Scott Ritter Quotes
It has been estimated that 80 percent of the oil illegally smuggled out of Iraq under oil for food ended up in the United States.
Ritter, Scott. Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein. I.B. Tauris, 2005, p. 215.
Bush’s administration was notorious for appointing wealthy young people who were ideologically consonant with Bush and not very experienced or competent themselves. Most of them were not very intellectual or well-read or well trained and had few of any accomplishments. From FEMA to the occupation of Iraq, there were massive failures of management and administrative competence and this hurt the reputation of the administration as much as Bush’s poor policy decision. See {624062} for an example.
Things were not so different 80 years ago.
The strategic importance of Iraq was critical ever since oil was discovered in Iraq, Kuwait, Iran and the Gulf States.
Immediately after the invasion, there was no census, and the coalition forces and the United Nations election supervisors were concerned that there was not yet a basis of creating regional and district representation so that the 3 major ethnic groups would all have reasonable representation. Nor were there any organized political institutions other than the religious ones. The subtlety that stable democracy is not a “winner take all” tyranny of the majority is lost on many people who see elections and democracy as synonymous. So elections were scheduled for the following year. Many in the Shiite majority wanted immediate elections so that they could control the country in which they had been dominated for years by the Sunni Bath Party minority.
After the invasion phase of the Iraq War, to shore up the economy $12 billion of cash was printed up and flown to Iraq to the U. S. Governor in charge, Paul Bremer. He then was to properly allocate it to develop the economy and pay for reconstruction services. However, apparently there were no records kept and no one could determine who the money went to and for what purpose. It was the largest mismanagement and disappearance of cash in world history.
The relationship between the Embassy and the contractor was so twisted and corrupt that the contractor’s on site manager in Iraq threatened to have Richter killed if he continued to probe into the documents that would incriminate them. In the midst of a war zone where the contractor was responsible for providing armed security for the State department personnel—see the graphic—including Richter, it would have been very easy to arrange. Blackwater then arranged with the embassy to have Richter and another auditor/investigator expelled from Iraq so that they could not complete their entire investigation. The State Department began a complete investigation years later when the press discovered this memo and divulged it.
William Scott Ritter Jr. is a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He later became a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming according to The New York Times "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction."
