On a television news program recently, retired Army four-star general Barry McCaffrey was asked to comment on John Bolton, the man who next week will become the president's new national security advisor.  Mr. McCaffrey's facial expression indicated that he might have some misgivings about John Bolton, nevertheless he said that John Bolton is an "intelligent," person who "writes beautifully."

In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, George Will began by describing John Bolton as "intelligent, educated, principled, articulate and experienced."

When I heard Mr. McCaffrey describe John Bolton as "intelligent" and later read George Will describing John Bolton as "intelligent, I wondered in what sense they were using that word.  And I wondered why they would say "intelligent," if they were trying to say something meaningful and illuminating about John Bolton.  Because, nothing I have ever heard John Bolton say and none of his writings that I have read has inspired me to believe that "intelligent," was a useful way to describe him.  Certainly "intelligent" would not be among the first hundred words I would use to characterize John Bolton.

If, in writing, the word intelligent is enclosed by quotation marks, an ironic usage is indicated, but George Will did not use quotation marks or otherwise indicate that he was being facetious when calling John Bolton intelligent.  And Mr. McCaffrey did not through tone, inflection or facial expression indicate irony when using intelligent to describe John Bolton.

When not applied ironically, the word "intelligent" is generally thought to have a positive meaning.  It means that the person we are calling intelligent understands something about reality, usually something of significance, and, implicitly, better than most other people understand it.  It is taken for granted that understanding something is good, good because it is in some way useful to human beings, either in an immediate utilitarian sense or in a more abstract sense.  At minimum, intelligence is supposed to provide a good enough understanding of some aspect of reality to enable a person to interact at least relatively successfully with that reality.

If we believe that the national security advisor is intelligent about nuclear weapons, and war, and the uncontrollable consequences of the use of nuclear weapons in a world bristling with them, we believe this intelligence is good because such a national security advisor is likely to help his country to avoid using nuclear weapons and to avoid provoking others into using theirs.  But if we believe that the national security advisor is not intelligent about the reality of war and nuclear weapons, we believe that is bad because this national security advisor is more likely to endanger not only his own country, but the world at large.  Such is the problem with John Bolton, that is, if Barry McCaffrey and George Will are incorrectly using the word "intelligent," when they describe him.

Is John Bolton intelligent about the dangers of war and nuclear weapons?  In his recent Wall Street Journal article, The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First, advocating a first strike against North Korea to preemptively destroy its capability of reaching the United States with nuclear weapons, John Bolton somehow does not discuss the monstrous risks involved in such an attack.  He focuses instead on what he believes is the legal justification for it, based on a standard laid down by Daniel Webster after the British invaded American waters in 1837 to preemptively destroy the steamboat Caroline, thought to be destined to carry weapons to Canadian rebels in Ontario.  Bolton points out that Webster criticized the British attack on the grounds that such an attack was justified only when "the necessity of self-defense was instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation."  In the case of the Caroline, Britain could have waited until the steamboat was out of American waters and on its way to Ontario.

Applying Webster's standard, Bolton distinguishes North Korea from the  wooden steamboat Caroline, on the grounds that nuclear destruction delivered from North Korea could arrive in minutes with cataclysmic consequences for the United States.  In other words, according to Bolton, North Korea presents the United States with an  immediate, overwhelming threat that leaves no time for deliberation, and only one possible response: a preemptive attack on North Korea.  Thus, where Britain's attack on the Caroline did not pass Daniel Webster's preemption test, a United States first strike on North Korea would.  Bolton concludes his article,

This is how we should think today about the threat of nuclear warheads delivered by ballistic missiles. In 1837 Britain unleashed pre-emptive “fire and fury” against a wooden steamboat. It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current “necessity” posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.

Just as John Bolton does not seem to understand that a minor military incident from 180 years ago does not provide a useful analogy or practical guide to the wisdom of an action that could entail the loss of hundreds of thousands or even millions of human lives, and result in unintended consequences for humanity, long-term, world-wide and horrific, Bolton does not mention that his "legal" justification for a first strike on North Korea would also legitimate a first strike on any state that a US president perceives as an imminent threat to US security.  But more, it would also justify a preemptive attack on the United States from any state that perceives the United States as an imminent threat.  Presumably, Bolton believes that US military might is sufficient to deter other countries from exercising their legal right to preemptively strike the United States whenever they perceive that it poses an imminent threat.  Otherwise, he, our future national security advisor, has promoted preemptive attacks on the United States by providing the legal justification for them.  And if John Bolton is counting on American military power to protect it from preemptive strikes, then what is he really doing with his legal justification for preemption other than promoting the might makes right doctrine?

