Ritter's
Repudiation Ritual
By David Swanson
04 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In
March 2006, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter posted an article
online proposing that the antiwar movement learn techniques from warriors.
Ritter developed the article into the recently released book "Waging
Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement." At the same time,
Ritter has just posted online a new provocative article urging the impeachment
movement to advocate instead for "repudiation." There is some
reason to hope that this new article will not come back as a book in
2008.
Whatever Ritter writes about
peace and impeachment, he has already done tremendous service through
his truth telling about Iraq's lack of weapons of mass destruction.
Ritter spoke up prior to, as well as during, the occupation of Iraq.
He and I have spoken on panels together, and I find him a much better
speaker than writer. While the peace movement is very far from victory,
it has made more progress than Ritter believes, and he himself has been
a significant part of that.
His new book on "the
art of war for the antiwar movement" will strike many peace advocates,
just from the title and the vocabulary, as about as sensible as a book
on "the art of peace for the Pentagon." But it does not take
much effort to ignore the warrior vocabulary and realize that all Ritter
means by it is seriousness. He wants to see a serious, centralized,
strategic organization work in a disciplined manner to end the occupation
of Iraq. I do too, and I join Mike Ferner in applauding Ritter for such
a proposal. But trying to find a guide to such work in Ritter's book
leads only to disappointment.
Peace activists should be
familiar with Gene Sharp's "Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century
Practice and 21st Century Potential." That's a book that uses the
same vocabulary of "waging" and "struggle," but
offers specific substantive guidance in how to do it. The reason that
at least some peace activists are not attracted to Ritter's advice is
not that they oppose disciplined struggle, but rather that they read
his writing and fail to find anything useful in it. Maybe they should
heed Ritter's call for serious strategy and go read Sharp.
Ritter's book comes with
this Table of Contents:
1.-On Losing
2.-Waging Peace
3.-The Art of War
4.-Decision Making
5.-Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield
6.-Strategy, Operations, Tactics and the Art of Campaigning
7.-Organization and Incident Command
I think a more revealing
rewrite of this would be:
1.-Ritter's Misunderstanding
of the American People
2.-The Constitution on a Bumper Sticker Can Save You
3.-Ritter's Biography Fascinates its Author
4.-Let a Stupid Acronym Think for You
5.-Make That Two Stupid Acronyms
6.-More Reasons Why Scott Ritter Really Should Have Something to Say
7.-Conclusive Evidence That He Does Not
This is a book that opens
with a lengthy throat clearing. We're not winning, the occupation of
Iraq is not ending, and I'm about to tell you why, really I am, as soon
as I fully explain why I'm the one who knows all about it, I really
am about to tell you, here it comes now… and so on until you reach
full copies of the US Constitution and the UN Charter packed into the
back of the book as filler.
Ritter focuses on public
opinion as what needs to be won over, but on the failures of the US
Congress as the unacceptable results. He thinks that the antiwar movement,
as currently composed, lacks even "a chance of prevailing with
the American people." This ignores public opinion polls showing
that a majority of Americans favor ending the occupation of Iraq. Ritter
also does not address the fact that actions of Congress so often fail
to follow majority opinion. He's too focused on the shortcomings of
peace activists.
"The mainstream media,"
Ritter writes, "treats the antiwar movement as a joke because many
times that is exactly what the antiwar movement, through its lack of
preparation and grasp of the facts, allows itself to become." Of
course, peace activists could often be better prepared, but they are
very seldom given access to corporate media, no matter how prepared
they are. Ritter was well prepared to discuss the WMD claims even prior
to the invasion, and how many times was he put on television to do so?
Of course we should have
better researchers and messaging strategists, but we would be quite
foolish to expect that to solve the problem of the media. We would also
be foolish not to be wary of the forces of institutionalization. Did
the antiwar movement have the money to develop such institutions, the
pressure would be intense for them to, like MoveOn.org or the Center
for American Progress or the Campaign for America's Future, drift away
from actually opposing the occupation. In fact, if the antiwar movement
or any other justice movement or collection of justice movements had
serious funding, I would advocate not for better lobbyists of GE, Viacom,
Disney, and Fox, but for the creation of a television network that actually
reports the news.
Sadly, for all Ritter's talk
about intelligence and education, he is silent on this point. Meanwhile,
every election cycle, the progressive groups that Ritter so disdains
self-destructively dump advertising dollars into networks that destroy
those groups' agendas every day of the year – enough dollars to
have created a real news network. The antiwar movement, however, is
running on bare bones funding. The largest expense I can recall any
peace group shelling out for in the past few years has been, in fact,
a speaking fee for Scott Ritter. I would feel better about seeing speakers
for peace request and accept such enormous fees if the books those fees
allowed them to write were worth reading.
