Reply #9: Ritter on Why Bush Invaded [View All]

[welshTerrier2]

i just found this recent interview with Ritter online:

source: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00146.htm


<snip>

Between The Lines: If securing the United States from an imminent threat, as they described it, was not the motivation for the Bush administration policy in invading Iraq, what was, in your view?

Scott Ritter: What you need to do to answer that question is dissect who populates the senior most decision-making hierarchy positions in the Bush administration and what motivates them. What is their stated ideology? You will find that somewhere around 90 percent of these senior positions are held by people who have an affiliation with the Project for a New American Century, which is a neo-conservative thinktank and their ideology has been stated clearly, several times in writing. It's global hegemony. It's the United States of America imposing its will, pre-emptively if necessary on the world, where we find our national security to be at risk. We will take advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union to leverage our overwhelming military and economic power to our benefit. We will walk away from multi-lateralism. We will walk away from the United Nations and this will become an America-only world. These people believe in Plato's noble truth, where they are "in power of the noble truth," the vision that says, America is just, America is right and the world must follow our path.

And here we've stumbled on stage one. We've gone into Iraq and we stumbled, we stubbed our toe. We're not going anywhere else. It's a disaster. The neo-conservative vision of the Project of the New American Century is fluttering away. The Bush administration has to go back, hat in hand, to the United Nations to beg for help. But the tragedy is, this is something that anybody who had subjected their vision to a fair and open debate would have ascertained for themselves. It would have been nice if we had the informed consent of the American people regarding Iraq. It would have been nice if the Congress of the United States had asked the tough questions and demanded the tough answers. It would have been nice if the American media had done that. But instead, everybody just bought into the rhetoric of the Bush administration, especially after September 11, 2001, where the Bush administration was very effective in exploiting the ignorance and the fear of the American public to push this agenda.

And that's what's going on. Iraq was never a threat to the United States of America. Iraq was the easiest target to pick for a major playing out of the neo-conservative agenda of global hegemony.