The protestors, all Amherst townspeople, held strategically placed signs throughout the Red Room calling Bolton a “war criminal.” One particularly distraught man in center of the room wearing red T-shirt under a tweed jacket, hands also painted red, was screaming, “Blood on your hands. Blood on your hands. Blood on everybody here,” as Bolton was trying to speak and Arkes motioned to Marx.
“War criminal! War criminal! Murderer! Murderer! Murderer of innocent Iraqi men, women and children!” Earlier, a protester in the corner of the room had interrupted the former ambassador’s talk to call him a “chicken hawk” and question whether he had served in the military, to which Bolton quickly retorted, “Yes, I have actually. Six years in the army reserve and National guard,” followed by applause from the audience. “Now look,” Bolton told the protestors quite frankly. “If you want to speak, go ahead. I’ll be happy to sit down.” Bolton recalled his four and a half months of active duty for training and how he faced the prospect throughout his entire term of service of being called to active duty. “You see, I’d rather let these people talk,” Bolton explained as the protestors pointed to his lack of active service in Vietnam. “Let them have their say and then we’ll have our conversation.”
Bolton described how his father, a veteran wounded at D-day, approved of his son’s course. “I’m not embarrassed of it or ashamed of it. So are we done now?” “Just admit that you had no active service,” proclaimed the protester, followed by grumblings from an audience increasingly more anxious to hear the heart of Bolton’s argument.
So it was in this contentious environment, as the man in the tweed jacket was screaming, “Blood on your hands!” and protesters were pushing students out of the way to make their signs visible, that Arkes signaled Marx to take a stand. “If America stands for anything, it stands for freedom of speech,” the president told the man reluctant to comply, a statement that set the tone for the rest of the evening. “I don’t want to listen to your crap,” the man in the tweed jacket yelled at Marx.
Bolton quickly turned to pages ten and 11 of his book, “Surrender is Not an Option.” Joking that his publishers told him to “never miss an opportunity” for publicity, Bolton recalled being the only conservative speaker on Class Day at his 1970 Yale graduation among “liberal and worse than that classmates.” He described, “As I started my few minutes of remarks, I was greeted by hecklers, the only speaker so grazed. I had faced this sort of thing many times from the liberals at Yale, who saw themselves as brave and oppressed dissenters from US national policy, but who couldn’t stand encountering dissent in their own little sandbox. What you have over there, I said, pointing to the hecklers, is a typical example of liberal tolerance.” To Bolton and the audience that applauded wildly after he read from his recently released autobiography, the anecdote could not have been more relevant.
The lecture fit into the work of the Committee for American Founding, the organization founded by Arkes in conjunction with some former students dedicated to advancing and preserving the teachings of America’s Founders and Abraham Lincoln on natural rights and on the “anchoring moral truth” that all men are created equal so essential to the Declaration of Independence and the moral fiber of this country. Explains the Committee’s mission statement, “The Declaration began then with certain rights, grounded in human nature; rights that promised to be the same in all places where that nature remained the same,” such us equality for all. The Committee believes humans have a fixed nature and there are certain moral truths, natural rights that should be applied to all people to all places. The Committee understands that America has a right to defend its regime and sees a moral ground to justify the its preservation. This interpretation of the Founders’ and Lincoln’s teachings play a central role in Arkes’ classes as they are applied to modern moral questions and dilemmas in politics. “Should this [teaching] disappear when I take off?” asked Arkes and the founders of the Committee. “Should something be done to preserve it?”
The Committee hosts speakers and Amherst students and alums from the Class of 1943 to the Class of 2011 at its Colloquium weekends that take place once every semester and at lectures it sponsors throughout the year. “Even if we don’t accomplish anything else, there is just something charming about these encounters,” explained Arkes of the convergence of Amherst people, old and young, at the meetings. Traditionally conservative, enjoying the company of the likes of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia P’03 and Clarence Thomas, Senator Rick Santorum, Representative Tom Davis ’71, classicist Victor Davis Hanson and The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, the Committee includes people from a host of political ideologies. According to Arkes, members share no uniform view on abortion or same-sex marriage. They simply gather to engage in discussion on the Founders’ and Lincoln’s teachings, to promote open dialogue, the free exchange of ideas and viewpoints not often heard on the College’s campus.
Not about Bolton, could be shortened perhaps?
In this vein, Arkes called the Red Room audience’s attention to the UN’s conference in Durban, South Africa on 9 September 2001 that explicated Palestinians have an “unalienable right” for a homeland of their own, language that had “all the resonance that recalled our Declaration of Independence.” Yet, said Arkes, this proclamation at Durban “drew on a logic quite different and quite inverted from the American Declaration” because the Palestinian regime did not draw its powers from the consent of the governed, with an understanding of natural rights, rights such as equality, that “would stay the same in all places where that nature remained the same.” Rather, the declaration from Durban was “cut… from the Declaration of the Confederate States of America, the declaration that began with the words, ‘We the deputies of the independent and sovereign states.’ For the Confederacy began by avoiding that principle all men are created equal and affirmed the rights of states, or whoever controlled them. And so the Confederacy would be radically indifferent to the nature of the regimes that stood in those separate states.” Similarly, the United Nations, explained Arkes, does not distinguish between regimes and always seeks “to legislate without any moral ground we could recognize in claiming the moral authority to legislate and to legislate for the purposes that were often explicitly hostile to America and its interests and hostile to the principles of the American regime.”