The closest Ritter comes
to offering guidance in his book is his predictable insistence that
we need a simple dumbed-down message the size of a bumper sticker. He
claims the religious right has succeeded by virtue of the slogan "Guns,
God, Gays." But the religious right reaches people through lengthy
sermons on Sundays. It changes their world-view. A bumper sticker can
only latch onto someone's existing world-view. And "Guns, God,
Gays," is not a slogan in support of those three things, or for
the first two and against the third. Rather, it's a criticism of the
religious right by its critics. And when Ritter claims that the religious
right has won over public opinion on these issues, in contrast to progressives
or peace advocates on their issues, he again cites no polls to back
this up. (A quick look at polls suggests that, for example, the right
to an assault weapon is not more popular than the right to health care.)
Nor does Ritter even appear aware that the three positions of the religious
right he discusses (the right to own a gun, theism, condemnation of
homosexuality) have been with us for centuries and are now threatened.
The same goes for war. The progressive positions that Ritter lists on
pages 18-19 are almost all promoting a change from the tradition of
centuries past.
So, based on the "Guns,
God, Gays" example that is flawed in so many ways, what slogan
does Ritter suggest for the peace movement? The United States Constitution.
I kid you not. We should put the whole Constitution on a bumper sticker.
Ritter says not one word about current slogans (like "Bring Them
Home," or "End the Occupation") or what's wrong with
those. Instead he drifts off into advocating that people read the Constitution,
in the same breath in which he's told us that people only have the capacity
for 3-word messages. Oh – and we should take as our models…
(wait for it)… firemen. My son likes that advice, but he one year
old. Personally, I wonder whether the firemen's' union's early endorsement
of John Kerry was such a wise move, and whether it brought the antiwar
movement a clear and concise message.
The other place we're supposed
to look for model behavior is, of course, the life of Scott Ritter.
Ritter criticizes Cindy Sheehan for praising immigrants rights advocates'
success in mobilizing large marches, because Congress has not heeded
their demands. But Ritter describes his leadership of UN inspections
as model behavior and success, although Congress paid no more attention
to him than it has to immigrants' rights groups.
Perhaps, though, I am wrong
in understanding Ritter to really care what Congress does. When, in
his recent article, he opposes impeachment in favor of something called
"repudiation" his goal appears to be a shift in public opinion
for its own sake. But with Bush and Cheney already scraping bottom in
opinion polls, it's hard to know what MORE repudiation Ritter would
like to see. At least 109 towns and cities have passed resolutions demanding
impeachment. At least 11 state legislatures have taken up similar resolutions.
We could pass such measures in thousands of towns and all 50 states.
We could march around the White House chanting "We Repudiate Thee,"
but what would it accomplish unless it helped move Congress toward impeachment?
If we'd "repudiated" Nixon and kept impeachment off the table,
Ritter might have appreciated the unbroken Republican rule that would
have followed Nixon's completion of his term, but would Ritter have
appreciated being sent to the ongoing occupation of Vietnam? The impeachment
movement, in the analysis of Daniel Ellsberg, was critical to ending
that war.
Ritter proposes tossing a
copy of the Constitution at a religious righter and asking them to find
God in it. I propose handing one to Ritter and asking him to find repudiation
in it. Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see a crowd jump around "repudiating"
the White House, and I'm all for levitating the Pentagon too. But there
is only one way to remove Bush and Cheney from office, and that must
be done if we are going to end the occupation of Iraq. Ritter is well
aware that the candidates for emperor in 2009 from both major parties
cannot be trusted to fully end the occupation or to not start a new
one in another nation. Ritter recognizes that if there is no accountability
for what Bush and Cheney have done, future administrations are more
likely to do the same. And yet, Ritter appears not to have read the
document he so wants us to read that he printed it in his book.
Reclaiming the Constitution
means reading it carefully. In six places it mentions impeachment. In
not one does it mention slogans or bumper stickers or acronyms or the
arts of war. It does not mention election procedures or political parties
or corporations. The authors of the Constitution thought we could figure
out how to put people in power and how to sell stuff to each other.
But they put great care and a central focus on how to remove elected
despots between elections. They had just used the arts of war to overthrow
the rule of a king. They were thinking exactly as Ritter would have
had them think. And they thought of impeachment. They expected the practice
of impeaching presidents to be common and frequent, and they viewed
it as critical to maintaining public control, through the House of Representatives,
over the executive and judicial branches.
Ritter thinks that if we
impeach and remove Bush and Cheney we will simply replace them with
new tyrants. The authors of our Constitution considered that entirely
possible. Their advice would have been to impeach the new tyrants as
well. But here's what we know for certain. If we do not impeach Bush
and Cheney and remove them from office, we will not end the occupation
of Iraq any time soon, and we will elect nothing but tyrants to follow
the current ones, tyrants with a precedent licensing their tyranny.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.