It is odd that the title of John Bolton's article refers to the legal case for preemptively striking North Korea, when the international application of Daniel Webster's [Bolton's] preemption criteria would justify any country attacking any country at any time so long as the attacking state (plausibly?) claims to perceive an imminent, "overwhelming" threat to its security.  This is not the basis for a lawful international order, but rather for international violence as the first response to a claimed perceived imminent threat, and for the ensuing anarchy, chaos, and catastrophic loss of human life that we saw, for example, in the aftermath of the unprovoked US attack on Iraq in 2003.  Not surprisingly given his justification of preemptive strikes, John Bolton promoted that war, and claims now to still believe in the wisdom of that invasion.

So, is intelligence really one of John Bolton's salient characteristics?  Does the record show that he understands the realities relevant to the job of national security advisor?  The article we have just discussed is very brief, not quite two pages--glib--especially when considering that Bolton is claiming to sufficiently justify a preemptive attack that would be likely to have calamitous international consequences.  Because Bolton spends no words in the article discussing the new realities to be produced by an attack on North Korea, we cannot comment on his understanding of these realities, other than to say that since he does not discuss them he either must not care what they would be, or he must not see them as relevant to the question of the wisdom of preemptively attacking North Korea, or perhaps he just does not want to talk about them because it would be too difficult to make his case if he also had to address reality.

If Bolton does not see the possible consequences of an unprovoked attack on nuclear-armed North Korea as worthy of careful consideration, even after he has seen that the consequences of the Iraq War were entirely unlike and grotesquely worse than what he predicted they would be, (Bolton, like the other war-mongers of the time--Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al--claimed that Iraqis would greet the invading American army as liberators, and that Iraq would in short order set up its own democracy) then how can he live up to McCaffrey's and Will's description of him as "intelligent"?  As we said, intelligence is generally regarded as a positive attribute that allows one to interact successfully with reality.  But, for Bolton, it is not necessary to interact with realities of this kind, or to ponder them, or to anticipate them; he only needs to disdain them, then ignore them as beside the point.

So, how did it become possible for a willfully--and perhaps naturally--unintelligent person like John Bolton to become well-known enough to even be considered as the president's national security advisor?  To understand this, you first need to know that John Bolton has been a professional propagandist since no later than 1997 when he began his association with the neoconservative, "think tank," the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).  The purpose of institutions like AEI is not to provide a place for people to think about reality, but to think about ways to promote certain pre-ordained policy positions.  So, the tendency is that a person like John Bolton, who seems to have a natural disposition toward ignoring the facts when they contradict his fantasies, and whose natural tendencies have been further nurtured within one of these tank environments, nurtured by funds provided by, among others, the Koch brothers, feels free to ignore realities that are counter to his propagandistic propositions.  He need not address them!  He is paid to produce propaganda, not to offer serious, reasoned arguments.  (Alas, McCaffrey and Will do not appear to realize this.  Typical modern Republicans, they are limited themselves by their habits of thinking about reality via pre-conceived, insufficiently examined labels, not directly about reality. For this reason they have mistaken what Bolton does as intelligent.) And so that is what Bolton does.  Years of soaking his brain in a think tank has shriveled whatever there was of his brain to begin with, but it did pay off for him, finally--in this time of Pervasive Propaganda and Lying in the pursuit of Power--when his willingness to say or write anything to justify a new war brought him enough fame that even our president became aware of him.

Postscript:  There is reason to feel not completely pessimistic about the consequences of the president's choice of Bolton as one of the chief protectors of American national security:  Bolton is a talker and a writer, not a doer.  You can talk and write forever without ever having to encounter reality, at least Bolton has proved that he can do it for several decades.  (He did after all successfully evade an encounter with his dreaded rice paddy in Vietnam.)  It is not unlikely that John Bolton will prove to be too incompetent to successfully facilitate the prospective wars he has promoted through hot air, and the written word.  History has shown so far that the incompetent are drawn to the president and he to them.