Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter says neocons are parasites “that latch onto democracy until it is no longer convenient.” [More Below]
In the interview by Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story (published March 30 at Alternet.org), Ritter critiques Wolfowitz, Karen Hughes, Condi Rice, Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, and has some interesting comments about oil companies:
Paul Wolfowitz:
Paul Wolfowitz was a salesman; his job was to sell a war. … [I]n an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, … he acknowledged that WMDs and the threat they posed, was nothing more than a vehicle to sell this war to America. …
Karen Hughes:
Hughes – she is a salesperson; she will sell the policy. She is irrelevant. She is nothing. Her appointment means nothing. Rice has already capitulated to the Pentagon and the White House, and Hughes’ appointment is but a manifestation of that larger reality.
Condi Rice:
The State Department still has free thinkers in it. Rice is a dilettante. Anyone who was there during the Reagan era and her advising on Soviet policy knows how inept she is. She is not there because she is a brilliant secretary of state.
The media has bought into this, because the neocons cleverly put a woman, an African-American woman at that, into this position. So when Rice goes abroad, people do not look at the stupid things she says, they look at what she was wearing. …
Hillary Clinton:
Hillary is the manifestation of all that ails the Democratic Party. She stands for nothing. She has been compromised by her voting record … how can she stand for anything worth supporting? And yet she will be the Democratic nominee in 2008, thus guaranteeing another neocon/Republican victory. ‘Dump Hillary Now’ would be the smartest move Dean could make as the new Democratic National Committee Chair. … Like I said, it might take two or three cycles, but it will happen.
Howard Dean:
Dean has to be part of the process of rebuilding and that will take time. Dean cannot run for president, because Dean cannot run as a Democrat – the party is not set up to sustain someone like him. He is one of the exceptions in a corrupt party. He is also not corrupted by his voting record. He is someone who represents something, he did not vote for the war in Iraq, for example. …
Oil Companies, were they for or against the war?
No oil professional in their right mind would support what is happening in Iraq. This isn’t part of a grand ‘oil’ strategy; it is simply pure unadulterated incompetence.
So they are concerned about their bottom lines, and chaos doesn’t forward that goal.
Right. Oil company executives are businessmen and they are in a business that requires long-term stability. They love dictators because they bring with them long-term stability. They don’t like new democracies because they are messy and unstable. I have not run into a major oil company that is willing to refurbish the Iraq oil fields and invest in oil field exploration and development. These are multi-billion dollar investments that, in order to be profitable, must be played out over decades. And in Iraq today you cannot speak out to projecting any stability in the near to mid-future.
Read the entire interview.