A Critic's Defeatist Rhetoric
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Not all Marines take pride in the work of their brothers.
Take Scott Ritter (search), a former Marine and United Nations weapons inspector, who has turned into a critic of just about anything the U.S. does in Iraq. Now he’s writing for Al-Jazeera’s Web site, which seems like a perfect home for his defeatist rhetoric.
According to Mr. Ritter, “The highly vaunted U.S. military machine, laurelled and praised for its historic march on Baghdad (search) in March and April of 2003, today finds itself a broken force, on the defensive in a land that it may occupy in part, but does not control.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Offering no proof whatsoever, Mr. Ritter accuses the U.S. of conspiring with Iraqi assassination squads (search), and that, not foreign terrorists or former Saddam officials, is what started the post-war violence in Iraq: “Having started the game of politically motivated assassination, the U.S. has once again found itself trumped by forces inside Iraq it does not understand, and as such will never be able to defeat.”
As for the enemy, which he calls a “genuine grassroots national liberation movement,” Ritter is generous: “History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government.”
The only way out, according to Ritter, is for us to fail: “It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}It may be hard for Mr. Ritter to root for the enemy in Iraq, but that’s exactly what he’s doing. Why he’s doing that is another question.
And that’s the Asman Observer.
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