JOHN BOLTON LOOKS AT FAILURES OF THE NEO-CONS

And what of the Bush administration’s idea of spreading democracy, I ask. Is that now discredited? “You can’t discredit something that was wrong from the start,” he replies with evident feeling. “Their [the neocons’] ultimate conclusion is that if all the world were filled with democracies, there would be no war. But that is contrary to the entire human spirit.

The idea of big-government conservatism has more neocon adherents than from unmodified conservatives.”

 

 He concedes that their views coincided on the need to remove Saddam Hussein – Bolton felt it was in America’s interest to eliminate a potential threat. But he parted ways with the neoconservatives on the objectives of the subsequent occupation. “I am all in favour of democracy in Iraq,” he says. “I don’t know what else I would say. But our national interest today is to stop any part of Iraq from becoming a base for terrorism and if that is accomplished with a less than Jeffersonian type of democracy, then that’s OK with me.”

“The foreign service ought to be advocates for American interests, not apologists. This problem is not unique to the US but neither is it necessarily the rule everywhere else.” So which foreign services do serve their national interests? I ask. “The Russians,” he says. Then he pauses for a while before adding, “And the French.” Formidable, I think. “And the Indians and especially the Pakistanis.”

“Four years of European diplomacy have given the Iranians the one asset they could not have purchased – and that was time,” he says, wagging his finger. “And now, irony of ironies, after fiddling around with all this futile diplomacy, we finally have a French president who sounds just like we do on Iran.”