Scott Ritter is a retired U.S. Marine and the former top UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He says they lied. Clinton, Bush, Israel, France, Germany, everybody knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq by 1995. But Saddam remaining in power was a political embarrassment. The video is worth a watch, it gives more info than the transcripts.
Well, I don’t want to sound – I’m not somebody who’s into conspiracy theories, and I’m not somebody who’s out there saying this is about global oil. The tragedy of Iraq is that it’s about domestic American politics. This is a president, George Herbert Walker Bush, who in 1990, traps himself rhetorically by linking Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler. Once you do that, once you speak of a Nuremburg-like retribution, you can’t negotiate your way out of that problem. Now it’s either deliver Saddam Hussein’s head on a platter or you failed. He tried to during the Gulf War. I was part of a team that was targeting Saddam. We didn’t succeed.
Now the C.I.A. says, “Don’t worry, Saddam will be gone in six months. All you have to do is contain him, put these sanctions in place and keep him bottled up and he’ll collapse.â€? Six months later Saddam Hussein is still there. His continued survival became a political embarrassment that had to be dealt with.
Ritter’s credibility has gone up and down like a yo-yo. Whistle blowers never have an easy time. But one wonders if the Democrats should try to embrace Ritter. (Of course one has to wonder if Ritter would allow himself to be so embraced!) He has the creds–a Marine with serious experience in the field and not some bureaucrat out of the Hague. He was and continues to be right. His bristling indignation could go a long way if the Dems wanted to co-opt him. Of course the idea that Ritter could have a legitimate asperations to public office is mad (and humorously so; a quick search for “Scott Ritter for president” is good for laughs). But could he help make a president? Quite possibly.
He could help bring down a president perhaps. But I’m not sure he’d ‘make’ anybody for me. I know it’s unlikely, but I’m still holding out for a next president that can actually inspire people with his own ideas and actions, rather than relying on the incompetence of the opposition. I see Ritter’s role as .. not letting us forget that the stated reason for pre-emptive war, WMD’s, was not the true objective. Regime change was always the objective. And noble or not, it was never the stated or debated reason for war, two factors key to a transparent dialectic and a functioning democracy.