The John Bolton quote at the head of this page, caught my attention as it appears to confirm the depressing thesis that the catastropic civil war in Iraq is not an unforseen consequence of invasion or the result of blundering incompetence as many critics assert, but the deliberate objective of policy.Specifically it seems to indicate that the Bush Administration's Iraq policy is first to wreck the country by instigating a civil war, then when the people are too impoverished and traumatized to resist the American-imposed puppet regime, to take the oil and build the permanent military bases from which to control the entire Middle East.
The quote, if accurate, is important, therefore, because it establishes through the candid admission of an Administration insider, that the truth about the invaders' intentions in Iraq is quite different from what is generally supposed, and much more sinister.
Prompted by a reader's inquiry, I have just checked the source of this quotation, John Pilger's April 16 New Statesman article "Iran: the war ahead", only to find that the quote has been deleted.
A Google News search for the phrase "to maintain division and ethnic tension" produced a list with this as the second item (Note that the search results change from hour to hour and what you get may be quite different):
New Statesman - Iran: the war ahead
... recently spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East is "an agenda to maintain division and ethnic tension and the only ...
You can see that at the time of the search (2000 h PDT, April 19) the quote (bold face text) was still in the Google cache.
So I looked at the article as it appears on John Pilger's Web site. There I found that Bolton is quoted only indirectly and only in part:
...that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East is an agenda to maintain division and instability.
Division, yes. But no longer ethnic tension.
Searching further, I found a French Web page incorporating Pilger's April 16 New Statesman article, as originally published. In particular, it contained the following:
John Bolton, formerly Bush’s man at the United Nations, recently spelled out the truth : that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East is "an agenda to maintain division and ethnic tension and the only way to finally capture and enslave a country that has historically thrown out its occupiers on every occasion". He was referring to Iraq, but he also meant Iran, which would be next. That is the news.
So there is the entire direct quote as I first saw it.
What is happening here, is unclear. Perhaps only some more or less random late editorial changes, or possibly a change resulting from sober second thoughts about the accuracy of the quote.
I've written John Pilger, requesting a source for the quote and confirmation that it is, to the best of his knowledge, correct. However, an automated response tells me that "due to the huge volume of emails received it will not always
be possible to reply personally to your mail."
So if any one else can establish the validity or otherwise of the quote -- John Bolton, perhaps -- I'd appreciate hearing from them.
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