t r u t h o u t | Interview With Writer William Rivers Pitt
[With t r u t h o u t Editor Marc Ash]
Subject: His New Book; "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know."
Sunday, 29 September, 2002
truthout.org
MA: Welcome t r u t h o u t readers. We are today interviewing our very own lead writer William Rivers Pitt about his new book, "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know." Welcome, William.
WRP: Thank you.
MA: There are a couple of subjects that I want to touch on, one of which is your interview with Scott Ritter and what he had to say, but I think I'd like to start with your reasons. You've written some very sharp, critical, and compelling pieces about the Bush administration in general and about their plans for the Iraqi nation. What motivates you, what's important to you, what brings you to this point where you feel compelled to speak out?
WRP: The answer to that question comes in two parts, pre-September 11, and post-September 11. Before September 11, during the campaign for the presidency 2000, the catastrophe that happened in Florida and the first subsequent months of the Bush administration, I was appalled at the priorities of the administration. I thought they were leading us down a path to economic ruin, to international isolation. Virtually everything that Bush stood for I was against, and quite afraid of on a lot of levels. After September 11, the volume on my fears got turned up a great deal, particularly after the signing of the Patriot Act, and particularly with the rush to war with Iraq, in the aftermath of the meltdown of the stock market and Enron and Halliburton and Harken and everything else. I think that we are dealing with individuals...I don't even think you can rightfully call them republicans anymore. They are corporatists; they are something new on the planet and they are mortally dangerous to this country. I am not a radical leftist lunatic by any stretch of the imagination. I was a fairly moderate democrat before this party got itself into power and I have been radicalized by this situation. Right now, we are in a place of great and fundamental danger to everything about this country that matters to us.
MA: It's an interesting point that you raise. In watching CSPAN today, watching the debate on the Senate floor with regard to the Homeland Security Apparatus, there were references to powers bestowed on former administrations, and there seemed to be an attempt on the part of many of the senators that were speaking to make the argument that it was good for this administration to have this snippet of power and, it's okay, this is just another administration and these are just redistributions of power, it's no big deal. The powers that we're talking about and the administration that we're talking about is just another administration?
WRP: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. For example, the interesting thing about the Homeland Security argument is that you cannot avoid the fact that September 11 happened and that a great number of Americans would like something like a Homeland Security Department. If you shook Americans awake in the middle of the night and put the question to them, they would say "Yes, I would like Homeland Security to take care of things here, to make sure that September 11 doesn't happen." You also have to bear in mind that the Homeland Security concept was first foisted by Al Gore, just before he left office. So, the idea of a Homeland Security apparatus has been around for a couple of years now. What it comes down to more than anything is not trusting the motives of this particular administration. I mean, we can argue the merits of the Homeland Defense Bill as it stands all day long, and it has its good points and its very bad points, but the worst point of it all is putting it into the hands of an administration that is not trustworthy.
MA: It 's interesting to hear you draw that distinction between these administrations. One of the primary issues for t r u t h o u t is reaching out to the average voter, and saying to the average voter that it's important to sharpen your awareness and draw distinctions on the issues and on the players, now more so at this time perhaps more than anytime in history. You get a lot of fan mail from the people who read your work. What is your sense of their sense of urgency in regard to these issues?
WRP: If the people who respond to my work are any sort of a representative body, Americans are terrified, wanting to do something, but are faced with such an enormous challenge that they don't even know where to start. Half of the emails to me read, "Well, what do I do now? I have this information, what can I do with it?." I will tell you, I think that there is, and has been for a while now, a great whistling difference, an emptiness, a space in between what you see on the media as far as war on Iraq, and what the American people feel. War on Iraq makes for great television, it makes for great media, but the people themselves are not necessarily as wild about this idea as them media would lead us to believe. The media likes reporting on explosions and war, because reporting on economic meltdown and economic futures and bad stock markets and crooked corporate people, some of whom are deeply connected to the Bush administration, is not good television. It's boring and it's depressing. It makes people want to change the channel to go watch "Friends," or something that will make them forget about the fact that they're going to have to work another ten years to be able to retire.
MA: In your latest piece for t r u t h o u t, "Murder for Profit", you set forth the assertion that the Bush administration would indeed contemplate a full scale military assault against the Iraqi nation, that would in the estimation of experts kill at least 30,000 people, and by their own admission would entail the extensive loss of American life and billions of dollars at taxpayers expense. You set forth the assertion that the Bush administration would in fact orchestrate such a military assault for the purpose of cornering and dominating the oil market, the oil production in the region, but more importantly to sway this November's elections. It's a very serious charge. Can you give us a little more insight into what brought you to that point?
