as you may've noticed, scott ritter rarely pulls punches. his new book, waging peace: the art of war for the antiwar movement, aims to get folk to think and act strategically, and it babies nobody.

in his book tv talk, ritter said it's not enough to blame the white house or congress or media for the iraq mess: the american people must look in the mirror, face the hard reality that we are responsible for letting it happen, and do what needs doing to end it.

i assume ritter has also looked in the mirror. during the 2002 drumbeat, he went to baghdad and told iraqis the bushies wanted war and the only way to avoid it was to let UN inspectors in. iraq complied, and, of course, we invaded anyway.

at the time i thought ritter did right. it seemed to make sense that the war drum would stop when inspections started.

neither of us thought bush and cheney, determined to have their war, held back over the possibility our troops might face chemical and biological weapons (CBW) on the battlefield.

we should've been more cynical.

protective gear works most of the time. the conditions and activities of war can get pretty harsh, however. airtight seals can loosen, tiny cracks and tears can develop, and wounds make bigger holes. a tiny amount of nerve gas or virulent germs can have lethal effect. 150,000 troops multiplies risk. thousands of americans might've died. public opinion might've turned against the war.

dick cheney doesn't think like the rest of us, and he knows how to use the double cross and the triple loop. in 1990, a month or so after iraq invaded kuwait and the world responded with sanctions and a mostly-US troop buildup, then-secdef cheney publicly said: war is closer than ever; saddam hussein is feeling the effects of the sanctions. [approximate quote]

before that, most of the world assumed the purpose of sanctions was to get iraq out of kuwait without using force. cheney's statement jolted those who heard it into recognition that our government meant to attack and considered sanctions nothing but a means of softening up the target, iraq.

we now know the bush gang could not be appeased by proof iraq had no WMD. on the contrary, they'd already begun strategic bombing in june of '02, but before launching a ground attack they waited till rigorous UN inspections gave them a high degree of assurance no CBW remained.

thanks to the most subtle cheney double cross, scott ritter's trip to iraq to prevent war may've actually done the opposite of what he intended.