What Does John Bolton Say About Israel?

Last June, Ambassador John Bolton was awarded the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies Guardian of Zion Award.

The Center, affiliated with Bar-Ilan University, conducted the ceremony at the King David Hotel at which my wife and I were privileged to attend. It was established at Bar-Ilan University in 1995 by US Jewish community leaders Ingeborg Hanna and Ira Leon Rennert as an expression of their commitment to the preservation and advancement of Jerusalem's unique heritage. Integrating studies on the history, archaeology, geography, demography, economy and sociology of Jerusalem, the Rennert Center has become the foremost academic center in the international academic community studying aspects of Jerusalem's past and present.

The guests were great, including Caroline Glick among many.  Caroline has a post on his 2005 speech at ZOA.  The food was excellent.  And the atmosphere, as Bolton spoke, became more electric.

I had heard him a few years ago in New York at an event of American Likud.

To understand that, here are some selections from his full remarks:

"I don't believe there is a future for the two-state solution. We have been pursuing it for 70 years without success. I don’t think year 71 of pursuing it will make any change...[we should] advocate[d] for a three-state solution which would merge Gaza with Egypt, and parts of the West Bank with Jordan"

"I don't think there is a viable Palestinian state. I don't think there are institutions on the Palestinian side that can live up to the commitments of a treaty with Israel, that could give Israel or the US or anyone confidence that such a state could provide for the wellbeing of the Palestinian people or could resist takeover by terrorist elements. That's why to me the best solution for the Palestinians is to tie them in to existing economies and societies where the potential for a better life for them and their families is real, rather than pursuing a political objective that ultimately won't work and certainly won't benefit the daily lives of average Palestinians"

"Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. That isn't going to change. And putting the American embassy on a piece of ground well within the existing green line isn't going to offend anybody who is serious themselves about wanting peace. And I have a further objection. I don't think anybody should tell the US where it puts its embassy, anywhere."

"I think people need to pay more attention to the connection and collaboration between Iran and North Korea. We know that they've collaborated for nearly 30 years on ballistic missiles, and there's every reason to think that they've collaborated on the nuclear side. The day that North Korea gets a deliverable nuclear weapons capability, Iran can have it the next day by writing a check in the right amount of money. I have a zero risk tolerance for nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue states like Iran and North Korea because the threat to innocent civilians around the world, not just in America but in Israel and across the world, is very real."

A video of another of his speeches.

^

Quotable Words

Overseas "apology tours," public displays of empathy and inviting the likes of Iran to Fourth of July receptions at our embassies will not alter these underlying realities. Nor will reducing national-security budgets on such key items as missile defense and advanced weapons systems (while dramatically increasing unnecessary and inevitably inflationary domestic spending) make our adversaries more amenable to sweet reason. Sadly, such gratuitous indications of self-doubt and weakness only encourage the very adversaries whose favor we are currying.

The Obama administration finds itself surprised almost daily by, among other things:

• The recalcitrant and unyielding regime in North Korea, testing its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

• Iran's persistence in pursuing precisely the same weapons programs, as well as continuing its activities as the world's central banker for terrorism.

• Hamas' continued refusal to renounce terrorism, acknowledge the state of Israel's existence and abide by prior Middle East agreements (which is hardly surprising, given that doing so would require Hamas to repudiate the fundamental principles on which it was founded).

• Russia's continued belligerent attitude toward former territories of the Soviet Union and Moscow's generally unhelpful attitude in dealing with North Korea, Iran, the Middle East and countless other problems.

John Bolton

Joltin' Bolton

John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, author of "Surrender Is Not an Option" and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute has an op-ed in the Washington Post. Excerpts:-


The Flaws In the Iran Report

Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.
All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it...

...Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified. First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."

...Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq

...Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions.

...That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.

(Kippah tip: Atlas Shrugs)