“If those are the actual policies, then it would be hard to see how Trump as president could actually pursue his preference for peace,” Mr. Ross said. “It is not just that the Palestinians would see little reason to be responsive, but Arab states that are quietly cooperating with the Israelis in tangible ways would also find it difficult to play any role in peacemaking.”
.. The settlement was created with the support of the Israeli government, and has since grown to more than 1,000 families, or roughly 7,500 people, he said. The settlement’s location and ideology is considered hard-line among many Israelis and even some settlers.
.. Yet in its 40-year history, and with help from Bet El Institutions and American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva Center, the settlement has become one of the most influential in the U.S. in promoting its agenda and winning friends in the U.S, Israeli settlers say.
At a gala dinner earlier this month at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York, former U.S ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and current Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon were keynote speakers at the $500-a-ticket event to raise money for Beit El Institutions. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who is a frequent visitor to settlements in the West Bank, was also a previous speaker at the event
If Donald Trump Is So Upset About Iraq WMD Lies, Why Would He Want to Hire John Bolton?
DONALD TRUMP’S REACTION to news that some U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf was to fire back: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
He might have had a point — were it not for the fact that he was being so obviously and ludicrously insincere. Case in point: Trump is said to be on the brink of appointing John Bolton as deputy secretary of state. He is arguably the man most responsible for hiding the truth about Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs.
.. The Bush administration, with Bolton as undersecretary of state for arms control, arrived in Washington, D.C., in 2001 with the goal of invading Iraq. They weren’t motivated by whatever WMDs Iraq might or might not have, but, as a senior administration official later explained, by the simple and highly galling fact of Saddam Hussein’s “defiance” of the U.S.
.. When the September 11 terrorist attacks gave them the opportunity, the administration’s conservative wing, including Bolton, had no interest in sending inspectors to Iraq to see if Hussein had WMD. They wanted to simply use WMD as “justification you can jump on” to invade — without bothering to check whether Iraq actually had anything.
.. Iraq had informed the OPCW in late 2001 that it wanted to sign the treaty. This would require Iraq to provide the organization with a list of any chemical weapons stockpiles it possessed — and submit to intrusive OPCW inspections.
.. This set off loud alarm bells in the Bush administration, since inspections could not just delay their desired war, but undermine the case for it in the first place. As Bustani put it years later, his willingness to consider inspecting Iraq “caused an uproar in Washington,” and it quickly “became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me.”
According to Bustani, “Everybody knew there weren’t any [banned chemical weapons]. An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade.”
.. Bolton took the lead in ousting Bustani and replacing him with someone more pliable. After the Bush administration failed to win a March 2002 no-confidence vote from OPCW’s executive committee, it threatened to cut off its funding of the OPCW, which accounted for 22 percent of its budget.
.. they were unable to prevent later inspections of Iraq under the auspices of the U.N. Those inspectors then failed to find anything — since Iraq did not actually possess any banned weapons — and the U.S. and its allies went ahead and invaded anyway in March 2003.
.. If Bolton becomes part of the Trump administration, he’ll be an extremely loud voice for war with Iran. In November, he said that overthrowing Iran’s government is the “only long-term solution” to the country’s supposed threat to the U.S.
Flawed Choices for the State Department
If Mr. Trump places Mr. Tillerson at the State Department and has Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as his national security adviser, he will have filled two top national security posts with pro-Russia apologists.
.. Such inexperience could also enhance the clout of the deputy secretary of state, the department’s No. 2 official, a position that reportedly could go to John Bolton, who served as ambassador to the United Nations and under secretary of state for arms control under President George W. Bush.
.. Last year, he wrote in The Times about bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, and he has criticized President Obama for pushing a nuclear deal that has successfully curbed Iran’s program. There is no doubt that Mr. Bolton will work to destroy the deal if he’s given a State Department perch.
.. On Sunday, he made the outrageous accusation that the Russian hacking of the Clinton campaign was a “false flag” operation intended to blame the Russians.
Can Trumpism Survive a Trump Administration?
From the Bush family to Paul Ryan, the Iraq war to entitlement reform, Trump arrayed himself against the personalities and policies of the Republican Party
.. But his revolution was so sudden and sweeping that it raced ahead of itself, capturing the White House without having any of the plans and personnel and foot soldiers that actually operationalizing Trumpism would require.
.. were the president-elect a shrewd judge of ideology, it might be possible to come up with a foreign policy team — a mix of realist internationalists and war-weary Jacksonians, Jon Huntsmans and Jim Webbs — that matched reasonably well with his overarching vision.
.. But instead Trump is apparently considering Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton for the State Department — the former because of his campaign-trail loyalty, the latter (presumably) because of his connections to the Heritage Foundation, which volunteered itself for the transition process back when that process seemed unlikely to go anywhere. Both men do share a temperament with Trump — combative, adversarial, sometimes bullying. But neither is particularly Trumpist when it comes to the actual details of foreign policy; indeed, both are embodiments of the full-spectrum hawkishness that the businessman-candidate often campaigned against.
.. Bolton, for instance, took to the pages of this newspaper last fall to dismiss Trump’s idea of “an American-Russian coalition against ISIS” as both “undesirable” and “glib.
.. it’s also quite possible that if he appoints conventional full-spectrum hawks to key posts, full-spectrum hawkishness is what we’ll get
.. this is explicitly what a lot of people in the Republican Party are hoping for
.. Perhaps this means there will be a persistent division between rhetoric and policy, in which Trump continues to publicly sell himself as a new sort of nationalist — and his populist allies try to go mainstream and win converts and become the ideological cadres that Trumpism now lacks — even as the gears of government grind in the grooves that Mike Pence and Ryan and the conservative movement prefer.