Saturday, October 08, 2005
FOR THE WAR BEFORE HE WAS AGAINST IT
Scott Ritter, waging peace since 2002, continues rewriting history—with some Nazi comparisons thrown in to satisfy the BusHitler idiots:
A former chief UN weapons inspector has compared the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the US President, George Bush, with the Nazi war criminals who started the Second World War.
Scott Ritter, a former US marine, said today the US and Britain’s “aggressive warfare” in Iraq was similar to German actions in Europe 66 years ago.
"Both these men could be pulled up as war criminals for engaging in actions that we condemned Germany in 1946 for doing the same thing,” he said.
"Tony Blair and George Bush are guilty of the crime of planning and committing aggressive warfare."
Which is exactly what Ritter urged in 1999:
I have grown convinced that there has been a total breakdown in the willingness of the international community to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein is well on the road to getting his sanctions lifted and keeping his weapons in the bargain. A resurgent Iraq, reinvigorated economically and politically by standing up successfully to the United States and the United Nations, will be a very dangerous Iraq—one that sooner or later will have to be confronted by American military might.
Back to Flippy Scott’s latest speech:
Mr Ritter told how he delivered a report in 1992 stating Iraq’s missile program had been eliminated.
But, he said, the news was met with “stony silence” and he was told Iraq still possessed 200 missiles.
The inspectors returned to track down the weapons which never materialised.
"Ninety per cent of the time, or more, we received full co-operation of the Iraqi Government."
Full co-operation? Let’s look at Ritter’s letter of resignation from the UN weapons inspection team, as published in his 1999 book Endgame:
Iraq has lied to the Special Commission and the world since day one concenrning the true scope and nature of its proscribed programs and weapons and systems. This lie has been perpetuated over the years through systematic acts of concealment.
This investigation [I went on] has led the commission to the doorstep of Iraq’s hidden retained capability, and yet the commission has been frustrated by Iraq’s continued refusal to abide by its obligations.
Ritter’s resignation led to an appearance before a combined session of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, where his hawkish attitude was ridiculed by Senator Joe Biden (again, this extract from Endgame):
Biden was relentless, suggesting that the question of taking the nation to war was a responsibility “slightly beyond [Ritter’s] pay grade” ... the use of force was the kind of decision that people like Colin Powell and George Bush made, said the senator from Delaware.
At least Ritter had one supporter:
Senator John Kerry said that Saddam’s aim was to continue to build weapons of mass destruction at any cost. The US should be prepared to use force to achieve its goals, Kerry said ... sliding into a policy of containment, he emphasized, was disastrous ...
In the months that followed, I have had occasion to reflect on the words spoken by the various senators that day ... it was the words of Kerry and [Senator John] McCain that struck home the hardest: Kerry’s observation on the need for decisive military action against Iraq, and McCain’s comment that if people had listened to someone of my pay grade during the Vietnam War there might be fewer dead Americans. As Senator Charles Robb, a Democrat from Virginia and a former Marine veteran of Vietnam, noted near the end of my testimony, history was replete with cases where failure to act early resulted in greater suffering later.
Ritter was calling for war on Iraq five years before the actual invasion—which he now condemns as a war crime. A final Endgame extract:
No matter how difficult stopping Saddam Hussein is today, it will become more and more difficult, and extract a higher and higher price, the longer he is left to rebuild his arsenal.