Who’s the Bigger Pervert: Ritter or US?

By Rod Dreher • February 22, 2012, 5:00 PM

From Matt Bai’s portrait of the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a compulsive public masturbator who is now in prison on morals charges:

What really agonizes Ritter is that Americans seem to care about his forays into chat rooms, or about Michael Jackson’s doctor or the Kardashians’ wedding, but not about the moral crisis that Iraq unleashed on the land. They keep talking to Scott Ritter about justice for what he has done, and yet no one is paying for the larger crimes he believes were perpetrated against the society.

“Everybody who lied about the war got rewarded,” Ritter said. “Because they played the game. Tell the truth about the war, you don’t get rewarded.” He paused. “And then, you know, let’s be frank — you compound it with me shooting myself in the foot on personal, behavioral issues.” An awkward moment passed between us. “I’ll just ask the fundamental question,” Ritter said, looking at me squarely across the table. “My personal missteps — how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America seems to have no problem with that.”

It’s clear from this story that Scott Ritter has problems. Big problems. He’s a pervert who has earned his stint in jail. His logic in the above passage is a non sequitur. Boo, Scott Ritter!

Still, it’s interesting to contemplate part of his point here: that no prominent figures who argued for the war in Iraq have suffered for the disaster they visited upon this country. Rick Santorum, a big and unrepentant Iraq War hawk, a senator who voted for the war, is a leading candidate for the GOP nomination. Mitt Romney likes every position on the Iraq War, and has among his elite national security advisors a couple of men — Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan — who were leading Iraq War proponents among the policy elite. The fact that Iraq isn’t even an issue in the GOP primary race tells you that the American public, or at least GOP voters, aren’t interested in learning any lessons from the Iraq debacle.

Again, none of this has anything to do with why Scott Ritter is in jail. But yeah, the jailed masturbator is right: America seems to have no problem with allowing the US foreign policy, military, and intellectual elite who led the country into this disaster to get away with it. Which, if you think about it, is truly perverse.

38 Responses to Who’s the Bigger Pervert: Ritter or US?

KXB says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:08 pm

After the Vietnam War, the lesson that successive administrations learned is this – no draft, no political price. Yes, at different times, American presidents would get a few bad headlines, and maybe lose control of Congress – but there are no real costs to launching war, and bungling it badly. I believe the current figure is that 1% of Americans are in the military – so most people are not affected. So long as there is no draft, most families can ignore overseas adventures.
JT says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:19 pm

His logic in the above passage is a non sequitur.

Let me guess: you backed the war.

It seems absurd to say that it’s important to live to something like a community moral code and then deny that you can compare moral wrongs. How is this not MTD-ism?
JustMe says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:28 pm

that no prominent figures who argued for the war in Iraq have suffered for the disaster they visited upon this country

This is also true of the pundits. There was a big professional incentive to support the Iraq war, and the most vocal supporters reaped significant career rewards for their support. Thomas Friedman still has his perch on the NYT Op-Ed page despite his almost embarrassing punditry on why we should invade Iraq. Fareed Zakaria is doing fine. Jonah Goldberg is still considered a credible person by some. Hitchens was eulogized all around when he died.

Charles Pierce, meanwhile, got fired from his spot on the LA Times Op-Ed page and has only re-emerged in an online feature for Esquire. Phil Donahue was removed from his show on MSNBC because the channel didn’t want to be seen as the “anti-war news channel” (which gives you an idea of what the situation was– any channel with even one voice criticizing the war would have pegged it as the “anti-war channel”).

You’re allowed to be wrong, even deeply, morally, blindly wrong, as long as you’re wrong in the same way that all the “serious people” were wrong. If you were right, then you made everyone else look bad, and you need to be exiled. The last thing newspapers and TV pundit shows want is a guy who can remind his fellow guests “I told you so.”
E-Ro says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:31 pm

and “perverse” is the wrong word anyway. personally i’m a little tired of actual perverse acts like that described above being shrugged at and liberals trying to reverse-engineer Puritan rhetoric against policies they don’t like as the REAL perversions/immoralities/etc.

Iraq had to come out a certain way, and not exist in its weakened sanctioned state forever. McCain made this point at the ’04 RNC better than the Bush administration ever did. so the question was, were we gonna remove the sanctions even though we never confirmed that they’d gotten rid of their WMDs, try to remove Saddam internally, or remove him in the way we did.

basically you can view it as a colossal blunder but given that it’s not as though we overthrew a perfectly good government that we personally didn’t like i would not describe it as “perverse.”
JT says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:36 pm

given that it’s not as though we overthrew a perfectly good government that we personally didn’t like i would not describe it as “perverse.”

