DAR AL HARB - U.S.A.: BOLTON BLOVIATES ABOUT IRAN & NORTH KOREA

Bolton talks tough on Iran, N. Korea
By Josh Richman, STAFF WRITER

SAN FRANCISCO — Regime change is needed and military force must remain an option in compelling North Korea and Iran to abandon nuclear ambitions, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton averred Tuesday.

President Bush "wasn't simply indulging in a metaphor" when he named these two nations, plus Iraq, as an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address, Bolton told a few hundred audience members at a Commonwealth Club of California event in the Fairmont Hotel.

Both nations — one controlled by cult-of-personality leader Kim Jong Il and the other by religious zealots — hold "fundamentally different values" that are not subject to Cold War-like concerns about retaliation should they develop, market or use nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, Bolton said.

Both have a history of using their nascent nuclear programs as diplomatic and economic bargaining chips, and then reneging on their ends of the deals, he said. But as much of Europe and many in America call for continued diplomacy, "time is not on the side of the United States" and its allies, but rather on the side of those seeking the weapons.

Only replacement of the hostile regimes in those nations will afford Americans the security they deserve, Bolton insisted.

"I think regime change in Iran is feasible," he said, citing gross mismanagement of the Iranian economy and a young, well-educated populace as underpinnings of mass dissatisfaction

with the fundamentalist government. But that process "is difficult, it's complex, it could take a long time," and so, unattractive though an air strike on Iran's nuclear facilities might be, it must remain an option, he said. "I don't recommend this alternative, I don't look forward to it — it is at best a last resort."

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi saw the light and not only opened his pre-nuclear resources to U.S. intelligence, but even let the United States box up all the materials and store them in Tennessee, Bolton noted.

"There's plenty of room next to it for the North Korea nuclear weapons program and the Iranian nuclear weapons program," he quipped. Bolton, 58, served within the State Department, the Justice Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development during the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

President George W. Bush tapped him first as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security until 2005 before appointing Bolton to his U.N. post from August 2005 until December 2006. But his was a recess appointment and — perhaps due in part to his oft-stated disdain for the United Nations — he was never confirmed by the Senate, and his bull-in-a-china-shop tenure expired with the 109th Congress' end.

Asked Tuesday whether his low opinion of the United Nations had been tempered by his time there, he replied, "It hasn't changed at all."

Incremental reforms won't alleviate its inefficiencies and roadblocks to U.S. progress, he said, calling for a shift to all-voluntary financial support from member nations — in effect, a way for the United States to starve the U.N. of funding should it not advance U.S. interests. "We should pay for what we want and get what we pay for."

Answering another question, Bolton cited the ongoing genocide in Darfur as an example of the U.N.'s impotence: China, Russia and Qatar, with economic and social interests in Sudan, successfully blocked the Security Council from sending a U.N. peacekeeping force into the region without the Khartoum regime's permission, he said.

Asked what his greatest success was, Bolton cited his role — as George H.W. Bush's assistant secretary of state for international organizations — in getting the U.N. General Assembly in 1991 to repeal its 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.

Bolton might've raised the most eyebrows Tuesday when fielding a question about national security and immigration. Current plans to strengthen border enforcement, provide a path to legalization for illegal immigrants already here and hit illegal immigrants' employers with sanctions will be no more effective today than they were as segments of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, he said.

Instead, we should increase legal immigration to accept more students and workers into the United States, he said, for there's no better way to win the world over to the American way of life. China has a population of about 1.3 billion, he noted: "We've got a long way to go."



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1) Bolton talks tough on Iran, N. Korea