Ritter is armed with facts and the truth, Bush with distortions and the presidency -- guess who's winning?
By James Grant,www.interventionmag.com

September 11 came and went without the great acts of anniversary destruction that our leaders expected. Nobody bombed anything on domestic soil. New York experienced another day of coping and loss, revisiting the raw scars of what many tout as the most brazen attack on U.S. soil in history.

In such an atmosphere, President Bush spoke inside the high walls of the United Nations' main hall. He rattled the same saber that he's been shaking for months, rattled it like a corpse's teeth in a steel box: Iraq must be confronted, and punished for any acts of insubordination. Above all else, Bush maintained that Iraq must dispose of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or else.

U.N. Ambassador Mohammed Al-Douri is the kind of person many people in America would show displeasure at the company of, in these times. From Al-Khadra Baghdad, Iraq, he represents everything that Bush is attempting to confront: An Iraqi official who is insisting that Iraq has nothing to hide, especially not weapons of mass destruction. After Bush spoke today, Al-Douri reportedly stated that “[Bush] chooses to deceive the world and his own people by the longest series of fabrications that have ever been told by a leader of a nation.” He maintains that Bush is lying, and that Iraq has no weapons with which to attack its neighbors and enemies on a grand scale.

He’s not the only one. He’s also not the only person who has been vocal in his opposition of President Bush’s “fabrications.” In our nation’s capitol there is an American, a man of patriotic blood who has served his country well, who is pounding his fists and screaming from hilltops that Iraq has absolutely none of the capability that Bush would force-feed us as fact.

Scott Ritter is a man who is used to confronting that which is generally accepted as fact without any proof. In the Gulf War, as a junior military intelligence analyst, Ritter took on General Schwarzkopf in report after filed report. Norman being America’s darling or not, Ritter’s reports stated that our abilities at taking down Scud missiles were being grossly exaggerated. Nobody wanted to listen, of course -- another Bush had already gone on television and spoken the false numbers aloud. Ritter’s reports were shelved for years, until the military deemed it safe to admit that our Patriots, to use the official terms, “sucked” in their capability to de-Scud the air.

After the Gulf War, Ritter was handed a new job opportunity, a mission utterly unique in scope. As Lead Inspector for the United Nations Special Commission to disarm Iraq (UNSCOM), Ritter was to find and report any and all weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The situation seemed grim when his first foray into the Iraq Agricultural Ministry went awry -- officials blatantly refused the UNSCOM team access, violating the agreements the U.N. had set down for inspection. Ritter’s team was pelted with rotten food from angry crowds of Iraqis, and eventually a stabbing was attempted against one of his own team. Puzzlingly enough, the security team that had been assigned to protect the UNSCOM members did absolutely nothing. Ritter withdrew his group to safety, repeatedly urging the U.N. to step up and, you know, do something about this flagrant violation of the agreements. Eventually the UNSCOM team was allowed into the compound, weeks after their initial arrival. Golly, there were no weapons, no papers about weapons, nothing at all there for Ritter to inspect. Imagine that.

This first encounter with the confrontational and often downright rebellious Iraqi powers seems, in retrospect, to have stirred a grim resolve in the mind of Scott Ritter. He was stuck in a hostile country, with a nigh-impossible job to carry out, with no support from his higher-ups and no compliance from the Iraqis. In the face of such opposition many people might have turned tail and handed off the task for another to attempt.

Ritter instead did his job.

Until 1998, Scott Ritter combed the arid and hostile sands of Iraq, searching for any hidden cache of big-time weapons, things that could be used against the United States. If he heard a rumor of a hospital doubling as a weapons facility, he went there and hounded officials into giving him access to the grounds. If he found a sheet of paper detailing a weapons facility prior to Desert Storm, he went there and sifted through the bombed out remains. If he thought a facility had documents that might lead to the discovery of weapons of mass destruction, he and his team barged in and confiscated briefcases. They were met with hostility at every turn, held at gunpoint repeatedly, forced to run for their lives on several occasions.

