The Alternative Argument Briefly Presented
Written: Mar 24 '03 (Updated Mar 24 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brief enough to be read before it becomes outdated. Arguments presented in a balanced way.
Cons: Argument is wholly dependent on the judgment and credibility of one person: Scott Ritter.
The Bottom Line: Sufficiently thought-provoking and persuasive to make you think twice of the case for occupation of Iraq. More supporting evidence needed to make a really excellent political pamphlet.
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| knilaus's Full Review: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Kn... |
"Scott Ritter believes that the war on Iraq will do irreparable harm to this country -- particularly a unilateral war, without international law and the international community backing us up. A unilateral war will annihilate our credibility around the world. It will cause the Middle East to absolutely explode and bring forth terrorism that will make, in his words, the September 11th attack look like a kid's game. He believes we will lose hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans in the process, because we're not talking about an open field, desert war where we can see the tanks from ten miles away. This is going to be in downtown Baghdad. If we're actually going to get rid of Saddam Hussein, we have to go downtown and get him. And that means house-to-house warfare. That means reducing - quote, unquote - reducing Baghdad in the way that the Russians did to Grozny, and tens of thousands of civilians will die in the process. All of this is on the table.
And his basic premise is that before we do all of that, we have to have a good reason why."
-- William Rivers Pitt summarising his book in an interview on buzzflash.com, September 25th 2002. **
"War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want you to Know" is a product of the great Anglo-American tradition of issuing political pamphlets with the aim of presenting and promoting a particular point of view on how to deal with current affairs.
The authors are Scott Ritter, a former US Marine who was appointed operational head of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq until their eviction in 1998 and William Rivers Pitt, a high school teacher with a political inclination toward the left, who has become known as an outspoken and often harsh critic of Bush administration policy.
Structure
The 78 pages of "War on Iraq" are divided into three chapters: As introduction we are given an eight-page synopsis by Rivers Pitt, who basically outlines the main thrusts of Scott Ritters analysis and criticism. The second chapter consists of a twelve-page walkthrough of the contemporary history of Iraq, detailing among other things Iraq's recent past as a British colony and the shifting states of alignment between the Iraqi regime and US foreign policy.
These two introductory chapters set the stage nicely for the book's main attraction: A 54-page edited transcript of two telephone interviews given by Scott Ritter to William Rivers Pitt in late August of 2002.
The Arguments
The arguments presented in this book are essentially two-fold: 1) A war against Iraq is likely to have major harmful consequences to US interests in the region and internationally; 2) The case presented for a war against Iraq so far does not merit undertaking the risks associated with such an operation.
Briefly put, Scott Ritter argues that invading Iraq is likely to:
1) Take place without authorisation from the UN Security Council, thus setting a dangerous precedent for other states to follow.
2) Destabilise the Middle East in particular in the areas of the occupied territories and in Iraq's frontier areas.
3) Submerge allied forces in guerilla warfare from door to door of Iraq's cities possibly incurring hundreds if not thousands of casualties in the process.
4) Cause further suffering and grievance among the civilian Iraqi population through 'collateral damage' and possibly impeded access to fresh water, food and medicines.
5) Alienate many of the US' traditional allies in NATO and the war against terror.
Ritter does not dismiss invasion on the basis of the above predictions. Whether or not to incur the above costs remains ultimately a political decision, which must take into account the other side of the equation. However, he stresses that the severity of the potentially harmful reverberations of war against Iraq implies that the case for war must be bolstered with very heavy arguments indeed.
Pitt interviews Ritter about each of the arguments advanced by the pro-war advocates in turn, and Ritter discusses the merits of each of these arguments on the basis of his professional experience acquired as a weapons inspector.
Broadly summarised, Ritter is confronted with the following arguments for war:
6) Iraq retains chemical munitions and a programme to further develop these.
7) Iraq retains biological munitions and a programme to further develop these.
8) Iraq is pursuing a programme to develop nuclear weapons.
9) Iraq retains delivery systems capable of launching chemical, nuclear or biological attacks on neighbouring countries.
10) The Iraqi regime maintains links with international terrorist organisations such as Al Quaeda.
11) The Iraqi regime is brutal and repressive and a US-led occupation would enable Iraq to prosper and thrive under democracy.
12) Iraq has consistently refused to co-operate with UN weapons inspectors since 1998.
In response to each of these arguments Ritter is able to provide seemingly knowledgeable background information on the issues that makes the picture less black and white and at the same time gives you the information and analysis that I feel would enable one to make an informed assessment of the pros and cons of the case.
To my understanding, Ritter is not convinced by the then available evidence that the 'WMD' claims (#6 - 9) are true to the extent that they by themselves would justify an intervention.
