The basic point of the whole book is that "the sad fact is that, on the issue of Iraq's disarmament, a brutal dictator named Saddam Hussein has proven to be more truthful than the elected government of the people of the United States."(p. 138) Although it's not a question on Ritter's agenda, once again though, the Hussein vs. Bush comparison proves that contrary to the Liberal critique of communism, pluralism is no guarantee of truth, because in a bourgeois-pluralist society, special interests have a means, and more importantly, a profit motive for promoting lies.

If the U.S. government does fake the existence or use of WMD in Iraq now, it will only raise the question of why Saddam Hussein did not use them on the battlefield earlier, as we had so often heard regarding his ruthless control of the country. Obviously the reason for the lack of disastrous prior use of WMD is not that the united $tates had tight control on Saddam Hussein's every move, because months after the fall of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein was still at-large and even his sons took months to kill. In this respect, we disagree with John Dean--Nixon's lawyer caught up in Watergate--when he says that there is still hope to find the WMD, while saying it looks like Bush deserves impeachment. The find of WMD now would only prove that the whole Bush administration thing about a 50 mile "red line" around Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's use of WMD on his own people spiel was wrong just to name the two big ideas used to justify the war in the media, as opposed to just planning for one. If military plans and games count on Saddam Husssein's using WMD in the first 48 hours of conflict and it does not happen is one thing, but releasing such plans and games to the public as if they were a justification for war is another thing, a crime in the executive branch of the government, even by Amerikan bourgeois standards.

As Amerikans figure out that the military elite either did not know what it was talking about or lied about WMD, the question will remain on their minds, "so why did the UN have those resolutions about Iraq's WMD and why did the weapons inspections end if Saddam Hussein had no WMD?" Some have offered cultural explanations of why Saddam Hussein would bluff to defend Iraq's "honor." The real point though is that the public has to learn when to see through spin and conjecture, which in this case means patiently pinning down the words of politicians with precision.

As Ritter knows, because he was there in Iraq when it happened as a weapons inspector, Clinton sabotaged the weapons inspectors and ordered them to leave Iraq by telling Richard Butler that he was going to bomb Iraq in 1998. Saddam Hussein never ordered the inspectors to leave; (pp. 98-9) for that matter, the weapons inspectors with their prior knowledge of the bombings could have gathered somewhere safe in Iraq while the u.$. bombings happened instead of leaving. It is for this reason for the creation of a myth about weapons inspectors, especially going into 1999 and 2000 that there was bipartisan unity on Iraq.

Even to this day, in the Larry King special celebrating the 80th birthday of Bob Dole, ex-President Clinton is maintaining bipartisan unity on Iraq, something he tried to use even in the days of his impeachment in the House. In fact, in order to let Bush out of some trouble, Clinton said he "had a different take" on Uraniumgate. Admitting that all presidents make mistakes, Clinton offered that perhaps military strikes in 1998 had successfully targeted Saddam Hussein's WMD. This gave Bush a way out, of saying that there were no WMD, thanks to Clinton's military strikes while also pointing to Clinton himself who said there was no way of knowing he had been successful (and thus partially justifying Bush in his gamble "to be sure"). (This is a much more hopeful out for Bush than saying that Saddam Hussein gave the WMD to Al-Qaeda or someone else for revenge for the invasion.) Although Ritter wrote the book before Clinton's statement on the Larry King show, Ritter dismissed the Clinton military strikes as militarily insignificant based on the places they targeted and that he, Ritter had already visited. (For all but the sickest individuals, what a thankless job that must be--to come up with a list of places to bomb, hoping to get the right ones even as intelligence showed nothing definite anywhere!)

Something that Ritter points out is something MIM should have already--the role of Senator Joseph Biden (Democrat) right up to the present day. Anyone who saw him on television along with Senator Rockefeller being interviewed about WMD could see that Biden is a spin-master who made Rockefeller look like a paragon of virtue. When asked where the WMD in Iraq are Biden says the UN said they were there and then takes up the Clinton era lies. The public could easily fail to notice that Biden changed the subject from now to 1991 or 1998 at best. It's not that he said anything false, but that he did not answer the question--spin, emphasis on facts that are not relevant or relatively insignificant compared with the facts needed for the question at hand. At least Biden admitted that recently the administration "exaggerated" information on the WMD. His job when asked about this should have been to explain that.

From Ritter's point of view, Biden's role (when he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Democrats controlled the Senate) arose in defense of Clinton and has remained fairly constant since. It appears that Biden's original point in all this, (pp. 88-92) aside from political cowardice in not saying anything the public is not ready to hear, is that Amerikans never seriously meant to support the UN resolutions in a straight-forward way, because doing so would have meant being willing to go to war. On the one hand, he did not want UN weapons inspections to dictate questions of war, but on the other hand, Biden also wanted the flexibility to go to war when the rest of the UN did not want it. All of that means that the united $tates signed on to the UN resolutions in bad faith from the beginning. It's fine and good to say as Biden did that they are too politically difficult, but then the united $tates never should have participated in the UN resolutions to begin with then. It's typical of the whole Amerikan attitude toward international treaties, to just back out of them when inconvenient--whether it is the ABM treaty with Russia or global warming.