I’m sure your feelings are no end of comfort to the dead.
Bill Kurtz says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:47 pm

Actually, there is one public figure who paid a price for supporting the Iraq War, but that’s because she’s a Democrat, not a Republican. Hillary Clinton would be president if she hadn’t voted for the war.
J says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:48 pm

Ritter’s condition sounds like adult ADHD to me- impatient, pig-headed, obsessive, righteous, unable to respect compelling evidence to the contrary, moody, easily angered, lots of depression and intrusive thoughts, unable to control certain kinds of sensory-driven behaviors, easily distracted, gets in over his head a lot of the time, etc.
Mr. Patrick says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:48 pm

E-Ro writes:
“basically you can view it as a colossal blunder but given that it’s not as though we overthrew a perfectly good government that we personally didn’t like i would not describe it as ‘perverse.’”

Justifying 10 years of war, civilian collateral damage and sectarian massacre followed by a future obscured by misty clouds of blood as far as we can possibly imagine, as being in opposition to hypothetical continued economic sanctions is…not un-perverse.
E-Ro says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:52 pm

whatever dude, i’m arguing semantics basically but they’re semantics i care about. you can demagogue any issue with real consequences the exact same way, it’s pointless.

it’d be pretty ironic if burned ex-neocons like Dreher end up opposing whatever next big conflict there is, even if there’s a much clearer moral case for it, and then flip in the other direction once it’s over.
E-Ro says:

February 22, 2012 at 5:54 pm

also ever notice that paleocons (though i don’t know if this commenter is one, seeing as Dreher’s reader base seems 90% liberal) are fire-eaters on a million issues but then rhetorically turn into Noam Chomsky pacifists with their style of anti-war argument? gimme a break
E-Ro says:

February 22, 2012 at 6:02 pm

“sectarian massacre”

which we wanted to happen for the fun of it ‘course.
Mr. Patrick says:

February 22, 2012 at 6:07 pm

Yes, all opposition to any war whatsoever, before or after the fact is indefensible pacifism. Preferably a kind with a slavic-sounding name attached. Makes it sound even more eviler.
Dave D. says:

February 22, 2012 at 6:08 pm

Yeah E-ro, I don’t get it either.

Look, Ritter is the bigger pervert because he actually was a pervert. We had good intentions going in, and we just found out not all wars are Bosnia, where we can use air power to just make everything go away. Last I checked we don’t prosecute or oust leaders and pundits for that kind of thing, otherwise we should villify the greatest generation for causing civ casualties and loss of human rights ten times over than Iraq with firebombing cities and interring Japanese Americans.

If we need to get out because we can’t win, that’s one thing. But none of this hindsight constructing of history that makes it out into neocons railroading people into pointless wars.
KXB says:

February 22, 2012 at 6:09 pm

“rhetorically turn into Noam Chomsky pacifists with their style of anti-war argument?”

Examples would be nice. Most objections towards military adventurism from the political right seem to have their origins in “It’s none of our business”, ‘We can’t afford it”, or “Big Wars mean Big Government.” That is markedly different from the suspicious view of America that one often finds in the Chomsky crowd.
reflectionephemeral says:

February 22, 2012 at 6:12 pm

Has anyone anywhere suffered any negative consequences whatsoever for their poor judgment and poor commitment to accuracy in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Certainly, as JustMe points out, pundits were rewarded for being wrong. (Here’s a sorta-pundit frankly admitting error).

I think that Bill Kurtz is correct, and that Hillary Clinton would be president were it not for her support of the invasion; but that’s not much of a punishment. Many people don’t get to be president.

Anyone else, anywhere?
Liam says:

February 22, 2012 at 6:23 pm

Bill Kurtz:

Very astute reminder.
Mr. Patrick says:

February 22, 2012 at 6:37 pm

Dave D. writes:
“If we need to get out because we can’t win, that’s one thing. But none of this hindsight constructing of history that makes it out into neocons railroading people into pointless wars.”

Yeah that’s not called “hindsight” when it’s exactly what was said back in 2002. And Bosnia (or maybe you mean the Kosovo intervention) is now the measure of a successful, “good” war? Holy smokes. The bulkhead is even weaker than I thought.
Sean says:

February 22, 2012 at 7:04 pm

I’ve long believed that every time Bill Kristol, Victor Davis Hanson or any of the other pitchmen for the Iraq War should be allowed to appear on TV or in print only with the following disclaimer: “I still believe the Iraq War was a good idea, which you should keep in mind when considering my opinions on other issues.”

In a just world, “Yeah, but you continue to believe that invading Iraq was a good idea” would be a stock response to everything that comes out of those peoples’ mouths. Maybe such shame would dissuade these sickos from sending more Americans to die for the purpose of hastening America’s decline.
AnotherBeliever says:

February 22, 2012 at 7:05 pm

I read the NYT Magazine piece on Scott Ritter just now. From my two or three psychology classes, it seems to me that Ritter is the type who doesn’t mesh well with other people. Even us Americans, as individualistic as humans come, are at heart social creatures. It’s not surprising therefore that someone who thinks the rules never apply to him should be a voice crying in the wilderness in the lead-up to Iraq. We collectively need the services of the square pegs who won’t fit in society’s round holes. But it doesn’t prevent some of those square pegs from going on to self destruct.
Mont D. Law says:

February 22, 2012 at 7:17 pm

The Iraq war was/is a complete disaster by any metric.