The Al-Quaeda claim (#10) he dismisses as ludicrous on the basis that the Ba'ath regime throughout its rule has pursued a policy of agressive secularisation, and that followers of Osama bin Laden are likely to turn any chemical, biological or nuclear agents delivered to them against the Ba'ath regime itself.
The democracy claim (#11) he finds to be an unlikely outcome in the near future on the basis that Iraqi society supposedly not unlike Afghanistan is divided into three major ethnic fractions of which neither the Kurdish nor Shia population can provide a leader deemed feasible or suitable to rule by outside powers. This argument I find less convincing: Surely, having claimed that instilling democracy in Iraq is an important objective the coalition forces could not subsequently attempt to influence the selection of a new Iraqi leadership and still retain any kind of credibility? In any case, it is useful to remember that Ritter is a military expert and former weapons inspector - not a political scientist nor a specialist in ethnicity. I thus personally do not put much value in his judgment on this particular issue.
The 'refusal to co-operate' claim (#12) is given some background by Ritter, who tells us how various agreements and compromises were reached between the weapons inspectors and the Iraqi regime only to be subsequently disregarded, when the US strong-armed the UN to take a confrontative stance on issues such as access to Ba'ath party sites, which Ritter as a weapons inspector felt were professionally unjustified.
Credibility
First of all it is important to reiterate that this is a book written with the genre of the political pamphlet in mind. People reading it should expect a partisan approach to the treatment of its subject matter. William Rivers Pitt is obviously a columnist with an explicit, political agenda. Scott Ritter may be more difficult to classify as formally appears in this book as a professional and an expert on the issues at hand. However, it is important to remember that Ritter is first and foremost a professional when it comes to issues of disarmament and weapons inspections. Although his observations and predictions of other aspects of the dispute have so far proved to be remarkably correct (the likelihood that Iraqis would accept the return of inspectors; the inability of the US to secure a second resolution at the Security Council; the lack of a popular uprising against Saddam's regime) I would still hesitate to accept his assessments on issues of politics and international relations at face value. When that is said I must however also admit that I think Ritter manages most of the time to present a balanced account of the uncertainties affecting the credibility of his own analysis.
Relevance
Since "War on Iraq" was published in the fall of 2002 the dispute over disarmament has been provisionally resolved by the unilateral decision of coalition states to invade the totalitarian state using military force in an effort to topple the regime and uncover suspected weapons of mass destruction.
With this fact in mind, one would be forgiven for thinking the contents of this book must surely be outdated and irrelevant now that war against Iraq is a fait accompli and reversing that decision entails political suicide on a grand scale.
On the other hand it can be argued that the war on Iraq is supposedly an example of the new White House security policy doctrine emphasising the necessity of pre-emptive strike. This implies that costs and benefits of the Iraqi conflict will be studied extensively by military analysts and policy makers alike in order to prove or disprove the doctrine's validity.
In modern times the ramifications of US foreign policy have more often than not been international if not global in scope. Thus, questions over the validity of its basic premises should be of concern to every enlightened citizen of the world.
Through the helpful facilitation of mainstream news channels such as CNN and BBC World most people are familiar with the case for war against Iraq and with the fact that UN Security Council member states such as France, Germany, Russia and China opposed the idea that these arguments somehow necessitated the immediate use of military force to bring about Iraqi disarmament. However, mainstream media has focused more on the question of "who is for" and "who is against" rather than on the subtleties of the criticism.
"War on Iraq" presents the essential criticism of the case for war. This should be of interest to anyone who is has a professional or personal interest in US foreign policy and world affairs, or just anyone who is interested in verifying predictive qualities of Scott Ritter's judgment on Iraq.
For scholarly purposes this is not the book to reference. Instead I would recommend a tome such as Milan Rai's "War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War in Iraq". Additionally, to get a balanced view of the arguments for and against the war, I would also recommend taking a look at either "The Threatening Storm" by Kenneth M. Pollack and "The Greatest Threat" by Richard Butler - the former executive head of UN Weapons Inspectors - for an alternative interpretation of the events leading up to the 1998 eviction and Operation Desert Fox.
Links
The Buzzflash Interview with William Rivers Pitt - http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/2002/09/25_Pitt.html
** = Buzzflash.com have been contacted for permission to quote the interview with William Rivers Pitt. I have yet to receive a reply. Should they refuse I will replace it immediately with an equivalent quote directly from the book.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
knilaus
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Member: Kristoffer Nilaus Olsen
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Reviews written: 22
Trusted by: 35 members
About Me:
Just out of temporal stasis.
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