Bolton: Preemptive strike ‘legitimate self defense’

“Israel has the legal and moral responsibility to protect its citizens from violence” and a preemptive strike by Israel would be “legitimate self defense,” former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told the Israel Day concert audience in Central Park on Sunday.

He added that he believed American military action was unlikely.

In an exclusive interview with The Jewish Star, Bolton stressed that “Iran is still Israel’s most serious threat,” not only for its nuclear weapons capacity and existential threat, but as an exporter of terror and nuclear capability.

“Iran is perfectly capable of giving nuclear weapons to a terrorist group,” he told the Star.

He pointed to Pakistan as another nuclear threat, and said Saudi Arabia and Turkey were potential threats to Israel if they also develop nuclear capability.

As for Syria, he said there are “no good options.”

He said that the U.S. assumed that Russia agreed to “get Assad out of power” and that the Administration therefore “wasted two-and-a-half years. The violence grinds on with no near term solution.”

Bolton said there was “enormous opposition” and “resistance” by the people of Iran to its government and that the U.S. and Europe should provide communications and financial support for that resistance. “Public opinion is there,” he said.

The United States has tried “diplomacy, sanctions and bluster” to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, Bolton told the concert audience, but the “ayatollahs are determined” to procure nuclear weapons.

Israel has struck twice to stop the development of nuclear weapons by countries hostile to Israel. When then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered the destruction of the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981, “even [then U.S. President Ronald] Reagan criticized Israel,” said Bolton.

In 2007, Israel destroyed a reactor in Syria, “built by North Korea, financed by Iran,” which created “an existential threat … the prospect of a nuclear holocaust.”

Bolton declared that the U.S. “should support Israel with weapons, intelligence and if Israel makes this difficult decision, stand by Israel militarily.”

He said the U.S. should defend Israel in the U.N. and everywhere, and should re-supply Israel for the losses they would sustain in a war with Iran and in the suppression of Hezbollah.

The overwhelming majority of Americans will stand with Israel, Bolton said.