{"id":4150,"date":"2009-06-17T17:49:03","date_gmt":"2009-06-18T00:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=4150"},"modified":"2009-06-17T18:33:34","modified_gmt":"2009-06-18T01:33:34","slug":"scott-ritter-is-still-out-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2009\/06\/17\/scott-ritter-is-still-out-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Ritter is still out there."},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I was was reminded about the existence of Scott Ritter — through a bit of a fuzzy route:\u00c2\u00a0a link to an item of economic hysteria at a website called “truthdig”, which apparently employs Scott Ritter\u00c2\u00a0to do some “truth telling” or other\u00c2\u00a0(shown prominently on their top of the page banner).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Scott Ritter\u00c2\u00a0was, circa 1998 and 1999, a hero of the “right” because he hawkishly\u00c2\u00a0 denounced Bill Clinton’s policy visa vie Inspections in Iraq, and seemed to say Saddam Hussein was harboring vast supplies of chemical and biological weapons.\u00c2\u00a0 Come 2002, he became a hero of the “left” as he\u00c2\u00a0dovishly denounced George W Bush was lying in saying that Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and leading us into the war in Iraq.\u00c2\u00a0 The thing about Scott Ritter that always puzzled me was his dogged insistence that his views were completely consistent — when questioned about this he would answer by the verbal equivalent of stating the two viewpoints with strong force.\u00c2\u00a0 (I note too that a quick google search shows Timothy Noah making that same comment here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

he’s argued that his views never changed, despite a substantial paper trail to the contrary<\/em><\/p>\n

I could always imagine how Scott Ritter might explain, to my satisfaction, the seeming discreprency.\u00c2\u00a0 But he didn’t make them.\u00c2\u00a0 So I was left with a fairly odd\u00c2\u00a0situation with him — a man who was correct about this matter, yet even\u00c2\u00a0still had to be taken with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n

And so for the past several years I would occasionally hear news from Scott Ritter on one topic: the upcoming war with Iran.\u00c2\u00a0 Dates certain.\u00c2\u00a0 Strangely, the dates always passed, and I was left with vague intimations of covert actions, somewhere on the edges.<\/p>\n

So, upon seeing Scott Ritter’s face, I made the following guess:\u00c2\u00a0 he has some things to say about the Iran situation.\u00c2\u00a0 And\u00c2\u00a0my guess on what those might be:\u00c2\u00a0the election results were legitimate, and what we’re seeing in Iran is Western Propaganda and the results of CIA psy-ops projects.\u00c2\u00a0 This would allow him to sit himself comfortably in the “neo-cons angling for Showdown in Iran” line of the past few years.<\/p>\n

That Seems to be roughly the case<\/a>, though I may be reading too much into some inferences here and there.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Large chunks of his article I at least think are plausible enough — the only twitter comment that looms large for me from Tehran is the question “Is this Berlin 1989 or Tianamin Square 1989?”.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t think the results on the ground bear out the “distorted picture of the few of Mousavi’s base of college kids\u00c2\u00a0distorted picture of the election” line — he’s guilty of that selectivity as he accuses everyone else.\u00c2\u00a0 But, for my money, the most problematic bit\u00c2\u00a0comes from\u00c2\u00a0page two, he rolls out a whole lot of straw with this:<\/p>\n

Was there fraud involved in Iran\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presidential election? Almost certainly.<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 One might argue that the heavy-handed involvement of unelected clerics in determining who gets to run for office in and of itself makes a fraud of the democratic process. A similar argument, however, could be made about the exclusivity of the two-party system in the United States today, and yet very few media pundits question the viability of America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s democratic system of government.<\/em><\/p>\n

Good thing nobody out there is making the case of Iranisn electoral fraud based on the limitations of their “democractic process” — as it is, this reads like a legitimizing argument through cynicism.\u00c2\u00a0 I guess I could say that\u00c2\u00a0our analyses tends to be a little bit wobbly on the nature of Mousavi.\u00c2\u00a0 If Ritter wanted to provide a “Realist” perspective with Mousavi finding his way to the reign of power as a possibility with a “not much changes”\u00c2\u00a0leading to his conclusion that we’re still going to be\u00c2\u00a0grappling with Iranian nuclear designs whatever happens — that would be a column that makes more sense to me.<\/p>\n

I suppose the matter hinges on his acceptance of the election outcome, which is the key departure to the lousy perspective.\u00c2\u00a0 If such happens — Ahmadinejad returns to power — the internal dynamics of the regime won’t be quite the same and the government’s repressive controls will recalibrate.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a different status quo, and it’s worth acknowledging that, or to quote the\u00c2\u00a0tactically\u00c2\u00a0understating Barack Obama “I do believe something has happened in Iran..”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I was was reminded about the existence of Scott Ritter — through a bit of a fuzzy route:\u00c2\u00a0a link to an item of economic hysteria at a website called “truthdig”, which apparently employs Scott Ritter\u00c2\u00a0to do some “truth telling” or other\u00c2\u00a0(shown prominently on their top of the page banner).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Scott Ritter\u00c2\u00a0was, circa 1998 and 1999, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4150"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4153,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150\/revisions\/4153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}