John Bolton’s departure from the White House this week was a tragedy for all those in favour of protracted, drawn out American wars against a large Middle Eastern country around 636,000 square miles in size.
As a champion of foreign incursions against a large country in Western Asia with approximately 82 million inhabitants and a unitary theocratic-republican authoritarian presidential republic system of government, Bolton was a reliable cool head in a Trump administration notable for its volatility in foreign affairs. That is why it was so disappointing he was sidelined and dismissed from his post just days prior to a drone attack on Saudi Aramco oil facilities by Iranian-backed Yemeni separatists.
The drone attack, claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, sparked fires at two major facilities run by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil giant, disrupting output and exports. Two sources close to the matter told Reuters news agency 5 million barrels a day of crude production had been impacted - close to half of the kingdom's output or 5 percent of global oil supply. If Bolton was still in office as National Security Advisor, he might have been able to push the President to immediately launch retaliatory air strikes against Iran, starting a game of tit for tat aggression that would surely have led to full scale intervention and millions of deaths. Sadly, out of office, he’s been reduced to barracking from the sidelines.
At press time, his desperate attempts to get #JeSuisSaudiAramco trending on Twitter had gone to nought, and his argument that an attack on Saudi oil facilities was an attack on all of us had been met with only muted responses from the public. Shockingly, it seems like most people really don’t give a shit about the long term health of a state company operated by a barbaric and anachronistic monarchy that still beheads gay people in 2019! At press time, Bolton had penned a poem in the form of “First they came ...", the famous confession by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy (including, by his own admission, Niemöller himself) following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group. Sources tell us that Bolton’s rendition, “First they came for Saudi AramCo, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Saudi oil production facility” lacked the same punch as the original literary classic.
Please God, no more to come.