"All Options Are On the Table"...for June?


Former UN weapons inspector-turned-Bush administration gadfly Scott Ritter has made two provocative claims in a recent speech: that the US rigged the January 30th vote in Iraq, and that plans are in motion to bombard Iran in June of this year.

The speech itself was delivered before an audience of fellow-travelers, and was reported in the newsletter of a Washington State "peace and justice" group, so I am going to advise everyone to take these "portentous revelations" with a grain of salt at least as big as the one you ingested for the "Schwarzenegger Overdoses on Nicorette" story (vide infra).

I'm reporting it here because of what appears in the final paragraph of this excerpt:
On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran’s alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million -- a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism.

The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called "a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom," were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.

Asked by UFPPC's Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.


I'll wait to hear Seymour's side before I pass judgment, of course; it sounds like that story will only verify the manipulation angle, not the impending attack angle. It's hard to imagine how Ritter, an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, would have access to war plans unless they were leaked to him, but no such claim is made in the report of his speech.

For now, the plans to attack Iran sound like the sort of thing that we (on the left) want to hear, and find credible because of our low opinion W. Thinking critically: It's hard to imagine how a president who narrowly avoided being unseated during wartime would proceed with similarly poorly motivated military plans, against a larger country, when our forces are already overextended and we know that many traditional allies have abandoned us and won't help in the future.

Then again, it's not like W is running for anything ever again...

Posted: Thu - February 24, 2005 at 03:34 PM   | Category:     |   |   | |


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