The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

Former UN arms inspector and US military operative / intelligence officer Scott Ritter has been all over the airwaves the past week with a very chastening message for those of us who have been beating a drum for an invasion of Iraq. First of all, Ritter is a physically formidable figure -- very tall, strong, trim, articulate, passionate, smart -- he's a central-casting American Military Hero type. His credibility itself is rather scary.

Ritter served on one of the US teams monitoring the disassembly of Russian nukes as part of a set of agreements between our two nations in the 1990s. Later he was sent into Iraq as part of the UNSCOM weapons inspection mission. He now acknowledges that his principal role was gathering military intelligence, systematically locating potential targets for future US action against the Saddam Hussein regime.

Ritter now says that it is very unlikely that Iraq has been producing nuclear weapons or biological weapons at any scale of importance. He says the facilities for accomplishing this would be too large to hide in underground bunkers. He is stating pretty forcefully that a US incursion now would be a huge mistake.

As I said, Ritter is a formidable voice of dissent. Make of it what you will.

A reader and correspondent writes apropos of these developments

"W's sudden urge to invade Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with Hussein and absolutely everything to do with the Enron / Harken / Halliburton scandals. How to maniupulate the Great Unwashed? Scare the fuck out of them with a manufactured crisis which threatens huge uncontrollable repercussions. Then, after a few months, casually opt to desist from violence. The world sighs with relief and the scandals have been implicitly defused since those issues were not pursued while the world was holding its breath. Upshot: Bush stays in office, no charges are leveled against him or Cheney. And there is no uproar in the Middle East."

That interpretation is a little more strictly Machiavellian than my tastes allow.

I have another one: Saddam Hussein is trying to snooker the US into an act of aggression in order to lead a worldwide jihad against the Great Satan. Saddam is nearing the end of his regular career and, being a fellow of grandiose self-regard, would like to cast himself as an historic savior / warrior-king of the Islamic world.

Note: Saddam was overtly secular in his behavior and apparent beliefs until the last several years when he has been acting out an Islamic version of the Born Again story (among other things, he has been reportedly at work on his own personal hand-lettered transcription of the Koran). Anyway, Hussein perhaps recognizes that the time has never been more ripe for a united jihad, and there are no other candidates stepping up to the plate to lead it.

This raises the obvious question: would Saddam survive any US incursion provoked by his snookering? Well, Osama bin Laden apparently survived using little more than camels and caves to make his getaway. Central Asia is a large place, and despite the internecine animosities there, the huge region might prove hospitable to an Islamic warrior savior on-the-lam.

Would Iraq survive as a nation? I doubt it. But it was an artificial construction anyway.
The greatest result of a US incursion in Iraq would likely be enormous political turbulence, including the overthrow of the Saud family, an escalation of hot war in and around Israel, some kind of oil market fiasco (and the destruction of pumping infrastructure), and a meltdown of Pakistan (perhaps helped along by India). All this with further repercussions for global economic stability.

Would Saddam benefit from throwing the world into turmoil? My guess is that, if he survived on-the-lam, he would enjoy the spectacle hugely. How many of us, nearing the end of our temporal careers, get to set the world on fire?

A word or two about the August stock markets: watching this sickening spectacle of the August bear-trap is like seeing a morbidly fat lady filling her supermarket shopping cart with frozen pizzas, Ring-Dings, Cheez Doodles, and Mountain Dew -- a common sight, by the way, where I live.

The eventual result of this delusional market splurge will be the fierce destruction of retirement accounts later in the year. It could be the kind of epochal event that provoke third parties to form in the US.