NightBlogger

The Telegraph
In a Wall Street Journal editorial, the leading voice of Washington’s hawks warned that time is running out for efforts to stop the Islamic Republic’s covert nuclear research programme. “We will be blamed for the strike anyway, and certainly feel whatever negative consequences result, so there is compelling logic to make it as successful as possible,” Mr Bolton writes. “At a minimum, we should place no obstacles in Israel’s path, and facilitate its efforts where we can.” Mr Bolton said that further rounds of United Nations sanctions were no longer a realistic deterrent. “We have almost certainly lost the race between giving ’strong incentives’ for Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and its scientific and technological efforts to do just that. Swift, sweeping, effectively enforced sanctions might have made a difference five years ago. No longer.” More

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, faces a citizen’s arrest when he addresses an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales this evening. George Monbiot, the journalist and activist, is planning the action because he believes Mr Bolton is a “war criminal”. He said he was surprised that a “war criminal” such as Mr Bolton would be allowed to “swim through the politest of polite soirees – which is of course Hay.” Mr Bolton, who was the American ambassador to the UN from August 2005 to January 2006, is due to talk at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival at 6.30pm on international relations.

Mr Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, plans to arrest him as he steps off stage at the end of his talk. He said he was prepared to jump on stage and perform the citizen’s arrest there if necessary. He claimed Mr Bolton was “instrumental in preparing and initiating the Iraq war by disseminating false claims through the State Department” while he was under-secretary of state for arms control. More

John Bolton, former Ambassador to the UN, takes aggressive stand and suggests bombing Iran, an act he believes Bush will follow through on before his term ends. Bolton has been a prominent participant in some neoconservative groups such as the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank that promoted war with Iran in the past as an ideology for US geopolitical dominance in the region.