Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter made headlines when he publicly defended Saddam Hussein and said that the Iraqis had no weapons of mass destruction – despite the fact that only a few years earlier he was saying quite the opposite.
Now he’s been arrested on suspicions of sexual misconduct involving minors.
This could well be coincidence, but it does raise some potentially damaging questions. If Iraqi intelligence knew of Ritter’s sordid history, could that explain his abrupt change of attitude on Iraq?
If the Iraqis have already blackmailed Ritter, what do they know about the governments of France and Germany? Could that explain their sudden efforts to stall a conflict between the US and Iraq? All these questions are strictly conjectural at this point, but given the current situation the answers could be quite shocking.
Oh, come on now, Jay. Are you trying to dance the limbo? How low can you go? What you offer here is not worth anything, not even as speculation – and you know it. If you want to argue that way, it is just as likely that those criminal charges were brought forward to discredit a man whose opinion does not fit the current ideology. (But now that would sound like just another leftist conspiracy theory, would it not?)
As to Germany trying to prevent a war from happening, think of the German context. The government ONLY managed to get reelected because they promised to stay out of any war – war is not popular around here. Now, what with Nato membership and UN resolutions that Germany can not dodge, the German government has no choice but to do all they can to prevent a war, because if there IS a war, Germany cannot keep out. But if Germany does not keep out, that would be the immidiate end of the present government. Plus it just might be that Germans do not like war. I, for one, don’t.
Janek
Granted, I don’t have any proof, but the fact that he suddenly changed his tune on Iraq this summer and now is being charged with such a serious crime raises a lot of questions.
As for Germany, I can understand saying that they will stay out of the war. However, saying that they will not help even with a UN mandate seems out of line. It could be that Schroeder is just yielding to pressure from the Greens, but the fact that German companies have been found to have sold banned chemicals and technology to the Iraqis already and Schroeder’s previous shady business dealings, there’s a chance that something else could well be going on.
In both cases, there’s no hard evidence, but that doesn’t mean that both cases shouldn’t be throughly investigated…
i take ritter at his word, that he’s being a peacenik because what he knows about iraqi child prisons is inflammatory and will fuel war sentiment for the wrong reasons. ironic that his thoughts about children may be getting him in trouble here.
Hell, even a damned dirty liberal like me thought there was something fishy about his 180 and unusual adamancy. I always just thought he was a little crazy; it seems I was right in the wrong way.
I agree with the author.