{"id":179286,"date":"2018-03-30T18:22:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-30T23:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/03\/30\/john-bolton-is-actually-worse-than-i-had-previously-known\/"},"modified":"2018-03-30T18:22:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T23:22:00","slug":"john-bolton-is-actually-worse-than-i-had-previously-known","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/03\/30\/john-bolton-is-actually-worse-than-i-had-previously-known\/","title":{"rendered":"John Bolton Is Actually Worse Than I Had Previously Known"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>It turns out that in a dispute over WMD inspections before the Iraq war, he <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2018\/03\/29\/john-bolton-trump-bush-bustani-kids-opcw\/\">threatened the children of a UN official<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Who better to advise the bully-in-chief, Donald Trump, on when to make war and kill people than another bully? It\u2019s difficult, after all, to avoid the label \u2014 that of a bully \u2014 when thinking of John Bolton, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/world-us-canada-37989338\">former Bush administration official<\/a>-turned-<a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2018\/03\/22\/media\/trump-john-bolton-fox-news\/index.html\">Fox News pundit<\/a> who Trump recently picked as his national security adviser.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cJohn Bolton is a bully,\u201d Jos\u00e9 Bustani, the retired Brazilian diplomat and former head of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.opcw.org\/\">Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons<\/a>, told me when I reached him by phone in Paris earlier this month.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>In 2001, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had penned a letter to Bustani, thanking him for his \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2002\/apr\/16\/iraq.comment\">very impressive<\/a>\u201d work. By March 2002, however, Bolton \u2014 then serving as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security Affairs \u2014 arrived in person at the OPCW headquarters in the Hague to issue a warning to the organization\u2019s chief. And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn\u2019t mince words. \u201cCheney wants you out,\u201d Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice president of the United States. \u201cWe can\u2019t accept your management style.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bolton continued, according to Bustani\u2019s recollections: \u201cYou have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don\u2019t comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There was a pause.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York.<\/span><\/b>\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(<i>emphasis mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n<p>Great shades of Elvis.<\/p>\n<p>Their evil and stupidity outstrips my fertile imagination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that in a dispute over WMD inspections before the Iraq war, he threatened the children of a UN official: Who better to advise the bully-in-chief, Donald Trump, on when to make war and kill people than another bully? It\u2019s difficult, after all, to avoid the label \u2014 that of a bully \u2014 &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[364,394,374,373],"class_list":["post-179286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-evil","tag-foreign-relations","tag-politics","tag-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}