John Bolton Scares Me, And He Should Scare You

For years, my Republican friends have been telling me how brilliant former U.S ambassador to the U.N John Bolton is, and I've just never seen any evidence of it. Bolton's talking points are no different than Sean Hannity's, and I believe that Hannity's ignorance is so powerful that it will someday fuel our cars. Ambassador Bolton is the perfect intellectual for talk radio and cable news, which is to say that he isn't an intellectual at all.



Over the last five years, most serious people have come to the conclusion that the United States cannot fight multiple large-scale land wars as the military is currently constituted, yet Mr. Bolton asserts that America isn't fighting enough of them every chance he gets. Were it up to him, U.S forces would also be battling in Iran and North Korea, on top of the escalation in Afghanistan and Bolton's wish to keep a large number of troops in Iraq. Taken individually, you could make a weak case for each of those suggestions. Taken together, you begin to look like a psychopath.



The Ambassador knows this, and never discusses his worldview as a whole, because even he must recognize that it's insane. Instead, he issues missives about individual operations like the one he published today in The Daily Beast.



Bolton's supporters compare the Long War on Terror, or whatever it's being called this week, to World War II. However, the analogy couldn't be more inapt. Between 1942 and '45, the United States had a military draft and eventually sixteen million men were deployed to Europe and the Pacific. America was also a full wartime economy during those years, easily the closest that country has ever come to socialism.



The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has proved that the United States can barely keep even 200,000 soldiers in the field for any length of time without the military starting to fracture. Administrative procedures like "stop-loss" were resorted to because a volunteer force was inadequate to the task. And instead of debating how these wars would be paid for, as was the case in the 1940s, Washington has passed three significant tax cuts during the last ten years.



The United States was fighting two of it's largest wars since Vietnam at the same time, yet only one half of one percent of the population is asked to sacrifice anything at all, even though terrorism is supposed to be an "existential threat." If you've ever wondered why I'm not all that serious about the War on Terror, it's because the United States itself isn't.



As Richard Clarke details in his book Your Government Failed You, the Joints Chiefs of Staff designed it to be this way in 1973, although they couldn't have anticipated the consequences. The Chiefs knew that America could never again fight a long term war like Vietnam if the population was unable and unwilling to support the effort at the beginning of it, particularly in the absence of the draft.



They also knew that the politicians would continue proposing wars without knowing fully what the military was capable of over the course of a long conflict. So, in a very clever move, they removed the supply and support duties from the regular Army and made them the responsibility of the Reserves and the National Guard. That would not affect small wars, like Panama or Grenada, or short ones, like Operation Desert Storm.



However, if it appeared that another war like Vietnam was on the horizon, the president would have no other choice but to activate the Guard and Reserves, which would immediately make the disruption of war felt at home. The president and Congress would have to tell the American people the true length of the conflict, and its cost in blood and treasure. The reorganization plan, in theory, would have instilled some honesty into the political and policy class.



It worked for a long time, in fairness. Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and the first Bush refused to instigate large, long-term wars, such as the one Presidents Kennedy and Johnson committed to in Southeast Asia.



Unfortunately, that was undone by a revolution in U.S foreign policy during the Clinton and second Bush administrations. Clinton utilized the military as a peace-keeping and nation-building force in Eastern Europe that kept forces there for years at a time, albeit in a non-combat capacity. Instead of activating the Guard and Reserves, the Clinton Administration employed private contractors to provide those services, most famously Halliburton.



Then Bush retaliated against Afghanistan and invaded Iraq, and the use of contractors accelerated well beyond what even Clinton envisioned. But it quickly became clear that, in a shooting war, they weren't as effective as the career military and were considerably more expensive.



More importantly, they did little to slow or stop the breakage done to the professional military by the overreach of American foreign policy since 1993. But it did distract the American people at the beginning of the conflicts from the possibilty that they could be endless, only for the realization to hit them later, which profoundly damaged public support for both wars.



I have never seen Bolton address any of that when he calls for more and newer wars against more and more countries. He also seems to believe that these wars can be fought exclusively by air power, which most people know is silly.



A decade and a half's worth of bombing didn't remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, but ground forces did in three weeks. Most experts believe that bombing the Iranian nuclear program will only delay it, not eradicate it. Bombing in the former Yugoslavia only accelerated the the genocide there and, by the time ground troops were introduced to keep the peace, it was almost complete. Bombing alone never fully accomplishes policy objectives, unless you're bombing an unserious country, like Libya.



It is frequently ignored by everyone that Ambassador Bolton was never a serious part of the policy process in the Bush White House. It is well known that Secretary of State Condolezza Rice objected to his appointment furiously, and only agreed to support it publicly if she would be allowed to keep him on a very tight leash. That's why he never said anything as furiously crazy at the U.N as he regularly does today. For all practical purposes, Bolton was little more than a sop to the neoconservative wing of the GOP as the White House fought an internal battle over the prosecution of the war in Iraq.



Since leaving office, John Bolton has been on a mission to be even more Bush than Bush. Even before the election of Obama, Bolton was publicly calling on his former colleagues to attack both North Korea and Iran, even before the "surge" in Baghdad. There is no end to the number of wars that Bolton wants to commit the military to, but he doesn't seem to understand how the military works very well.



If John Bolton reminds me of anybody, it is Clinton's second secretary of state (but then U.N ambassador), Madeleine Albright, who once shocked then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell by saying "Why do we have this marvellous military if we can't use it?"



Not once have I ever heard anyone respond to Bolton's ridiculous proposals by saying "You and what army?" The volunteer military can barely fight the wars that they're already committed to. Where would you get the troops? You can't use troops from South Korea to invade Iran and expect them to continue defending South Korea or to invade North Korea. American troops are a finite resource, but Bolton's appetite for armed conflict is not.



Nor does he seem to understand very much about the economy and how it could withstand the huge burdens third and fourth major ground operations would impose on it. As a Republican in good standing, one can assume that Mr. Bolton wouldn't support the necessary shift to a wartime economy - which would involve dramatically higher taxes, along with wage and price controls and the rationing of consumer goods - particularly if they were imposed by a Democratic president and Congress. Instead, he would almost certainly finance his new wars with even more debt.



The Cold War policy of containment of the Soviet Union was predicated on the theory that the Russian economy could not support the grand ambitions of the Kremlin's foreign and military policy if those ambitions were challenged. After 40 years - from Truman through Reagan - that theory was proved to be correct and the Soviet Union finally disintegreated.



However, that is likely also true of the United States. Expanded military adventurism, as supported by the likes of Bolton, combined with America's entitlement culture and unnaturally low tax rates will eventually collapse the U.S economy and its position as a world power. To the best of my knowledge, Bolton has never addressed that, either.



Rarely have I seen anyone with such an undeserved reputation as a strategic thinker as John Bolton. When going to war is your first answer to everything, even though you clearly haven't thought of what that would entail or what the consequences would be, you really can't be called a thinker at all.



You can, however, be called a lot of other things.