John Bolton is Not A “Hawk”. He’s A Draft Dodger Big Time.
John Bolton has never had a position that matches his appetites for power, meaning not he’s not been given power to do as he fantasizes. which appears to be compensatory greed for bloodshed to compensate for the fact that he’s never been to war, in fact draft dodged and brags about it.
An actual hawk is brave, cares for his kin, soars far more than killing. Has acute sight, does not make enemies to make enemies. So beautiful, the hawk is considered an emblem not of war, but of freedom and majesty and kinship.
Hawk is not an accurate name for Bolton. There are others…
“During the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, Bolton drew number 185. (Draft numbers corresponded to birth dates.)[ Vietnam Extra (November 25, 2009). “What’s Your Number? The Vietnam War Selective Service Lottery”. Vietnam Magazine. History Net.]
As a result of the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ decisions to rely largely on the draft rather than on the reserve forces, joining a Guard or Reserve unit became a way to avoid service in the Vietnam War.[Schmidt, William E. (August 20, 1988). “Some Now in Congress Joined Reserve or Guard”. nytimes.com/. New York. It has also recalled the complex, changing and often criticized system by which young men, particularly those who were white, from the upper and middle classes and college educated, were able to avoid military service altogether by using student deferments or other exclusions, or to ease their service by seeking haven from possible combat duty in the Reserves or National Guard.]
Bolton enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard in 1970 rather than wait to find out if his draft number would be called.[United States Senate (2005). “The Nomination of John R. Bolton to be U.S. Representative to the United Nations”. www.congress.gov. United States Congress. Retrieved November 15, 2016.] (The highest number called to military service was 195.
After serving in the National Guard for four years, he served in the United States Army Reserve until the end of his enlistment two years later. He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”[ Ross Goldberg and Sam Kahn, “Bolton’s conservative ideology has roots in Yale experience” Archived September 24, 2010, at the Wayback Machine., Yale Daily News, April 28, 2005.]
But there is more, showing not the vision of the hawk, but more the disgraceful efforts by Bolton to undermine others for his own reasons, to be underhanded about it, and not acting in the ‘national interests.’
Bolton was instrumental in derailing a 2001 biological weapons conference in Geneva convened to endorse a UN proposal to enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. “U.S. officials, led by Bolton, argued that the plan would have put U.S. national security at risk by allowing spot inspections of suspected U.S. weapons sites, despite the fact that the U.S. claims not to have carried out any research for offensive purposes since 1969.”[“Bolton Linked to Firing of U.N. Arms Monitor”. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 12, 2015.]
Also in 2002, Bolton is said to have flown to Europe to demand the resignation of Brazilian José Bustani, head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and to have orchestrated his removal at a special session of the organization.[Ibid]
The United Nations’ highest administrative tribunal later condemned the action as an “unacceptable violation” of principles protecting international civil servants
Bustani had been unanimously re-elected for a four-year term—with strong U.S. support—in May 2000, and in 2001 was praised for his leadership by Colin Powell.[ “Bolton said to orchestrate unlawful firing”. AP via USA Today. June 4, 2005. Retrieved April 25, 2011.]
He also pushed for reduced funding for the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program to halt the proliferation of nuclear materials.[ Alternet.org Archived May 17, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.]
To end for now: Bolton has spoken publicly of his loathing of North Korea for years. His seeming unreasoned animus is well known. His pronouncements include strongly supporting and being in favor of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (also known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK), “an armed Islamic group which had long been on the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. In the 1970s, MEK members, who “had been trained by the Soviet Union in guerilla warfare and supported Khomeini … assassinated U.S. military officers then working in Iran. MEK members actively took part in the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, according to a U.S. government report.”
It appears unstable bloodlust, anger at others instead of tact/diplomacy is Bolton’s main m.o. I can only say imo that if Bolton had served in the Viet Nam war instead of evading it, he might be a different person today. He might have saved lives. He may have found brotherhood based on heart instead of mere plastic ambition.
My father who lived through war, used to say never give a king an army, for the mad kings of the world will send your young, not theirs, to their deaths –for momentary satisfaction like a sex addict chalks up one, and then onto the next, the next. That the mad kings are insatiable.
The time to act in resistance to this ‘cabinet’ that more resembles Dr. Calgari’s, than a Cabinet in a Democracy– that so many many have died for… the time would be now. All hands on deck. Each in their own ways that are effective.
We appear to be at a similar moment to Hitler taking the mantle, the ridiculousness of believing props that Nam and Korea as ‘dominoes’ would be the end of the world, the absurdity of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that were non existent. And in all those cases, in the aggregate, millions were killed. Millions.
Not again. We have the insights, know the pattern toward destruction of our young. Never again. Truths will out, if we will carry them.
And Mainstream Media, by the way, stop pounding the drums of war by elevating such as Bolton as ‘hawks’, and that pitiful Trump is ‘building a war cabinet.’ No building of anything; just a mad king-child breaking his toys in his ongoing rages.
If there’s a fire, and some souls are awake, our job is to awaken others who are still sleeping … our senators and congressmen/women, would like to know they will be voted out of office if they continue to pretend to not see what they see, in spades. Now is the time.
Photo: by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (John Bolton) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
