Neocon ideology as John Bolton loses control and his moustache quivers uncontrollably.


I guess that todays announcement answers the question we posed a month ago.

Hill has been amazingly successful at tamping down the threat of a nuclear North Korea, but the greatest test is looming...Will North Korea give up their Plutonium stockpile and pledge to make no more weapons from it?

That is the $64,000 dollar question.

How long can Hill maintain his perch on the tightrope? He has managed the impossible thus far - he has managed to commit actual diplomacy while dealing with an administration that finds peaceful resolution of conflict anathema, and will only accept a diplomatic solution if there is no other alternative.

All the while, chickenhawk Übermensches have awaited his failure with bated breath, and the administration has been less than pleased with his successes. Indeed, they have denied him plaudits he richly deserved, just to remind him who works for whom.

It appears the answer to the "how long" question turned out to be "long enough."

Some days, you just get some good new. This looks like one of them. And the popping sound you hear? That is the sound of wingnut heads exploding. And fans of diplomacy popping champaign corks. There is quite a bit of that, too.

The indispensable Steve Clemons had this to say about todays announcement.

This is huge news -- and is a giant step in putting US-North Korea relations on a new and more constructive track. This is a success for the Bush administration -- and more importantly for Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian & Pacfic Affairs Christopher Hill who has been a punching bag for former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton who has been spitting on Hill's deal-making for the last year.

There are still a lot of questions ranging from the interesting issue of North Korea cooperation with Syria's alleged nuclear facility that was destroyed by Israel and other issues -- but when President Bush gave Colin Powell the positive nod in the first week of April 2003 to proceed with the Six Party Talks, Bush and Cheney ignored Iran's offer of a structure for normalized US-Iran relations the very same week in 2003.

The contrast in circumstances between where America is today with North Korea and where we are with Iran is vital to note. We 'engaged' North Korea and blew it with Iran.

Congrats to Christopher Hill, John Negroponte, Condoleezza Rice, the former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns and his successor William Burns. And for those who want to knock China around, they should know that this entire process was impossible without China's impressive, collaborative diplomacy.

Barack Obama's inclination towards engagement with problematic leaders around the world now is now buttressed by an experience of the George W. Bush administration. Too bad so much of the rest of America's foreign policy portfolio didn't get this same kind of attention.

I am particularly gloating over the fact that todays announcement bolsters Obama's foreign policy plans and undermines John $idney's "bomb Iran/endless war" agenda.

Someone Help Mr. Bolton From the Stage...

Sheer ridiculous wankery from John Bolton...

I don’t think you’d hear the Arab states say this publicly, but they would be delighted if the United States or Israel destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons capability.

It's hard to count just how many ways that Bolton is wrong when he speaks like this in public. No credible news organization should look to him for analysis or commentary, at least not the ones who value what they put out as far as content is concerned. Bolton reads and sounds like the last Neocon standing, a relic of 2003 that simply can't find anyone to take him seriously anymore.

His statement is wrong on so many different levels--but yes, it would technically be true to say that many Arab nations would like to see Israel "disarm" Iran and "destroy their nuclear weapons capability." Except that there are a whole host of other reasons they would be horrified and would react accordingly against it--namely, I don't think OPEC would sit there and do nothing. I don't think Jordan and Syria would allow their airspace to be used for any kind of overflight, at least not without serious protest or military force. The fledgling Iraqi government would likely collapse into hysterics over such a thing.

Does anyone seriously think Israel could do such a thing? Well, no, because, for starters, Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons capability--hence, the disconnect in Bolton's logic. He knows they don't have one, but he cannot make his case if he has to sit there and patiently explain just how far away they are from having one. They have a series of initiatives and programs headed in that direction, and there's a good chance they could get there in five to ten years with a massive effort and an influx of money, and with support and technology they don't currently possess. However, there are at least a handful of other nations around the world that you could say the same thing about. But no one talks about Algeria or Taiwan like this, do they? No one talks about the fact that Brazil, South Africa, Argentina, Spain, Romania, or South Korea could probably beat the Iranians in the race to get a weapon if they put forth that same herculean effort. How seriously do you take a country like Iran when they're largely incapable of doing anything other than talking and repressing their own people?