WRP: What brought me to that point was simply watching how this had developed. Saddam Hussein has been around for twelve years. In fact, he's been around for thirty years, but he has been an American problem ever since we stopped funding him and he turned on our allies. All of a sudden, in mid-August after three months of terrible economic news, and what looked to be an incredible catastrophe at the polls in the mid-term election for the Republicans, Saddam Hussein is now the most dangerous man on the face of the earth and has to be addressed militarily, immediately. This, in and of itself, supports the idea that they will instigate war to distract the American political populace from the sorry economic situation that we're in. It's only part of the story; it's only one half of the deal. All by itself, they might not have had the guts to go and do this. But at the same time it serves the purposes of the incredibly influential neo-conservative hawks in this administration, like Richard Pearl, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney to name a few, who very desperately want to rewrite the whole map in that region. They want to start with Iraq, they want to deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They want "total war" in the region. There was a recent Rand corporation think tank group that went and spoke to Richard Pearl's defense Policy Board, which is influential inside the Pentagon, and described Iraq as the "tactical pivot" that would lead to "total war" within that whole region, to take the place over, to institute regime changes from left to right and to secure American hegemony over the oil producing countries in that region. It serves two purposes at once. It serves the purposes of men like Andrew Card, who think of this administration in terms of a product to be sold; his product until very recently was a really dirty and soiled one. It serves the purposes of the people who are actually running the foreign policy of this administration.
MA: Okay. Now let's take a quick look at the book itself. Again, the title is "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know." What is it that the Bush team doesn't want us to know?
WRP: The Bush teams does not want you to know that Iraq does not pose a grave threat to the United States of America. Iraq has been effectively contained by the sanctions, and the weapons inspectors virtually annihilated whatever weapons program they had. Whatever they might have been able to squirrel away is now junk, because the chemistry of the stuff they were trying to make dictates that it ceases to be effective after a couple of years. They do not have any missile technology. They certainly do not have any connections to Al Qaeda - Saddam Hussein has been viciously and vigorously repressing Islamic fundamentalism in his own country. He puts people to death if they proselytize Islamic fundamentalism. That's why he attacks the Kurds. If Hussein were to give Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction, they would use those weapons on him first. They hate him. Also, the politics and cultural facts of the region, this pipedream of democracy in Iraq, that we're going to institute a regime change and create western style democracy, is laughable. This administration does not want that at all, because the majority of people in Iraq are Shiites, theologically and ideologically aligned with Iran. If we were to give them western style democracy, they would immediately align themselves with Iran and create a strategic issue that is ten times as bad as the one we have now.
MA: Let's take a quick look at your main source for technical information and direct information on the Iraqi arms situation. You were able originally to attend an address given by Scott Ritter in the Boston area, and what you heard from him during the source of that presentation really set off some alarm bells.
WRP: He is an incredibly dynamic speaker, a powerful guy. He's a Bush supporter, a conservative republican, and a marine. I consider him to be a patriot, leaving aside his political considerations, which are his own business. The man knows what he's talking about. He has been there. I don't know anybody else who has spent seven years destroying weapons of mass destruction, and all the means to create them, in Iraq. He's been there; he thinks this is an incredibly bad idea. I went to go see him at Suffolk University at the end of July. I wrote a piece for t r u t h o u t about it called "The Coming October War in Iraq" which got pretty widely dispersed. The publishers of this book, because of that piece, offered me this project. I took it, and then through the sponsors who hosted Scott Ritter at the talk in Suffolk, I managed to get a hold of him, and he was kind enough to give me several hours on the telephone.
MA: You mentioned a moment ago in speaking of Scott Ritter, you said "He's a patriot". Are you a patriot?
WRP: I like to think so. I like to think that at the very least I am doing my duty as a citizen. There's a great line in the interview that I had with Scott for the book: "It's not our job to sit dumbly while politicians say a bunch of stuff that isn't true, or is completely off the mark, or is just a bunch of spin," or what have you. It's our job to stand up and dissent as loudly as we can, if we feel we are headed in the wrong direction. I am not a traitor, or an appeaser. I'm not anything other than an American who thinks we are just spinning off in an absolutely incredibly dangerous direction, and I'm doing the best I can.
MA: Do you love your country?
WRP: More than anything, I love this country, absolutely and with no question.
MA: Again, the name of the book War on Iraq: What the Bush Team Doesn't Want You to Know by William Rivers Pitt is available through many large resellers and we'll have a link for it on this site so you'll have convenient access to it. William, thank you very much, and hopefully we'll get a chance to do this again in the near future.
WRP: Thank you.
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William Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. He is the author of two books - "War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter) available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," available in April 2003 from Pluto Press.
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