Excerpts:"I wouldn’t have engaged in negotiations with Iran in the first place. The policy has failed. Sanctions won’t stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons." Bolton thinks the Bush administration would “rather find a way for diplomacy to succeed but time is running out”. He added as an afterthought, “That’s me speaking”
...Bolton believes that Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is wasting her time trying to restart the Middle East peace process. The Arab-Israeli conflict was “not a priority”, he added. “I don’t see linkage to Iraq, and Hamas and Fatah are in a state of civil war.”
...One of his greatest concerns is the threat to Israel and the West posed by Iran’s nuclear programme. Regime change is “preferable” to striking Iran’s sites, he noted, but “the only course worse than the use of force is an Iran with nuclear weapons”.
The EU3 nations’ years of negotiations with Iran were not a “neutral activity”. Iran used the time to develop its mastery of uranium enrichment — as its own leaders have boasted....
[On Iraq] “The fundamental point is whether the civil war that exists is going to continue.” Bolton has often been mistaken for a neocon, but while he considers democracy preferable to other forms of government, he does not consider it America’s duty to spread it.
The shape and form of the nation is irrelevant: what matters is that Iraq is either tolerably pro-western or de-fanged. He has no regrets about the removal of Saddam Hussein; now it is up to the Iraqis if they want to engage in “fratricide”. The same goes for partition: “If the future of Iraq is to stay together, that’s fine. If not, I couldn’t care less from a strategic perspective.”