This was a day of personal vindication for me; I feel like I want to vomit

WilliamPitt

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Thu Oct-07-04 05:23 PM
Original message

This was a day of personal vindication for me; I feel like I want to vomit

Edited on Thu Oct-07-04 05:27 PM by WilliamPitt

This was published in September of 2002, six months before the Iraq invasion was undertaken. The book took a simple stand:

"The case for war against Iraq has not been made. This is a fact. It is doubtful in the extreme that Saddam Hussein has retained any aspect of the chemical, nuclear and biological weapons programs so thoroughly dismantled by the United Nations weapons inspectors who worked tirelessly in Iraq for seven years. This is also a fact. The idea that Hussein has connections to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists is laughable—he is a secular leader who has worked for years to crush fundamentalist Islam within Iraq, and if he were to give weapons of any kind to Qaeda, they would use those weapons on him first."

- Page 9 of a laughably short book.

I did dozens, hundreds of radio interview about this book. People thought I was nuts to say Hussein wasn't a threat; it was only a little more than a year since 9/11, and the Bush propaganda machine was ranging unchecked and unchallenged across the entire media spectrum.

Look at a few of these reviews of the book on Amazon:

"In the end, Ritter offer nothing new except political opinions based not on facts, but some other agenda which remains a mystery to Scott Ritter followers today." - October 1, 2002

"If this was a novel, it might be a little more forgiveable.
As it stands, this 'piece of work' (if any real work went into this joke of a book), is nothing but some un-informed leftist spouting-off anti-republican, liberalist nonsense. This author has no investigative ability at all, is somehow ignorant to the facts, or is just a common liar." - October 24, 2002

"It is a sloppily thrown together collage targeted to the 'no war in Iraq' crowd, and does not even feign objectivity." - November 18, 2002

"The book isn't well written, is clearly unfactual in the above and other areas, and, as has been noted by others, lacks a reference or bibliography. It might have been more honest to market it as fiction. There's certainly no answers here." - December 20, 2003

The book wound up as a New York Times and international bestseller, and got translated into twelve languages. Twelve. The world got it. The world got it on the first read-through.

I remember one day that winter, I got a call from an MSNBC producer. Hans Blix and the weapons inspectors had only been in-country a few days, and this producer wanted me on the (I think) Connie Chung show. The catch, however, was that she wanted me to talk about what the inspectors were doing wrong.

"What if I think they aren't doing anything wrong?" I asked. Silence on the line. A short chuckle. A demurral. A click. If I wasn't going to slam the inspectors, I wasn't wanted on MSNBC. This is one of the eight billion reasons I want to break furniture when DUers take that fucking network, or any of its on-air 'talent,' seriously.

I traveled something like 100,000 miles over the next two years, talking to anyone and everyone who would listen. I dove into the heart or Red States like Texas, Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Montana, Indiana and New Hampshire to talk about how this whole Iraq invasion was a snowjob that was going to wind up mass-producing new threats to our country.

Gave up my beloved teaching job to do this full-time. Had the greatest relationship I will probably ever know explode out from under me, and I still kept on marching.

And now, today, almost a thousand days later, we hear in the media what I've been talking about since I first met Scott Ritter in July of 2002. The stuff wasn't there, hadn't been there for years, and was in no way about to be created.

Now, today, some more American soldiers were killed while dutifully performing their mission to destroy Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. They join 1,067 other dead American soldiers, and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

I was right the whole time. I feel like I want to vomit.

Oh, P.S. The ENTIRE mainstream media establishment owes Scott Ritter a gold-plated, diamond-studded apology. The man was right. If karma had a living stick, the pogues who ran him down and cut him out would be forced to line up and kiss Ritter's ass in the middle of Times Square, simulcast on every network, in Spanish where available.