Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter never found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Was this before or after he was a columnist for Al-Jazeera?
David Asman of Fox News Channel brought it up in his recent “Asman Observer” column at FoxNews.com:
A Critic’s Defeatist Rhetoric
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
By David AsmanNot all Marines take pride in the work of their brothers.
Take Scott Ritter, a former Marine and United Nations weapons inspector, who has turned into a critic of just about anything the U.S. does in Iraq. Now he’s writing for Al-Jazeera’s Web site, which seems like a perfect home for his defeatist rhetoric.
According to Mr. Ritter, “The highly vaunted U.S. military machine, laurelled and praised for its historic march on Baghdad in March and April of 2003, today finds itself a broken force, on the defensive in a land that it may occupy in part, but does not control.”
Offering no proof whatsoever, Mr. Ritter accuses the U.S. of conspiring with Iraqi assassination squads, and that, not foreign terrorists or former Saddam officials, is what started the post-war violence in Iraq: “Having started the game of politically motivated assassination, the U.S. has once again found itself trumped by forces inside Iraq it does not understand, and as such will never be able to defeat.”
As for the enemy, which he calls a “genuine grassroots national liberation movement,” Ritter is generous: “History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government.”
The only way out, according to Ritter, is for us to fail: “It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.”
It may be hard for Mr. Ritter to root for the enemy in Iraq, but that’s exactly what he’s doing. Why he’s doing that is another question.
It reminds me of a short piece I wrote several months ago—based on one of the most startling things I’ve read because it was written by a journalist in a moment of honesty. I’m glad, in a way, that it only lasted a moment.
Here’s a snippet from my own article:
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a columnist at the London Evening Standard. In light of the handover of sovereignty to Iraq on June 28 2004 she wrote her latest piece, a gem entitled ‘My shame at savoring American failure in Iraq’, and it includes these words (my bolding):
“A dogged campaigner against the blighted war in Iraq, I am now wrestling with the demons of callous triumphalism. The anti-war protestors have been proved horribly right. The allies who marched with the US into this ugly adventure should feel mortified. It is a fearful and turbulent country the new Western Imperialists hand over to the Iraqis. The past months have been challenging for us in the anti-war camp. I am ashamed to admit that there have been times when I wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson. On Monday I found myself again hoping that this handover proves a failure because it has been orchestrated by the Americans. The decent people of Iraq need optimism now, not my distasteful ill-wishes for the only hope they have for a future.”
I believe Alibhai-Brown exposes a broad cross-section of the western media and many Liberal-Left politicians and supporters, but I don’t think those people realize the far-reaching implications of their quest for American failure. On some level, I feel Alibhai-Brown speaks for many, and so for bluntly avoiding the mendacity of the rest I’ll give her credit. […]
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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