So we're to believe that Arab countries would celebrate an aggressive projection of Israeli military force into a distant country, one that "succeeded" in destroying dozens of facilities, and left Iran defenseless? Because in order for Israel to destroy Iran's nuclear program, it would involve sending thousands and thousands of sorties over hostile territory into hostile territory, it would involve systematically destroying the Iranian air defense systems which use some fairly modern SAMs and SAM systems, and it would take months. Months of attacks, months of assessing damage, and months of determining what the end state of the situation was. As in, did we get it all? Did we get everything?

All while expecting Iran to do nothing in response to this.

Last time I looked into this, Iran was a founding member OPEC. They're not the end all, be all, but they're part of an organization which is running the table right now on energy prices. When was the last time anyone stood up and said, "you know, Iran is part of OPEC." Why do we never hear anyone point that out? We hear the likes of Bolton, we hear the proxies and the shills, and they always conveniently fail to point out that Iran is a member of OPEC.

So is Bolton being ridiculous? Yes, of course. Should Israel do nothing? Of course not--but how do you explain this to the Neocons? They're not totally wiped out, unfortunately. They're like the last shithouse rat looking to bite someone just to see if they can still pull it off.

Until we are rid of them, we are cursed with their presence in the media.

--WS

No, the Iranians DO NOT have a missile that can hit the United States

Via Think Progress, we get one of the most insane and batshit crazy pieces of unadulterated fear mongering and out-and-out stupidity I have seen this year.




Dumbasses...

No, the Iranians do NOT have any missile, of any kind whatsoever, that can actually hit an installation in the continental United States of America.

--WS

Citizen's Arrest

In order for there to be an actual arrest, you'd have to get past his bodyguard, Pam Atlas. A pie in the face would be nice, too.

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, faces a citizen's arrest when he addresses an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales this evening.

George Monbiot, the journalist and activist, is planning the action because he believes Mr Bolton is a "war criminal".

He said he was surprised that Mr Bolton would be allowed to "swim through the politest of polite soirees – which is of course Hay."

Mr Bolton, who was the American ambassador to the UN from August 2005 to January 2006, is due to talk at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival at 6.30pm on international relations.

I'd rather see the actual authorities from the Hague arrest him, but so much for wishes and good intentions.

--WS

News That Would Make a Wingnut Squirm

If this is true, I'm quite certain we'll see someone denounce it as appeasement, right?

Iran and the United States have been engaged in secret "back channel" discussions for the past five years on Iran's nuclear programme [sic] and the broader relationship between the two sworn enemies, The Independent can reveal.

One of the participants, former senior US diplomat Thomas Pickering, explained that a group of former American diplomats and experts had been meeting with Iranian academics and policy advisers "in a lot of different places, although not in the US or Iran".

"Some of the Iranians were connected to official institutions inside Iran," he said in a telephone interview from Washington. The group was organised by the UN Association of the USA, a pro-UN organisation. Its work was facilitated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a government-funded think-tank chaired by the former chief UN weapons inspector for Iraq, Rolf Ekeus.

Could this be one of the reasons why Deputy Secretary of State Negroponte went to Pakistan earlier this year? As a cover story for meeting with Iranian officials? If this ends up being the case, will Negroponte become the poster boy for appeasement and face withering attacks from the neoconservatives like John Bolton:

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.

Mr Bolton, who was addressing a fringe meeting organised by Lord (Michael) Ancram, said that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was "pushing out" and "is not receiving adequate push-back" from the west.

"I don't think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I don't know what the alternative is.

"Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities."

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the "source of the problem", Mr Ahmadinejad.

Clearly, the choice has been to try to negotiate. This marks a reversal wholesale rejection of neoconservative rhetoric and returns us to the policy advocated early on by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, before he put his common sense, his decency, and his integrity into a blind trust to be opened only after all of the Bush neocons are out of office. Too bad there's so much intellectual dishonesty out there--it would do wonders for the political discourse in this country to acknowledge the wisdom of negotiation and diplomacy as a means of solving problems. It doesn't make you a "pussy" if you don't want to bomb people or torture them, you know.