Tag: Weapons of Mass Destruction

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Back to the Future in the Middle East

2019: “Wow, what a year I was! Y’all will never see the likes of me again. Twelve months of impulsive Trump tweets, GOP campaign aides going to prison, the Ukraine brouhaha blowing up, wacky Rudy going nuts on television, wild hearings in the House of Representatives, and finally, impeachment! Boom! Top that!”

2020: “Here, hold my beer. How about war in the Middle East, as a starter?”

Ah, the Middle East, home to so many great American foreign policy decisions. Remember those weapons of mass destruction that were hidden all over Iraq in 2003? The ones that the Bush administration (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, et al.) used as “evidence” to start a war that got 4,400 Americans killed and 31,000 wounded in action; the war that also resulted in an estimated 500,000 or so Iraqi deaths?

Turned out, of course, that there weren’t actually any weapons of mass destruction to speak of. Oops. Sorry, dead people. But at least the Bushies had to go through the process of trying to convince Congress that a dire threat existed before launching missiles and a subsequent invasion.

With the Trump administration, such Constitutional niceties are being ignored. Trust us, they say. We knew about some nasty plots to kill Americans that were about to be carried out by Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, so we assassinated his ass at the Baghdad airport. Ironically, the evidence — which we’ll probably never see — was provided by the same “deep-state” intelligence agencies that have been demonized for months by the president and his supporters. Guess they cleaned up their act.

In lieu of consulting with Congress or even the Gang of Eight, the president let a few friends at Mar-a-Lago in on the news in advance, so they could adjust their stock portfolios, plus Senator Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, his children, Vladimir Putin, and others in his inner circle. After the strike, the president tweeted a message to Congress that he stated would “serve as notification” of his right to do whatever he wanted in the Middle East. Trump followed that with a tweeted threat to Iranian leaders that the U.S. had a list of 52 “cultural sites” that would be targeted if the Iranians dared to respond. Sure, that’s a war crime, but so what? The president then, literally, returned to the golf course and continued to tweet, presumably between shots.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told the media that the Pentagon would not target cultural sites, despite the president’s continued insistence — live and via tweet — that we would.

All this caused me to wonder what would happen if for some reason Twitter went out of business. How would the president communicate with Congress or the American people or foreign friends and adversaries? Facebook? Instagram? Tik-Tok? The importance of Trump’s favorite social media platform will be a subject future historians will be mulling over for years, I suspect. But I digress.

So, here we are, seven days into the new year, the new decade, on the brink of conflict in the world’s most volatile region — home to Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. Oh, and Afghanistan, just on the other side of Iran, lest we forget. What a complex stewpot of hideous outcomes could be concocted within the confines of this tortured hunk of planetary real estate.

Does anyone think there’s a plan or a strategy here? Does anyone have confidence that this president would shrink from using nuclear weapons if Iran responds in a way that threatens his fragile ego? More important, does anyone have confidence that anyone around this president would or could stop him? It’s a “no” from me, on all counts. A Republican congressman told CNN on background this week that when Trump gets ready to act, “You can’t out-escalate him.” How reassuring.

2020 is upping the ante.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Q&A: William Scott Ritter,

More than five years after the war in Iraq began, opponents of the war are plentiful, but most have never set foot in the Middle East. As a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, William Scott Ritter has. And he’s been opposed to the U.S. occupation since the beginning.

As an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps for more than a decade, Ritter was trained in weapons inspection. Beginning in 1991, he worked as a U.N. weapons inspector and says he saw firsthand how the United States government was more concerned with getting rid of Saddam Hussein than disarming Iraq.

Ritter eventually resigned from the U.N. in 1998 and evolved into a popular anti-war figure and talk-show commentator. Ritter will address the current situation in Iraq and in Iran at Christian Brothers University on Thursday, May 1st, at 7 p.m. — by Bianca Phillips

Flyer: Did you find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Ritter: There’s never been a debate whether Iraq had WMD. They did have it. Some of it, they declared to us and we destroyed. Some of it, they tried to hide.

When we were close [to] finding what they tried to hide, the Iraqis panicked and destroyed it. That was done in a similar fashion to how a drug dealer would flush drugs down the toilet before the cops came in on a drug raid. And then they would deny there were any drugs.

Through our forensic investigations, we were able to compel them to acknowledge that they had these secret WMD.

what role did the U.S. play in U.N. weapons inspections?

The U.S. used the inspection process and the unique access the inspectors had to gather intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s security. That process exposed a link between U.S. intelligence-gathering activities and the work of the inspectors. That made the Iraqis very distrustful of the inspection process.

In 1998, I protested to the United States that their interference was destroying the credibility of this operation. In the last year of my work, 14 of my inspections were stopped, not by the Iraqis but by the United States government. That’s why I resigned.

Why did you choose to go public with these concerns?

I wasn’t just an academic or somebody with a chip on my shoulder. I was somebody who worked on the inside at a very high level and had firsthand experience.

What should the United States have done after 9/11?

The first thing to recognize is that there was no link whatsoever between Iraq and the events of 9/11. So right off the bat, we chose to make Iraq part of the problem.

I think one of the biggest mistakes was to treat [the events of 9/11] as an act of war. The last time I checked U.S. laws, hijacking was a crime. Murder is a crime. Nineteen criminals hijacked four airplanes and committed horrific crimes.

The international community rallied behind us. We should have taken full advantage of this, not to pursue a global war on terror, which is a horrific title, but rather a global struggle for justice. If we had taken that path, I have high confidence that the entire al-Qaeda organization would have been plucked from the vine and destroyed.

What should we do about Iraq?

As a former Marine, I’d say get [the troops] out now. Some people use the Pottery Barn rule: We broke it, we own it. That’s fine if you’re a law-abiding citizen in a store and you accidentally bump into a shelf and break something. What we did in Iraq was no accident.

The better analogy is the elephant in the china shop. Is the appropriate policy simply to keep buying new china for the elephant to break? Maybe we should be talking about getting the elephant out of the china shop.

What are your thoughts on the situation in Iran?

Iran poses no threat whatsoever to the United States. We have policy differences with Iran, and these can be resolved peacefully. We need to take the military option off the table and speak solely about a diplomatic solution.