Scott Ritter Quotes
My personal missteps - how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America seems to have no problem with that.
Ritter, Scott. Interview. Democracy Now!, 2012.
Podharetz was citing the Vietnam war. The two American occasions where the plausibility seemed to fade were the Vietnam War and The Irag war. Both Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson and George W. Bush as Bismarck predicted, had much political trouble over the wars.
Galloway, a witness before the committee who had always criticized the American and British Policy of Iraq invasion to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, had also predicted the insurrection and resistance to the American and British occupation had been attacked by Coleman for taking campaign contributions from British Islamic terrorists—see {616260}. Coleman expected the typical American hearing behavior where Senators can berate witnesses who generally behave docilely in defending themselves. He was not used to the English style of political debate which is much more aggressive and Colemen was nonplussed when Galloway came up with this put down.
His balanced judgment and concern for American Casualties changed during the Iraq War over a decade later where he insisted on taking steady American casualties even after Saddam had been deposed and American troops were in the middle of a sectarian civil war.
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."
