Scott Ritter – All American good guy

Time for another spook outing. Former US Marine and former UN arms inspector, still playing flat out for the home team, laying down his reputation for his country: Scott Ritter.

You’re the US government. You decided, soon after 9/11, to redo Gulf War 1 and this time finish it. You need inside intelligence. You dig through your mountains of electro-data with your electro-diggers. You exhaustively debrief everyone who ever has any remotely significant dealings with the Iraqi regime, and you put it all together as best you can. You’re looking for any sign of Saddam trying to get his retaliation in first, one way or another, and you’re looking for information about just how he is setting about defending himself, so that you can come at him from different directions to the ones he’s ready for.

One way in is to get your spooks onto that “UN” WMD inspection team. And … another is to set up your very own peacenik pro-Saddamite appeaser, who can tramp all over various Iraqi red carpets, shake lots of hands, talk to lots of assemblies, conspire with or be deluded by lots of Iraqi dirty tricksters and generally shine a different light on all the things and the people and the places you want to know about. Whatever happens, however Ritter’s treated and by whom – trusted, distrusted, used, abused, whatever – you learn things, and possibly (when you combine it with all the other things you’ve learned) important things. Ritter himself may never know how well he’s now doing. But what about the harm Ritter may also be doing? What harm? Will Ritter cause important third parties to oppose Bush’s decision to take out Saddam? It’s not their decision and it never was.

You also ham up the “opposition” to the war from other sources. You get old Bush family retainers to dissent publicly from Junior’s plans. You encourage massive press coverage of all those European “statesmen” (some of whom are also on your team) with their “vulgar cowboy” talk.

This oppositional play-acting serves two purposes. First you (with your Republican political hat on) want Gulf War 2 talked about a lot just now for electoral purposes, while the Democrats, who’d rather be talking about corporate cock-ups (remember those?) and economic downturns and domestic policy stuff, don’t, hence their silence on GW2. Second, and more seriously (with your US of A hat back on), you want Saddam H imagining that he has a lot more “support” in the West than he really does. That way he behaves himself, so that he doesn’t alienate all that support.

You’re not just threatening would-be bombers and reservoir-poisoners with ghastly failure and ghastly punishment. You also want their bosses, for their own larger strategic reasons, to choose to refrain.

This was the trick you also worked on the USSR during the mid to late eighties, to get that to collapse quietly. You gave the West’s “peace movement” huge publicity. You arranged for Gorbachev to be idolised in the West, especially in the USA. Faced with their enormous “peace movement”, and a leader who apparently had the West’s masses eating out his hand, the Moscow bastards held off from anything too nasty, so as not to alienate their Western “support”. By the time they got that this support was mostly smoke and mirrors, their game was up.

Even as you were cranking up the peace movement, you poured as many bodies as you could into the USSR to learn whatever they could. Some of these bodies were posing as pro-Soviet peace-activists, and the like. Lefty Professors, student radicals, “youth” representatives, communists, anti-anti-communists. Were we all supposed to think that none of these guys were working for you, and that the only spooks you had in the USSR were military attaches and local dissidents? Come on.

Note this. You got double benefit from your pseudo-peaceniks. They both pressed flesh with the enemy and enabled you to control the peace movement, insofar as it was genuine, mostly by contributing to it when that’s what you wanted, but if necessary by standing ready to tone it down, should it have ever got out of control and started to do real harm.

And now you’re doing it again. This sort of thing has only got to influence things a bit, for a while, to pay for itself many times over. Scott Ritter is just one of your projects out there and running.

Okay, so why does a good little pro-Western anti-Saddamite like me indulge in the apparent treachery of revealing what I have deduced? Why am I telling them, merely for the unpaid pleasure of telling my fellow blogospherists?

Well, first of all, the Saddamites are not all stupid. The beauty of something like the Ritter operation is not that the opposition are totally taken in, but that they are confused and wrong-footed and sucked into elaborate silly-bugger games, and all this at the very time when they need to be thinking about more serious stuff. I’m not telling Saddam’s dirty tricksters anything they haven’t thought about. Besides which, they may surmise that I also may be one of your spooks, and that this posting (should any of them chance upon it) may be evidence that Ritter is, after all, a genuine peacenik who is doing genuine harm to your (our) arrangements, instead of what they had been assuming.

The truth is I’m just a bloggist having some fun and all blog-readers out there will surely know this. But if the bad guys get wind of this speculation, from me or from someone else out here being semi-public about it, they won’t know what to believe. I’m rocking no boats and spilling no beans. All you good guys out there know that this posting almost certainly means exactly and only what it says. But the bad guys won’t know what the hell to think.

Which I like. For the deeper message of this posting is that, just as the West is capable of a ferocious mega-slaughter if it were ever to come to that (see the collected works of Dale Amon, including for example the later paragraphs of this), so too, in the meantime is it more subtle, more cunning, more intellectually profound, than its intellectually and spiritually more one-dimensional enemies.

We are now turning our minds in our millions to this Islam thing. Is it a threat? What sort of threat? Where do all the good Muslims fit in? What must we do and not do with this thing and to this thing, to coexist contentedly with it?

Somewhere in among the Islam thing, we now all know, there’s a nasty wildcat. If we mishandle things and end up having to drown the entire Islam thing in horrors – wildcat, kittens and all – then we’ll do it. But plan A is to carry a big stick, but then with the other hand to stroke and hypnotise the wildcat into immobility and to anaesthetise it.