There is a difference between being a smart lawyer and being
a clever one. The smart lawyer determines what his client is entitled to,
states his case so comprehensively as to please the judge and the jury, and
never tries to overstate any part of the case lest he annoy those listening to
him.
On the other hand, the clever lawyer uses every trick
available to him to make his side of the story sound better than it really is.
In taking this approach he more often than not exposes a weak hand, something
he does in full view of those in attendance. And so, instead of helping his
client, he stands a good chance of harming him.
This is the sort of thing that often takes place in the
courtrooms. Something similar takes place in the public square which is the
place where the court of public opinion is held. Usually the place is turned
into an arena where the politicians go to state their case and fight it out
verbally with the opposition. The fight becomes interesting when lawyers-turned-politicians
or lobbyists become combatants, and bring to bear the training they were given
as lawyers while going full tilt against each other.
John Bolton is a lawyer by training who has done more
politicking than legal work, and more lobbying for the foreign entity called
Israel than he did anything else in life. Thus, most of the work he did in the
public square for Israel's causes or for any related subject bears the stamp of
a politician more than it does the work of a lawyer … until now. For the first
time that I am aware of, Bolton has pulled a fast one (typical of clever
lawyers) on his readers. This is in addition to the almost daily dose of low
level deception he injects into the public discourse about his President being
delusional. This time, Bolton pulled the clever trick in an article titled:
“Iraq's descent into chaos,” published on July 13, 2014 in Pittsburgh Tribune.
The occasion for writing that article is the debate which
flares up once in a while in America as to who bears the biggest responsibility
for the fiasco that the second Iraq war turned out to be. Well, as far as the
world is concerned that debate is meaningless because the world places the
responsibility squarely on America, and could not care less about the Left-Right
divide currently plaguing American politics. And this is also how history will
treat the question, even in America itself, once the passions of the moment
have subsided.
Now, what exactly did Bolton do that smacks of clever
trickery? What must be understood is that there are two legitimate ways to
argue a case. You either take the global approach to the subject … which some
people call the package deal. Or you take the divided approach … which some
people call dealing with the parts of the case separately. What clever lawyers
do is use the two approaches; one for their client and the other for the
opponent. Catch a lawyer do that, and you know he has a weak hand.
And this is what Bolton is doing in his article. Here is the
proof: Talking about the Bush contribution, he writes: “was the decision to
disband the Saddam-era army required by the decision to invade? Obviously not;
it was entirely separate and distinct, as were the vast bulk of other
post-Saddam decisions.” Now talking about the Obama contribution, he writes:
“the absence of a status-of-forces agreement was not a real reason to withdraw
but only a pretext camouflaging Obama's ideology and mollifying his domestic
political base.”
Do you see what he did? He gave Bush the divided approach,
and dealt with each part separately so as not to bring into the debate the
ideology that motivated the actions taken by the Bush Administration. But then
Bolton gave Obama the global approach to argue that the failure of America's
involvement in Iraq came about because of Obama's ideology. Had he given Bush
the same treatment, he would have brought into the debate the real reason for
the Iraq fiasco – the ideology that motivated the operation.
In fact, it was the disbanding of the Saddam-era army;
better known as the de-Baathification of Iraq – modeled after the
de-Nazification of Germany – that caused the Iraq fiasco. That disbanding was
the brainchild of the people who planned, controlled and supervised the war on
Iraq. They were the people who called themselves children of the Holocaust
survivors; the ones that took charge of the American military and used it to
get back at the world via a war that looked like the explosive expression of
the hate that these people have for humanity.