And Ritter did his job. Sadly, in 1997 he was accused by the FBI and several important military leaders of espionage. Ritter maintains to this day that he was unfairly attacked for political reasons. He was not spying for Israel -- he was doing the job set forward by others, a job that had to be done, and the allegations against his motives were nothing more than an attempt to discredit a man whose findings were not what Capitol Hill wanted.

You see, although Ritter found shaky leads at times on facilities capable of producing chemical agents, bombs, missiles, and other nasty little presents from Saddam, he never found more than bombed-out remnants. Not one secret cache had come to light. Not one stashed bomb was found. As his solid resolve drove him, Ritter was finding something that leaders in Washington had feared was becoming fact.

Iraq had nothing. They’d attempted to hide a few odds and ends throughout the country before Ritter came, but now they’d destroyed all weapons of mass destruction that they’d secreted. The sanctions against Iraq had pretty much taken them out of the game. Not only did they not have chemical or biological arms, they had no bombs, no missiles, nothing that made them a menace against even the most rudimentary defenses that a well-equipped military would provide.

Now, in 2002, Ritter has something to say, and the Bush administration is ready to ignore his findings.

Bush loves the camera. This fact may have caused a great deal of consternation amongst those who write his speeches, or do PR for the White House. Bush not only loves the camera, he also loves grandstanding. He likes flinging the words “War,” “Terra,” “God,” “Evil,” and “American” around in an attempt to raise our patriotic hackles. Saddam must be stopped! He’s a menace! He’ll try to destroy us all!

And our other leaders, for the most part, are willing to meekly allow George the Angry to tell our military where to go, who to kill, and when without demanding an adequate why. Very few people in Washington are willing to stand up and risk their standing by criticizing the Elected Monkey. As long as they look good in front of their own cameras, no elected official will commit that kind of career suicide at a time when the flash burned images of two jetliners blasting the WTC are scarred onto the public eye.

Ritter, however, has nothing left to lose. His good standing with our government has been blackened since 1998 when he resigned from the UNSCOM team, effectively killing the entire investigation. His shoes had been big in that job, and nobody came forward to fill them. Not that it mattered -- nobody seems to care that Ritter, unpopular as he may be in political circles, has a truth for us all.

That truth is that our government is blatantly lying to us.

Bush and company want us to believe that Iraq is the Bogeyman. They have all kinds of evil whatchamacallits that they could use to mess us up. We must invade, and damn the cost in lives! Damn the taxpayer expense! We must invade Iraq now! Bin Laden has become a nothing, a nobody, and instead the focus should be on a country that had little or nothing to do with the WTC tragedy. We can’t find Al-Qaeda’s head honcho? Screw it! Iraq is just as bad! Yeah! Go U.S.A.!

And testifying before congress, speaking plainly, a man who has been there and done that is trying to tell the world that Iraq is nothing of the sort. They are not big bad boo gums that will destroy American lives. They have nothing. They are not threatening their neighbors. They are not holding a gun to anyone’s head. Any invasion of Iraq will be America starting a war in an already hostile section of the desert, against the will of the rest of the world, and it will reflect poorly on us in the long run. We will be wasting an incredible amount of money if we do anything more than continue to enforce the sanctions on Iraq. Worse yet, we will be blackening the country of America in the eyes of many around the world, possibly with horrible results.

Ritter’s words fall on deaf ears. Bush’s war machine is rumbling, the gears grinding and churning. It will take more than one man, no matter how well-versed and experienced, to stop what a President has put in motion. A President who sloughed his way through college. A liar who has bald-facedly shoved mistruths and outright lies into the gullet of the American populace many, many times before. A man who deserted his own military post is now in command of the most powerful armed force in the world. Who is a learned and wise man such as Scott Ritter to stop this grinding War Machine?

One can only hope that our congressional leaders will eventually listen to Ritter. And that when they do, they will make their own inquiries.

But until they gather some courage, we all know where our military is heading this Fall. Until someone opposes Bush, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld and tells them to hold on, time out, we want some proof! you can bet your paycheck that any active member of our military force would do well not to make any plans for Christmas. Iraq is in our esteemed leader’s sights, and nobody is willing to stand in his way.

Except a man who is pounding his fists, speaking angrily, and ready to back up his assertions with hard facts.

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