Scott Ritter Explains Why He Let the World Down
By Cory Forsyth
A&F Associate

"This isn't about the national security of the United States," Scott Ritter told an audience at a speech he made late last year. "If it was they would be able to substantiate the threat that Iraq poses. This is about domestic American politics. The day we go to war [for ideological political reasons] is the day we have failed as a nation." I got the sense watching Ritter speak at Edmunds Ballroom last Friday that part of the reason he was so upset that America had gone to war with Iraq was because it left him with little of relevance to say. I also got the feeling that someone high in the White House, possibly Colin Powell, really wishes he hadn't seen Ritter rise to power as a U.N. Weapons Inspector and routinely kicks himself for having consequently unleashed this political blowhard.

Ritter, a marine intelligence officer during the Gulf War and a U.N. Weapons Inspector until he resigned in protest of its ineffectiveness in 1998, speaks decidely un-eloquently about war for someone, who, as a 12-year veteran, must have seen plenty of it. "War represents the ultimate failure of mankind to exist as a human being," Ritter has said, "Because it's about killing fellow human beings." The first ten minutes of Ritter's talk were more or less a long, rambling, cliché-riddled denunciation of war. I can agree with the denunciation, but I've hardly heard a less moving description of the horrors of war. "We are waging war," Ritter intoned maybe a dozen times, with increasing emphasis on war. Once he threw in a "we are waging hell," and later he told the audience that "the dogs of war have been unleashed," and these dogs are "biting." A few minutes later, it was Dante's Inferno that was being unleashed.

Of course, he was speaking at Pomona, and it wouldn't take a very impassioned speech here to win us over, peace-wise. In fact, as far as anti war sympathy goes, I'm pretty sure Ritter had us at "Hello. We are waging war."

Claiming to be "pro-marine," Ritter explained his position on Iraq. "I am not a pacifist," he told us, and as a person willing to go war, to fight for his country even, he did not believe that the Bush administration had laid all its cards on the table. After seeing the Iraqi weapons industry firsthand, Ritter said he did not believe that Iraq was a justifiable threat to America. And, as such, he opposes this war because he "loves [his] marines" and doesn't want to see them killed in unnecessary combat.

Explaining the horrors of war for Iraqis fighting against the U.S. military's "unbeatable" force, Ritter said of war, "If a village opposes you, it dies. If a city opposes you, it dies! This is not war, this is slaughter [by the U.S.]."

Ritter, who is also a ballistics missiles technology expert, had a lot of interesting information regarding the weapons inspections in Iraq. He explained the exhaustive searches in which his team engaged (Ritter boasted that he had a reputation for being the "hardest-nosed inspector that's ever been to Iraq" ), looking for evidence of weapons manufacture and confirming the weapons disposal claimed by Iraq. He explained some of the weapons Iraq had been developing, including liquid bulk anthrax.

Colin Powell had frightened the American public with putative evidence of this biological weapon last year. Liquid bulk anthrax, Ritter explained, is useless unless it can be properly aerosolized to deliver through the air. "In its liquid form, the only way it would kill you," Ritter told the audience, "was if the Iraqis put some liquid bulk anthrax in the nose of a ballistic missile and that missile came down and hit you in the head." Nevertheless, Ritter told the audience that liquid bulk anthrax only has a shelf life of three years before it germinates and becomes ineffective. The last possible time Iraq had such a weapon, Ritter claimed, was in 1998. "Call me a simple marine," Ritter said, "but you do the math."

Ritter, a self-proclaimed "card-carrying Republican" who has admitted voting for George W. Bush, is an interesting voice for the stand that he takes. His rhetoric-laden, cliché-riddled talk-at one point he admonished the audience to consider the little Iraqi girls who "will never grow up, will never know what it means to be mothers"-on Friday sounded more like Republican Talk Radio than an intellectual argument. Part of the controversy surrounding Ritter's bombastic pronouncements is probably due to the fact that he sounds so much more like them than like us when it comes to anti-war advocacy. I think this probably lends him credence when addressing many middle-of-the-road audiences, but the speech he gave was lacking a bit in substance for the more sophisticated Pomona audience. While he talked ceaselessly about the dangers and injustice of the war, Ritter gave no indication other than a vague appeal to "ideology" for Bush's decision to enter into a war with Iraq. Asked in the question-and-answer period whether oil might be a motivating factor, Ritter claimed that he thought it could not be.

Still, Ritter's speech, if nothing else, gave a unique perspective against the war in a community that has nearly heard them all. "Iraq was fundamentally disarmed. And we know it," he told the audience last Friday. Despite Ritter's bombast, he has the background to say some very revealing things about the administration and the war machine. We would do well to listen to what he has to say.