Scott Ritter Was Right (And Almost All the Knowledgeable Commentators Wrong)

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Scott Ritter was one of my heroes during the rush to judgment on the necessity to attack Iraq.

He's still one of the smartest guys around on these issues and events, and The New York Times has almost apologized to him.

Almost.

Ritter’s opponents on Iraq still aren’t willing to grant that he knew something they didn’t. The way they see it, Ritter, whose position on W.M.D.’s swung significantly after he left the country in 1998, was like the stopped clock that finally managed to tell the correct time. “Oh, no, he wasn’t pres­cient, I can’t agree with that,” said Richard Butler, who was Ritter’s boss under the United Nations in Iraq. “When he was the ‘Alpha Dog’ inspector,” Butler said, referring to Ritter’s own description of his aggressive tactics, “then by God, there were more weapons there, and we had to go find them — a contention for which he had inadequate evidence. When he became a peacenik, then it was all complete B.S., start to finish, and there were no weapons of mass destruction. And that also was a contention for which he had inadequate evidence.”

History will record, though, that Ritter was right, while those who showed him nothing but contempt were flat wrong. While he wasn’t the only one saying that the war’s pretense was false or that its aftermath could be calamitous, Ritter was almost certainly the most determined dissenter and the one with the most on-the-ground intelligence. And if his views on Hussein’s regime careened from one extreme to the other, at least he demonstrated a capacity to evolve in his thinking — something few policy makers or commentators showed themselves able to do at the time. No doubt his very existence continues to discomfit those who insisted on Hussein’s lethality, and whose explanation for why they were wrong — that the intelligence was fabricated, essentially — has always been undercut by the fact that Ritter was never taken in.

I asked him if the war in Iraq, which in a matter of weeks would effectively end, had turned out as he thought it would, or if it could have been worse. He considered the question.

“It could have been worse,” he said finally. “We could have won. We could have felt empowered to move on to Syria and Iran, and then we would have been totally screwed.

“But if we’re just going to get into the realm of reality,” Ritter went on, “how much worse do you want it? We’re bankrupt, morally and fiscally, because of this war. The United States is the laughingstock of the world.”