Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Ritter ended in total disagreement with Bush policy, was also seen as somewhat dicey in some ways by other experts in the game.

Richard Butler, Ritter's former UNSCOM boss, said that Ritter "wasn't prescient" in his predictions about WMDs, saying, "When he was the 'Alpha Dog' inspector, then by God, there were more weapons there, and we had to go find them—a contention for which he had inadequate evidence. When he became a peacenik, then it was all complete B.S., start to finish, and there were no weapons of mass destruction. And that also was a contention for which he had inadequate evidence."[5]

Writing in The New York Times, Matt Bai said that Butler's caveat notwithstanding, Ritter was in fact vindicated about Iraq's lack of WMDs and that the aftermath of the war could be calamitous. Bai described Ritter as the "most determined dissenter and the one with the most on-the-ground intelligence" of the situation in Iraq prior to the war.[5]

However, Bai went on to compare Ritter's insistence during his 2011 trial for sex offenses that his conduct was of no consequence to the wider community—and his unwillingness to consider a plea agreement—to the stridency with which Ritter advocated for his views on Iraq: "If there is a connection between Ritter the activist and Ritter the accused, though, it probably lies in the uncompromising, even heedless way in which he insists on his version of reality, and how he sees himself always as the victim of a system that is self-evidently corrupt. ... the very attribute that made Scott Ritter appear somehow clairvoyant on Iraq—his refusal to accede to everyone else's sense of reality—is the same one that has led him, now, to ruin."[5]

[...]

Later statements on Iraq

In February 2005, writing on Al Jazeera's website, Ritter wrote that the "Iraqi resistance" is a "genuine grassroots national liberation movement," and "History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilize and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government."[32]

In 2012, Ritter said the U.S. was "bankrupt, morally and fiscally, because of this war. The United States is the laughingstock of the world".[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter#Reception_as_weapons_inspector

**

One post from 2010 -- A good summary post, lars. REVIEW ARTICLE .. An unsafe world: Bush unbound?
A.G. NOORANI

Ye gods, it doth amaze me,/ A man of such a feeble temper should/ So get the start of the majestic world,/ and bear the palm alone. [my emphasis, lol, not Will's]
- Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare.

IT is a singularly unsafe world that George W. Bush created in his four years as the President of the United States of America. The American people have voted him to lead them, once again. It is unlikely that he will construe this as a mandate for change. Bush has torn apart the fabric of international law and undermined the United Nations and other international institutions. Worse, he has sought to create an international order devoid of legitimacy.

[...]

Lakhdar Brahimi, former Algerian Foreign Minister and U.N. Special Representative to Afghanistan, said on July 26, 2003: "The war in Iraq was useless; it caused more problems than it solved, and it brought in terrorism." Attacks on the U.S.-led forces were carried out by Al Qaeda terrorists with the support of foreign fighters as well as by people loyal to the ousted Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. But there was "a large group of Iraqis who will attack any foreign occupation force out of patriotism" - an emotion American leaders find hard to respect in others. The Iraqi government will have to prove that it was not "a puppet of the Americans, which is difficult to do when there are 150,000 foreign soldiers in the country". The same holds good for the Afghan government.

Despite its colossal failures in China and in Vietnam, the U.S. has not realised the force of nationalism. Scott Ritter, a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-98) and author of Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America, warns: "The battle for Iraq's sovereign future is a battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. As things stand, it appears that victory will go to the side most in tune with the reality of the Iraqi society of today: the leaders of the anti-U.S. resistance... . Regardless of the number of troops the United States puts on the ground or how long they stay there, Allawi's government is doomed to fail. The more it fails, the more it will have to rely on the United States to prop it up. The more the United States props up Allawi, the more discredited he will become...

"We will suffer a decade-long nightmare that will lead to the deaths of thousands more Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. We will witness the creation of a viable and dangerous anti-American movement in Iraq that will one day watch as American troops unilaterally withdraw from Iraq every bit as ignominiously as Israel did from Lebanon" (International Herald Tribune, July 23, 2004). Judging by past form, Bush will try to crush the revolt and incur greater odium.

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45321525