{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.paul.senate.gov/news/article/rare-op-ed-will-donald-trump-betray-voters-by-hiring-john-bolton", "Rare Op-Ed: Will Donald Trump betray voters by hiring John Bolton?", "2016-11-15", "2016", "2016-11", "Republican", "House", "KY", "Rand Paul", "P000603", "www.paul.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "Rare Op-Ed: Will Donald Trump betray voters by hiring John Bolton? \n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\nTuesday, November 15, 2016\n\t\nRumors are that Donald Trump might pick John Bolton for Secretary of State. Heaven forbid.\u00a0\r\nOne of the things I occasionally liked about the President-elect was his opposition to the Iraq war and regime change. He not only grasped the mistake of that war early, but also seemed to fully understand how it disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East and even emboldened Iran.\r\nWe liberated Iraq, but today their best friend is Iran, their second greatest ally is Russia, and their third strongest alliance is with Syria. Trump really seems to get the lesson. Hillary Clinton never did.\r\nMost importantly right now, John Bolton never learned and never will.\u00a0\r\nBolton is a longtime member of the failed Washington elite that Trump vowed to oppose, hell-bent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in the last 15 years \u2014 particularly those Trump promised to avoid as president.\u00a0\r\nJohn Bolton more often stood with Hillary Clinton and against what Donald Trump has advised.\u00a0\r\nNone of this is secret. It\u2019s all out there. Perhaps the incoming administration should take a closer look.\r\nBolton was one of the loudest advocates of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and still stupefyingly insists it was the right call 13 years later. \u201cI still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct,\u201d Bolton said just last year.\u00a0\r\nTrump, rightly, believes that decision was a colossal mistake that destabilized the region. \u201cIraq used to be no terrorists,\u201d Trump said in 2015. \u201c(N)ow it\u2019s the Harvard of terrorism.\u201d\r\n\u201cIf you look at Iraq from years ago, I\u2019m not saying he was a nice guy, he was a horrible guy,\u201d Trump said of Saddam Hussein, \u201cbut it was a lot better than it is right now.\u201d\u00a0\r\nTrump has said U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2003 \u201chelped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper.\u201d In contrast, Bolton has said explicitly that he wants to repeat Iraq-style regime change in Syrian and Iran.\r\nYou can\u2019t learn from mistakes if you don\u2019t see mistakes.\u00a0\r\nTrump has blamed George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for helping to create ISIS \u2014 but should add John Bolton to that list, who essentially agreed with all three on our regime change debacles.\r\nIn 2011, Bolton bashed Obama \u201cfor his refusal to directly target Gaddafi\u201d and declared, \u201cthere is a strategic interest in toppling Gaddafi\u2026 But Obama missed it.\u201d In fact, Obama actually took Bolton\u2019s advice and bombed the Libyan dictator into the next world. Secretary of State Clinton bragged, \u201cWe came, we saw, he died.\u201d\r\nWhen Trump was asked last year if Libya and the region would be more stable today with Gaddafi in power, he replied \u201c100 percent.\u201d Mr. Trump is 100 percent right.\u00a0\r\nNo man is more out of touch with the situation in the Middle East or more dangerous to our national security than Bolton.\u00a0\r\nAll nuance is lost on the man. The fact that Russia has had a base in Syria for 50 years doesn\u2019t deter Bolton from calling for all out, no holds barred war in Syria. Bolton criticized the current administration for offering only a tepid war. For Bolton, only a hot-blooded war to create democracy across the globe is demanded.\u00a0\r\nWoodrow Wilson would be proud, but the parents of our soldiers should be mortified. War should be the last resort, never the first. War should be understood to be a hell no one wishes for. Dwight Eisenhower understood this when he wrote, \u201cI hate war like only a soldier can, the stupidity, the banality, the futility.\u201d\u00a0\r\nBolton would not understand this because, like many of his generation, he used every privilege to avoid serving himself. Bolton said, with the threat of the Vietnam draft over his head, that \u201che had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.\u201d But he\u2019s seems to be okay with your son or daughter dying wherever his neoconservative impulse leads us: \u201cEven before the Iraq War, John Bolton was a leading brain behind the neoconservatives\u2019 war-and-conquest agenda,\u201d notes The American Conservative\u2019s Jon Utley.\r\nAt a time when Americans thirst for change and new thinking, Bolton is an old hand at failed foreign policy.\u00a0\r\nThe man is a menace.\u00a0\r\nOur Constitution and our founding fathers were explicit war was not to be fought without the permission of Congress. No matter which party occupies the White House, I will not shrink from my constitutional duty to oppose any advocate for war.\r\nThe true statesmen realizes, with reluctance, that war is sometimes necessary but as a country, we should resist any would-be leader who wants to bomb now and think later.\u00a0\r\nPresident-elect Donald Trump campaigned on changing our disastrous foreign policy. To appoint John Bolton would be a major first step toward breaking that promise.\u00a0\r\nhttp://rare.us/story/rand-paul-will-donald-trump-betray-voters-by-hiring-john-bolton/", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.paul.senate.gov/news/article/rare-op-ed-will-donald-trump-betray-voters-by-hiring-john-bolton"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.8877210095524788, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}