Ritter relishes role as lightning rod
Ex-U.N. arms inspector ‘waging peace with tenacity’
msnbc.com
WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 — Scott Ritter considers himself an accidental peacenik. “I’m not a pacifist. I’m waging peace with the same tenacity one would wage war,” says Ritter, the maverick ex-Marine and former U.N. weapons inspector who has emerged as a loud American voice against war with Iraq.
RITTER IS STEPPING up his arguments that Saddam Hussein’s arsenal isn’t the threat that President Bush claims it to be. Next week, he will be featured in an “instant” anti-war publication being released by Context Books, and will travel to Britain for a Labor Party conference where he hopes to fan the “democratic fervor” against military action that he says he is starting to see at home.
“I’m not asking them to accept everything I say at face value. I want them to challenge me,” Ritter said in an interview Monday. “I want them to hold their elected officials accountable.”
These activities are part of what Ritter characterizes as a campaign to educate Americans, and others around the world, about the perils of starting a war without good reason. And when it comes to Iraq, he said, Bush has yet to offer a good reason.
‘MAKE THE CASE’
“If there is a case for war, make the case and I’ll be standing right there beside you (against) the government of Iraq, which I have no sympathy for,” Ritter said. “I would hate for the United States to wake up 10 years from now with 58,000 body bags and a million dead foreign nationals in Iraq and elsewhere, and realize we made a mistake.”
Ritter angered the Bush administration earlier this month when he turned up in Baghdad declaring that Iraq is not able to produce nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell cast aside Ritter’s assertions as the viewpoint of “somebody who’s not in the intelligence chain any longer.”
“It’s an irrelevant point. I never was in the intelligence loop,” Ritter said Monday. “I definitely am in the information loop. My information is current, it is accurate, it is viable.”
He does maintain that U.N. inspections had eliminated 95 percent of Iraq’s deadly weaponry, a contention that meets with skepticism from many quarters.
EVIDENCE LACKING
“The full extent and the objective of Iraq’s (biological weapons) program has never been disclosed by Iraq. ... Hard evidence, as might be expected, is lacking,” Richard Spertzel, who spent four years as head of U.N. biological weapons inspections, told the House Armed Services Committee last week.
Right now, many in the United States don’t exactly know what to make of Ritter. (One Bush administration official bitterly compared Ritter to “Hanoi Jane,” a moniker given actress Jane Fonda for her visit there during the Vietnam conflict).
There are whispers that Ritter couldn’t possibly be driven by sheer patriotism, that he must be on the take from some foreign source. His trip to Iraq earlier this month was organized by the Iraqi government and by peace groups.
Ritter attributes the harshest criticisms to an assault by “right-wing media” that have been “particularly vehement in its attack on me” because he is speaking against Bush administration policy.
To those critics he says simply, “I’m comfortable with my level of patriotism.”
“There are a lot of people who are intimidated to speak out, who are afraid they will be attacked as unpatriotic and treasonous,” Ritter said. “It’s sad. We aren’t a fascist state. We do have freedom of speech. To suppress dissent is, frankly speaking, the most un-American thing I can imagine.”
Yet even some of those who lean in favor of Ritter’s anti-war stance are careful not to identify too closely.
ANTI-WAR ALLIES WARY
“I cannot say I associate myself with his remarks,” Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., said before leaving Syria for Baghdad last week. “He has a much more in-depth and emphatic attachment to this country (Iraq) than I do.”
But Rahall also said he doesn’t see impurity in Ritter’s motives. “What he has put above all else is his love for his country, as I do,” Rahall said.
Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector for seven years. He resigned in 1998, saying Iraq remained “an ugly threat” and the Clinton administration was doing too little about it. He also said he felt the United States was manipulating the inspections effort for its own political purposes.
Conservatives praised Ritter at the time for taking a stance against the Clinton White House. Ritter still holds to this argument, accusing the Bush administration of behaving “like it’s an imperial executive,” demanding that other nations follow its will.
“The United States is committing diplomatic suicide right now,” Ritter said. “You’re seeing the Bush administration apply this power to coerce, to bribe, to threaten nations into supporting their war on Iraq. We may succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but we will lose the war. The war on terror, the war on how the world views us.” |
