"...when I started talking...in 2001 and 2002, we traveled around the country and talked about the impending war with Iraq. And everyone went, 'well, there isn't going to be a war with Iraq. That's insane. The President's embarked on diplomacy. There's going to be a diplomatic solution. They're going to give inspectors a chance. There will not be a war.' I kept saying no, war has been decided upon because it is the policy decided upon to remove Saddam Hussein from power. No one wanted to recognize that policy. Then the war came. Then today there's a growing recognition that we were misled into this war. But now I'm mentioning the war with Iran that's already occurring, and everybody goes 'no, there's no war with Iran. Don't be crazy. We can't go to war with Iran. We don't have enough troops. We're bogged down in Iraq. No one would be crazy enough to go to war with Iran.' Ladies and gentlemen, the same man that got us involved in this war in Iraq (I should say men, Clinton and Bush), got us involved with a future war with Iran. The die has already been cast. The decision has been made, and, as much as Bill Clinton facilitated war with Iraq, he facilitated war with Iran by embarking on a policy of dual containment in the 1990's, putting unilateral U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, creating the politics of demonization where the American public on a daily basis has been bombarded with nothing but negative visuals, negative information about Iran, nothing positive. According to the U.S. media, Iran is populated by 50 million anti-American whirling dervishes who want nothing more than to come out of the country and cut off our heads. We don't recognize the cultural diversity of Iran. We don't recognize the fact that Iran is populated by human beings that care about life just as much as we do. We don't recognize that the Iranian mothers want a good future for their children just as much as the American mothers want a good future for their children. We don't recognize that Iranian men just want to have a job, a job that pays the bills, so that they can go home and maybe have a nice weekend with their family. That's the reality of Iran, but we don't have that. You see, we're told that Iran is a threat. We're told that the mad mullahs in Iran must be done away with in the same way that the mad dictator in Baghdad was done away with. The policy of regime change is in place today. This is why, when the Bush administration speaks of regional transformation, it's not just hypothetical. They mean it, and, just like the Downing Street Memo, that British document that refers to meetings that took place in July, 2002, says that the United States had a policy of regime change already in place that was not going to be changed and they were fixing intelligence around the policy, I'm here to tell you today that we have a policy of regime change in place about Iran, and we are fixing the intelligence around the policy. We have a congress that is unwilling to stand up and talk about the reality of Iran. And listen to Hillary Clinton when she asks ridiculous questions, when she has testimony about the Iranian threat. She doesn't have probing questions. She sits there and reinforces the negativity. She sits there and reinforces the notion of an Iranian threat, and the danger with that is that the compliant beast we call the American public, these sheep that allow themselves to be led to and fro, are listening to what she says. That's why I could be a pollster and ask the following question. Do you think America should go to war with Iran? And most Americans say no, it's stupid, we're already bogged down in Iraq, why should we go to war with Iran? Put those polling numbers up, and everybody will go 'see, there's not going to be a war with Iran, Scott. What are you worried about?' Let me get a little more tricky with you here. Do you think the Iranian government poses a threat to the United States of America? 78% of the American public says yes. How does the Iranian government pose a threat? Do they pose a threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons? The same numbers, 78%, yes, Iran poses a threat in the form of nuclear weapons. Now comes the cute part: how should we deal with this threat? Oh, we're not going to that war thing because it sort of went bad in Iraq. How do you want to support? Ah, economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations.
84% of Americans believe that we should impose sanctions against Iran through the United Nations as a manner to deal with the Iranian nuclear weapons threat that threatens the security of the United States. That's why we're going to war, ladies and gentlemen, because we have bought into the notion that Iran is a threat without question, without thinking. We just parrot back what's told to us by our elected officials. We bought into the notion that Iran is a threat in the form of nuclear weapons, even though no evidence has been put forward by anybody to sustain this notion. In fact, all of the intelligence information points to the reality that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran as we speak. Every case made by the Bush administration has fallen apart on investigation of guess what, the eternal threat to peace and security, United Nations weapons inspectors who had the audacity to go to Iran and investigate baseless allegations and expose them as baseless allegations. Well, they have nuclear weapons. And, now that we've said there's a threat, we say that the only way to deal with this threat is to impose economic sanctions, but you know what? They have to be imposed by the United Nations Security Council. The United Nations Security Council has members such as Russia, France, and China, not so much France right now on the issue of Iran but Russia and China, who have said 'we will not allow economic sanctions to be imposed because we have seen what you've done with the Iraqi model, that this isn't about getting rid of a nuclear threat. This is about regime change, and we're not going to let this occur.' But the United States is pushing hard to have the issue brought to the Security Council knowing full well that Russia and China will veto it. What does this mean, ladies and gentlemen? It means that, when Russia and China veto it, as we know they will, the President has no choice. His hands are tied. He didn't want to go to war, but he has no choice, you see, because Iran is a threat, a nuclear threat, and the United Nations will not do anything about this threat, and no President is going to stand by and let a threat exist. No President is going to allow the national security of the United States of America to be held hostage by the United Nations, and, as distasteful as war is, the President has no choice but to engage in a war with Iran. That's why we're going to war, ladies and gentlemen. The President wants it. The American people have been preconditioned to accept the terms of conflict, and the vehicle for facilitating this is in place: John Bolton, the United Nations ambassador, has already written his speech that he will deliver before the Security Council when they refuse to impose economic sanctions. That speech will be that America will not allow itself to be held hostage by the United Nations. Then the President will order bombing, and this is where it gets really interesting, because one of the true things about the Iranian threat is we do not have enough troops to invade and occupy Iran. You see, the Bush