Bolton, however, “hit the ground running with direct, savvy challenges to the way of life” in the UN in his 18 months there, said Arkes, in thanks to the “thickness of his experience” in foreign policy, particularly disarmament. He left the post frustrated with a “ceased up” “sleepwalking” administration, too focused on the intricacies of negotiation, too unwilling to hold firm in defense of American interests and explore the increasing threat of Iran and North Korea.
Bolton focused his talk on a subject he deemed “important and timely” as we head into the 2008 presidential election season. “The lessons of Iraq as we deal with other rogue states, particularly rogue states that seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missile systems that can be used to deliver them,” he told the Red Room audience. “These are the threats, these are the main challenges to our friends and allies around the world in the coming decades.”
Bolton traced what he called the two “mislearned” lessons from the “War in Iraq.” The first, he described, is the understanding that “if only you engaged in diplomacy, as opposed to something else, that all of the world’s problems could be solved. If only the United States had engaged with Saddam Hussein or fill-in-the-blank, you could reach a satisfactory solution.” Bolton explained that there are two camps of diplomats: one that believes that diplomacy can solve 99.44% of the world’s problems and one that believes diplomacy can solve 100% of them. He sees himself in the former camp while the latter camp “has taken diplomacy to obsession” and “has raised diplomacy from technique to policy, which it manifestly is not.”
The “second mislearned lesson” relates to the status of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and how critics believe Bush “distorted intelligence, cherry-picked intelligence or, in the worst version, flat our lied about intelligence.” War critics believe the administration did not adequately prove an imminent threat. Yet, reminded Bolton, the war in Iraq was never grounded on intelligence relating to an imminent threat posed by Hussein, but based on suspicion that he held nuclear weapons and readiness to use them. “His proclivity to expand his authority by military force and his demonstrated willingness to use weapons of mass destruction showed why that threat could not be allowed to ripen again,” said Bolton. Politicians on both sides of the aisle seemed to agree.
Leading up to the war, there was “little doubt in anybody’s minds” that Hussein had such weapons. “We don’t know what Saddam’s declaration of these chemical stocks actually meant. We don’t know if he was lying when he made the declaration. We don’t know if the weapons are hidden somewhere. We don’t know if they have moved somewhere. We just don’t know,” said Bolton of the missing weapons. Lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had nothing to due with faulty intelligence, rather the fact that politicians “failed to question [their] own assumptions” about Hussein’s capabilities.
Nevertheless, Bolton maintained the administration was justified in going to war. Iraq’s own 1991 declaration of nuclear weapons “changed the calculus with which he have to deal with them,” explained Bolton. “If you misjudge when that capability exists and misjudge the progress they’re making, by the time you make a decision to act, they may already have the weapons and your task is significantly greater.”
Now Bolton believes America faces two “acute” threats in North Korea and Iran, calling his avoidance of these two dangerous countries while at the UN a “mistake.” First, he said, the US must “try to identify the strategic policy [the two countries] are pursuing” in order to determine the best course of action.” “I do not favor just-in-time non-proliferation,” said Bolton. “Neither country will be talked out of its nuclear weapons program.” For both, nuclear weapons represent “trump cards for their regimes that are too valuable to be given up for any peaceful incentive.”
Heralding North Korea as “essentially a prison camp for some 20 million people,” Bolton explained it is a “criminal regime that will sell anything to anyone for hard currency” as it is the “largest proliferators of ballistic weapon technology” and engages in the trade of illicit narcotics and promotes the illegal gambling industry. North Korea, clarified Bolton, “is not going to give up [nuclear] capability for any price we’re willing to pay.” North Korea is willing to talk, but “when push come to shove, North Korea is never willing to fulfill its side of the bargain,” demonstrating what Bolton labeled “capacity for boundless mendacity.”
To solve the North Korean quagmire, Bolton proposed the US encourage China to pressure North Korea to relinquish its program because China, a country so focused on bolstering its energy capacity, could understand that North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons might encourage other South East Asian countries to develop their own programs and challenge China’s prominence in the region. However, China is reluctant, Bolton explained, because they fear too much pressure might collapse the regime and cause a newly unified Korea to join forces with the US and bring American troops to the region.
Bolton spent less time elaborating the threat Iran poses, but nevertheless professed its capabilities and the importance of diminishing the threat, although our options are “limited.” “One is regime change,” said Bolton. “The other, as a very last resort and a very unattractive option, but one we have to consider, is the targeted use of force against Iran’s program.” He explained that if the US had been more vigorous in working within the fragile country to bring about regime change, “we would be in a much different place today” as “regime change” cannot be turned “on and off like a light switch.” Bolton prophesized the United States might have to “consider reluctantly, and as a last resort, the use of force” in Iran.
“These are the questions we will have to face long after Americans have withdrawn from Iraq,” said Bolton, ending before he took questions on a somber note. “If we don’t deal with those threats now, you and your children will have to deal with these threats long after the baby boom generation has left the scene.”