Another Look at the Ritter Lecture

Author: Mark Garcelon

As Scott. Ritter so eloquently and powerfully argued during his talk of Sept. 23 here at Middlebury, the Bush government refuses to produce any of the intelligence it says it possesses that supposedly demonstrates that Saddam Hussein either has re-built his weapons of mass destruction capabilities to a degree that represents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States, or that his regime is cooperating in any way with the Al-Qaeda terrorist network which carried out the horrendous atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. Ritter emphasized that in every case in the past in which Congress was asked by a sitting president to authorize military action on the basis of such purported intelligence, past presidents have shared at least some of this intelligence with the Congress and with the American people. Take, for instance, John F. Kennedy's publication on Oct. 25, 1962, of intelligence photographs which proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the Soviet Union had installed in Cuba long-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States with nuclear weapons. The publication of this material played a crucial role in swaying world public opinion in favor of the United States during the Cuban missile crisis. But we are getting a very different story from this administration, which asks us simply to believe whatever they claim.
What are we to make of such unsubstantiated claims, especially when they directly contradict the testimony of individuals such as Ritter, the lead American intelligence officer on the team of United Nations weapons inspectors working to disarm Iraq between 1991 and 1998? Well, let's take a look at the history of some of the administration's personnel in order to assess their past record of veracity in similar situations. Two members of the current U.S. government — John Poindexter, current head of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, and Elliot Abrams, special White House assistant for democracy and human rights — were convicted in courts of law for either making false statements to Congress (Poindexter) or withholding information from the Congress about illegal activities (Abrams) during the Reagan administration's policy of circumventing the laws of the United States in order to arm the so-called "contras" fighting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s. It is true that these convictions were later overturned, not on the basis of the merits of the facts behind their respective cases, but on the basis that Poindexter and Abrams had been convicted on the basis of testimony given under a grant of congressional immunity. That is, both men were guilty of the acts in question, but eventually got off on a technicality.
And what were the fruits of these illegal policies? According to Amnesty International various Catholic human rights group and a finding of the World Court in 1986, the "contras" covertly armed and supplied by the Reagan administration were responsible for terrorist atrocities that resulted in the death of over 200,000 civilians in Central America in the 1980s. Nicaraguan society remains in ruins to this day as a direct result of these policies. In other words, the United States government defied the Congress in order to support terrorist networks in Central America supposedly advancing what Reagan called the "national security interests" of the United States. Sound familiar?
Many members of the Reagan foreign policy team besides Poindexter and Abrams such as Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the apparent architect of the administration's current Iraq policy now work for George W. Bush. The fact that Bush would appoint such people to his foreign policy team, when combined with his refusal to share any of the hard intelligence he claims proves his case against Iraq with the Congress or the American people, is a red flag that should alert both members of Congress and the public at large to regard unsubstantiated Bush government assertions about the current crisis with the greatest possible amount of skepticism. For, as Ritter emphasized, the current government's policy is not to ensure the resumption of UN-monitored inspections of weapons of mass destruction capabilities, inspections to which the Iraqi regime recently agreed to allow to resume "without conditions" under extant U.N. resolutions. Instead, Mr. Bush's policy is to carry out a "regime change" in Iraq, a policy that has no basis in either American or international law.
The implementation of such a policy would be a catastrophe for the United States both internationally and domestically. Internationally, implementation of this policy would dramatically erode the national security of the United States, as it would undermine at the highest levels the web of international law painstakingly constructed over the last 57 years. Undermining international law to this degree would play directly into the hands of Al-Qaeda-type demagogues in the Middle East and South Asia, functioning as their most effective terrorist recruiting tool to date. Moreover, such a precedent would essentially enshrine once more the pre-World War II principle of "might makes right" in international affairs, giving a green light for China to attack Taiwan or India to attack Pakistan in future crises. On what basis would we appeal to the international community to try and organize pressure to stop such actions, if we have so brazenly and flagrantly trampled the basic principles of international law ourselves?
Domestically, a so-called "pre-emptive war" on Iraq would further erode constitutional law, which has been under virtual assault by this administration since the 9/11 attacks as it has striven to suspend larger and larger sections of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, all under the pretext of fighting terrorism. To make matters worse, the administration has claimed that it must operate under an unprecedented veil of secrecy to counter the terrorist threat, and has repeatedly questioned the motives of those who question its need to do so. Thus debate is silenced under a veil of a "permanent state of emergency" and those who question the administration's foreign and domestic policies are indirectly tarred with innuendoes of "blaming America first," "treason" and "abetting terrorism." Such innuendos are an insult to the practice of democracy and to the intelligence of the American people — though we have seen them before, during the McCarthy period, for instance.
I believe that our great democracy now finds itself in an emergency situation, though one partly of its own making. That the Al-Qaeda network originated from extremist Islamist Arab networks originally recruited to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan by our Saudi "allies" and the CIA is beyond question according to basic scholarly standards. That these networks used the most atrocious terrorist tactics in the 1980s against not only Soviet personnel, but Afghan civilians they deemed "secular," is also beyond question according to such standards. That some of them, such as Osama bin Laden — drunk on their victory over the Soviet empire were enraged by U.S. policies during and immediately after the gulf war and decided to turn the guns around on their erstwhile allies is also beyond question according to basic scholarly standards. That the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush supported Saddam Hussein between 1983 and early 1990 during the height of his chemical-weapons attacks against Kurdish civilians in the north and Iranian soldiers in the south and even authorized the export of components of weapons of mass destruction to Hussein by U.S. companies, such as the anthrax bacillus — during this period is further beyond question according to basic scholarly standards.
You would think policymakers in the Republican establishment might learn a lesson from all of this about the advisability of intervening outside the law to try and impose military solutions on political problems in the Middle East and South Asia. But as the German ph
ilosopher Hegel once quipped, "Man learns nothing from history except man learns nothing from history."
I hope and I pray that millions of American citizens will follow. Ritter's example and speak out against the disastrous policies of the current administration and work instead for a rebirth of constitutional democracy in the United States and a turn away from unsustainable imperial policies that have sown such havoc for our society. We all, as citizens, can yet prove Hegel wrong.

Marc Garcelon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology.