Bomb Saddam, Save the G.O.P.

Room 295 of the Suffolk Law School building in downtown Boston was filled to capacity on July 23 with peace activists, aging Cambridge hippies and assorted freaks.

One of the organizers for the gathering, United For Justice With Peace Coalition, handed out green pieces of paper that read, "We will not support war, no matter what reason or rhetoric is offered by politicians or the media. War in our time and in this context is indiscriminate, a war against innocents and against children." Judging from the crowd, and from the buzz in the room, that pretty much summed things up.

Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, offered a stark contrast when he entered the room. There at the lectern stood this tall lantern-jawed man, every inch the 12-year Marine Corps veteran he was, who looked and spoke just exactly like a bulldogging high school football coach. A whistle on a string around his neck would have perfected the image.

"I need to say right out front," he said minutes into his speech, "I'm a card-carrying Republican in the conservative-moderate range who voted for George W. Bush for President. I'm not here with a political agenda. I'm not here to slam Republicans. I am one."

Yet this was a lie -- Scott Ritter had come to Boston with a political agenda, one that impacts every single American citizen. Ritter was in the room that night to denounce, with roaring voice and burning eyes, the coming American war in Iraq. According to Ritter, this coming war is about nothing more than domestic American politics, based upon speculation and rhetoric and entirely divorced from fact. According to Ritter, that war is just over the horizon.

"The Third Marine Expeditionary Force in California is preparing to have 20,000 Marines deployed in the (Iraq) region for ground combat operations by mid-October," he said. "The Air Force used the vast majority of its precision-guided munitions blowing up caves in Afghanistan. Congress just passed emergency appropriations money and told the Boeing company to accelerate their production of the GPS satellite kits that go on bombs that allow them to hit targets while the planes fly away, by Sept. 30, 2002. Why? Because the Air Force has been told to have three air expeditionary wings ready for combat operations in Iraq by mid-October."

"As a guy who was part of the first Gulf War," said Ritter, who served under General Norman Schwarzkopf, "when you deploy that much military power forward -- disrupting their training cycles, disrupting their operational cycles, disrupting everything, spending a lot of money -- it is very difficult to pull them back without using them."

"You got 20,000 Marines forward deployed in October," said Ritter, "you better expect war in October."

His purpose for coming to that room was straightforward. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democrat Joe Biden, has convened a hearing, which began Wednesday, July 31. The Committee will call forth witnesses to describe the threat posed to America by Iraq. Ritter fears that a lot of crucial information will not be discussed in that hearing, precipitating a war authorization by Congress based on political expediency and ignorance. Scott Ritter came to that Boston classroom to exhort all there to demand of the Senators on the Committee that he be allowed to stand as a witness.

Ritter began his comments by noting the interesting times we live in after Sept. 11. There has been much talk of war, and much talk of war with Iraq. Ritter was careful to note that there are no good wars -- as a veteran, he described war as purely awful and something not to be trivialized -- but that there is such a thing as a just war. He described America as a good place, filled with potential and worth fighting for. We go to just war, he said, when our national existence has been threatened.