From the exchanges Ritter had with the political leaders of the united $tates, we see that anything slightly complicated--such as the explanation of u.$. motives in ending the weapons inspections in Iraq in 1998--combined with something requiring political courage is something not likely to see the light of day. The media never gave the public an understanding of how the weapons inspections ended and no politician is going to stand up and tell the public either. If the public finds out, then only after that, politicians can refer to what the public already knows or unfortunately and more often, what it thinks it knows. (Exactly for this reason, Lenin was right that we need a vanguard party leading movements and then the government to tell the truth no matter how unpopular. The truth is more important in the long-run than any short-term popularity that power-holders may have.)

Yet the public also should know that the UN Security Council did not approve the Amerikan invasion of Iraq. In fact, the Amerikans were unable to win a majority of Security Council votes and one could expect the U.$. public to know that. So any time we hear a politician say that Iraq long flouted the UN and the UN Security Council, going back over a decade, mostly Clinton years, we have to ask, "how come the other Security Council members did not see it that way and why does the u.$. public know that and let the politicians off the hook?" The answer is that the other Security Council members knew the truth about the U.$. role in ending weapons inspections in Iraq: Amerikans did not and did not care to know given their pattern of disregard for all Third World people and political leaders both good and bad.

It's not that Saddam Hussein had done anything new after 1998 to warrant invasion. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz had all written to Clinton in 1998 urging military action to oust Saddam Hussein.(pp. 72-3) The day after 911, Wolfowitz was asking Bush to link it to Iraq and authorize the long-planned war.

What is sorely lacking in all the discussion of WMD in the press and even this book is the question: "how many times would the U.$. have to go to war to stop people it armed with weapons of WMD or that the capitalist system's market provided with WMD?" The Bush administration says only Saddam Hussein used them against his own people. Aside from the doubts raised by a particular CIA officer responsible for that intelligence who wrote in the New York Times Op Ed page, there is the doubt about the practical value of such an observation. The United $tates used WMD on Japan, twice. It used them again in Vietnam, with defoliants and killed almost 4 million Vietnamese according to the "Defense" Secretary at the time, Robert McNamara. The U.$. sanctions on Iraq have killed 1.5 million Iraqis; hence, the United $tates has proved the willingness to kill millions of people, so how can it doubt that its many wannabe followers and thugs in the world (people like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden who Reagan and Bush Sr. armed in the 1980s) might see things the same way. MIM is asking the people to put MIM in power as the firmest possible repudiation of the past of U.$. use of WMD and other genocidal practices and the best guarantee against weapons proliferation for profit and wars for profit. Without pointing out past injustices and disowning them, the united $tates justifies the rest of the world in taking similar actions.

Then there is the question of using WMD as a threat, in which Saddam Hussein has not been the main user of WMD. The United $tates has done that several times through history as admitted by Richard Nixon himself for example. Pakistan and India have done it too most recently. "Use" of WMD is not just detonating them. When we find ourselves in the "Terminator 3" situation, we have already fucked up. The key is to handle the problem of WMD before that, and not depend on a few good robots (heroes) to save the day at the last minute.

One last note on this book: Ritter makes it clear that he was the darling of the neo-conservatives before they turned on him. He obviously did not like Clinton himself and had to resign his post in disgust in the Clinton years, and so it was natural within Amerikan logic to hope for neo-conservative allies. Yet Ritter found that these people were willing to lie to go to war as well. It would seem so far that Ritter has yet to see just how diseased the two bourgeois parties are.

Ritter's book fills an important niche--starting the mental wheels turning of many considering themselves "U.S. patriots" (and probably conservatives of one stripe or another) above all. Ritter points out that the patriot and above all the military must serve the Constitution, not any individual or party who may become corrupted. "For me, the Constitution is an absolute; we are not Americans without it."(p. 198) His reasoning is clear and must be defended against the neo-monarchists and neo-confederates running the u$a. On the other hand, we at MIM are not going to vouch for Ritter's future. Clearly he has seen a lot and his own political development may or may not be much ahead of the public's. He voted for Bush and now he is recommending a vote against Bush in 2004 as the solution.

If the military intelligence establishment knew it were going out on a limb to build a case for pre-emptive war in Iraq, it could be that guys like Ritter and also Shinseki who more correctly estimated the cost of the war and subsequent "peace" operations build their own credibility and the possibilities for a "new blood" approach in the future, should the imperialist system need some new faces to replace the discredited old ones. Already in the Clinton years, the neo-conservatives were saying Ritter should be Secretary of State. On the other hand, if Ritter turns out wrong about WMD, then the military establishment still will have succeeded in another way --that of premising opposition to the war in Iraq solely on the basis of whether or not WMD proliferation had occurred. For MIM, had Saddam Hussein used nuclear weapons when a six digit figure of U.$. troops gathered outside Baghdad, it would not have been proof that Bush should have gone to war. It would have been proof that it was wrong for Reagan and Bush Sr. to have picked such allies as Saddam Hussein and wrong to pin the species' survival on the capitalist system providing motives for WMD production, distribution and use.