Morning Joe panelists hammer John Bolton for risking Iran war: 'This is what we were worried about'

MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski sounded the alarm on reports national security adviser John Bolton might be close to launching the war with Iran he has lusted for throughout his career in government.

The notorious "war hawk" has for decades called for regime change in Iran and North Korea, among others, aggressively pushed for the cancellation of the Iran nuclear deal, and now the White House is reviewing military plans to send up to 120,000 U.S. troops into the region.

"This seems to me to be escalating tensions unnecessarily," Brzezinski said. "You see John Bolton's fingerprints all over this. This is what we were worried about when he was chosen for the job."

Elise Jordan, who served in the Bush administration while Bolton briefly served as UN ambassador, said the push toward war with Iran should not be surprising to anyone who's followed the hardliner's career.

"We shouldn't be surprised that someone who has a reputation as one of the most hawkish advisers in Washington is pushing Donald Trump along this path," Jordan said, "and I think that we should be incredibly concerned any time that we're discussing moving over 100,000 troops into position because of escalating tensions. I think I really cannot believe that we failed to learn anything from the first decade of this century, and we are actually considering escalating with Iran in a war that would further destabilize the region and unleash God knows what in terms of chaos in a very troubled region already."

Co-host Willie Geist agreed the national security adviser was clearly pushing this reckless military plan.

"This does have John Bolton's name written all over it," she said. "He's been an Iran hawk from the beginning. It's one of the reasons that I think President Trump liked him as he watched him on Fox News. The piece says nothing is imminent. At this point they don't have this plan, they're developing a contingency if something should happen in the (Persian) Gulf, but we're talking about a number of troops that approaches the number that went into Iraq, at about 120,000."