Et tu, Bolton!

Byline: F.S. AijazuddinUpdated

THE memoirs of John Bolton (President Trump's former National Security Advisor, 28-9) have stabbed Trump from the front. Trump approached a US court to have their publication blocked. The judge decided otherwise. Meanwhile, they have been secreted on the internet, available to lock-downers.

Bolton clearly intends them to damage Trump before the presidential election in November this year. Unfortunately for Bolton, it is the US electoral system that will decide on Trump's re-election or removal.

Bolton's book The Room Where It Happened - A White House Memoir deserves to be read, only once. Historians will have scant use for it, as little as they had for his earlier work - Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, published within a year of his equally short stint as US ambassador to the United Nations (August 25-December 26).

Over the years, Bolton had chiselled out of himself an image of a rigid hawk, an obsidian Horus, obsessed with using US military force in the Middle East to dominate, punish and to achieve regime change. As Trump's national security adviser, he saw his job was 'to ensure that a President understood what options were open to him for any given decision he needed to make, and then to ensure that this decision was carried out by the pertinent bureaucracies'.

Bolton's book deserves to be read - only once.

Bolton's mission? To keep 'America safe from another 9/, or even worse, a 9/ where the terrorists had nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. As long as the threat existed, no place was too far away to worry about. The terrorists weren't coming to America on wooden sailing ships'.

As national security adviser, Bolton had access to Trump's ear, but he soon discovered someone else always filled the other ear - among them, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Bolton's successor at the UN Nikki Haley, Trump's daughter Ivanka and his Cassius son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Reading between the lines of these self-serving memoirs, Bolton's insecurities and resentments are all too apparent. He fears Trump's re-election. He dreads that Nikki Haley (with the support of Ivanka and Jared) will replace Mike Pence as Trump's running mate in the election this year. He cavils at being excluded by Trump from his one-to-one meetings with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. And he hated being out-trumped by Trump.

After the confrontation with the Iranians over the downing of a US...