administration is amazing. They don't believe in reality. <<laughter>>. They say this themselves. They say that America has overwhelming economic, diplomatic, and political strength that we can bring to bear on any given situation and create our own reality, that the old rules of diplomacy no longer apply, that we have such overwhelming force that we can shape events so that a new reality is created. Now they sort of had a hick-up, a bad one in Iraq where they thought the new reality would be greeting us with songs and flowers. They were a little wrong on that one, but they've modified their formulation apparently because they believe that, if we bomb Iran with a massive aerial bombardment, then the Iranian people will rise up and remove the Mullahs from power, even though history shows that it's not very likely that a nation that's bombed is going to rise up and support those who are bombing them. But, if that fails, the military has been told to be prepared to send troops from Azerbaijan, along the Caspian Sea coast, to the outskirts of Tehran where it would project a force of 40-60,000. The Iranian people would be motivated by our presence and rise up and overthrow the mad Mullahs of Tehran. We'll even put another 20-30,000 Marines on the coast where we can control the Straits of Hormuz, preventing the Iranians from shutting down that. .. oil shipping lane. What happens when that doesn't work? And it doesn't take a mathematical whiz to figure that it's not going to work, ladies and gentlemen. Iran is a nation about 2.5 times the size of Iraq. Iran has a population of almost 50 million people, and we're talking about putting 60-80,000 troops on the ground. We can't control a nation of 25 million people with 161,000 troops. What makes us think we're going to control 50 million with 80,000? It's not going to happen. Now is where it gets really frightening, because the Bush administration, if they go down this course of action, will have no choice at that point in time but to use nuclear weapons, and they have already developed the weapons -- they call them usable nukes. It's funny that term, usable. This is not about mutually assured destruction anymore. This is not about deterrence. The Bush administration has radically departed from past doctrine to say that we will have a family of nuclear weapons that are usable nuclear weapons, meaning that we can conceive of using them, and then they'll say we could use them preemptively in a non-nuclear environment, meaning that it's not about opposing somebody with nuclear weapons or biological weapons or chemical weapons, it's we can use them any time we want to if it's in the strategic national interest of the United States.
This war, ladies and gentlemen, has a good chance of beginning in 2007. What are you going to do, peace movement? What are you going to do? Sit back and go, 'oh my God, this is too much to think about. I'm going to hit the delete button and pretend that Ritter never spoke.' Or do what others do? 'Na, he's a crazy wild man. Na, I'm not buying into that garbage. We're just going to move on thinking that Iraq's bad and they'll never going on into Iran.' Study the facts I've just put on the table. You will not contradict a single one of them. You cannot contradict a single one of them because they are facts. I'm not making it up. It's all based on written and spoken statements made by Bush administration officials, past and present. What are you going to do? Wait for congress to do the right thing? Congress has already sold out. Congress isn't going to oppose this President. Congress has already bought into the notion of the Iranian threat. What are you going to do? One thing you can do is change congress, and you have a window of opportunity. The 2006 election may well go down in history as one of the most critical elections that this country has ever faced, because, if I'm right, and I pray I'm not, I pray I'm wrong, I pray I'm on drugs, I pray I'm having some hallucinations, I pray that none of this is true. What if I'm right and we don't change congress in 2006? We will unleash forces that will devastate this country, not just economically, not just politically, not just militarily, not just morally. Physically, because, if we drop nuclear weapons on Iran, we will have uncorked the genie, and that genie will not allow itself to be recorked until an American city has been vaporized in a radioactive cloud in a terrorist counterstrike to the American initiation of nuclear holocaust, and that is the statement of fact. Right now, when people talk about terrorism and nuclear weapons, I'm not too worried about it because I still think that we have to be concerned about it, but there's enough sanity that prevails in the world today where leaders such as Musharaf in Pakistan and others will not transfer this technology to the terrorists out of fear of the devastation that will be caused. If the United States drops nuclear weapons, all bets are off. The Muslim world will not rest until the Americans pay a price similar to the one that's been inflicted on them. What can you do? ... Find a candidate worth supporting, and put all of your resources into supporting that candidate and getting that candidate in position, reaching out across the nation to other states and say 'we need to get effective checks and balances in place in Washington, D.C. right now to hold this administration in place, in check.' History shows us that, when an administration starts floundering in the way that George W. Bush has, that they take on a fortress-like mentality. Witness Richard Nixon in the aftermath of Watergate. Things are going to get worse for George W. Bush before they get better, if they ever get better. More allegations of misconduct, more allegation of lies, deceit, distortion are going to be put forward, and we already see how this President reacts, not with an embrace that's inclusive but to reject and be derisive and to go on a counter-attack. The President, unable to generate any friction in terms of getting his policies implemented here at home because congress is starting to rise up and revolt, will look for distractions overseas in the same way that Richard Nixon looked to create a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and the Middle East. It's very dangerous times, ladies and gentlemen, very dangerous times, and, therefore, it's incumbent upon us to recognize that we cannot wait for someone to give us the solution. We must re-read the Constitution and take strength from the words in the preamble that speak of we, the people of the United States of America. The only way we're going to get a solution to this dual deception that's taken place today in Iraq and Iran is for we, the people of the United States of America, to re-empower ourselves as citizens, to break free of this cocoon of comfort, this consumerism we trapped ourselves into so that we are addicted to a lifestyle that can only be sustained by elected representatives who will carry out aggressive policies. We got to elect good people, and that's the thing. We've got to elect. No one else is going to elect them. We've got to nominate them. No one is going to nominate them. We've got to support and sustain them because no one else is going to do that. I hope I've put out enough challenging words and thoughts to you, and now you can hold me accountable for every single one of them as I open up the floor for questions. Thank you."
--Scott Ritter
You can't fault the guy for speaking up. |