It destabilized the entire Middle East – leading to the overthrow of several governments that either be replaced by oppressive Islamic dictatorships or degenerate into civil war

Changed Iraq from a hostile competitor of Iran to it’s client state

Killed and displaced a whack of people.

Destroyed the US Army

Increased the National Debt of the USA to astronomical levels. With no concomitant return.

Restored the institutional power of the American Presidency to pre-Watergate levels. Something that no President will ever willing give up.

Detached the USA from the international community, which it needs.

The list of disasters this war caused won’t even be evident in the next 10 Friedman units.
Dave D. says:

February 22, 2012 at 7:26 pm

Patrick, it’s not the measure of it. It’s just people expected Iraq to be as bloodless to us and as quick an intervention as it was. One that was fought with minimal US casualties or presence on the ground.

Even Ritter’s boss said he was only right based on luck, and had no evidence either way to form his opinions. Anyone else was like the boss said of him, chomsky-esque “clocks that were right twice a day.” I don’t think they were right cept based on luck or pre-existing ideology. No one simply knew whether or not he had them.
TTT says:

February 22, 2012 at 7:28 pm

Most people masturbate, albeit in private.

Most people don’t kill 4,000+ U.S. troops, 500,000+ civilians, and the economy and moral example of a global superpower as part of a frivolous war – not even in private.

He deserves his punishment, mind you. But the charlatans who permanently ruined this country in the quagmire of frivolous war deserve worse.
Peter B. Nelson says:

February 22, 2012 at 7:28 pm

The fact that Iraq isn’t even an issue in the GOP primary race tells you that the American public, or at least GOP voters, aren’t interested in learning any lessons from the Iraq debacle.

And the fact that Iraq isn’t even an issue in the DEM primary race tells you that the peace activists, or at least DEM voters, weren’t interested in stopping any bloodshed from the Iraq debacle.

The only question is, why does Rod give a pass to the other side on their aggressively militaristic foreign policies?

Answering my own question: if I think about it, I suppose TAC was founded as a voice of anti-imperialism within the conservative movement (and more power to it). Still, it just feels lopsided to go after Santorum with a meat cleaver while going after Obama with a toothpick.
C Bowen says:

February 22, 2012 at 7:43 pm

What bothers me, on the sub-issue being tossed around, is that the Administration and the policy elite didn’t even offer up a resignation–a scapegoat, and not one suicide, not even a wink-wink suicide–hell, liberal England even bothered with that, and after Waco, that whole Vince Foster thing. At least it was going through the motions.

Iraq was not a threat, was never a threat. Had nothing to do with anything beyond ‘doable’ (which means within election cycles.) Worse then a crime, a mistake, as they say.

Charlatans, all.
Edward Hamilton says:

February 22, 2012 at 7:49 pm

There are some important moral distinctions between Ritter’s conduct and that of Iraq hawks. Most obviously, the Iraq debate occurred in public, following normal democratic procedures, and obtained the support of a broad bipartisan group of legislators. That’s not to say that they weren’t wrong, merely that at the time, they believed their decisions to be justified based on a rationale they could present to the public, the UN, and other nations.

Ritter obviously knew his private behavior was wrong, and attempted to conceal his behavior from others. In that sense, he’s morally culpable in a way that any sincere advocate of war isn’t. He did something he knew was wrong, for his own personal advantage.

I say this because I think it’s important to critique politics in a way that doesn’t get bogged down into secondary debates about the moral status of individuals. Whether or not Bush was a good person or an honest person isn’t the point. Comparing him, or Santorum, or various policy advisors, to a pedophile simply ends the conversation. Part of the reason why the GOP can’t “process” the failure of the Iraq war is precisely because there have been so many overreaching critiques that exaggerate the moral enormity of the Bush administration.

Scott Ritter is a bad person. George Bush is a good person, so far as I can tell, who has crafted some bad foreign policy. Diverting attention from the debate over the policy to a debate over the person just shifts us from a debate that the war-skeptic side should win to a more emotional debate that quickly hits an impasse.

I don’t want the Republican party to come to a consensus on the point that Bush was an evil liar, on par with a pervert. I just want them to avoid trying to repeat his (probably well-intentioned) mistakes.
Mr. Patrick says:

February 22, 2012 at 8:10 pm

Oh, you had good intentions. I’m sorry, but why didn’t you mention that earlier? It changes so much, like absolutely nothing at all.
Glaivester says:

February 22, 2012 at 8:11 pm

Edward Hamilton, you are assuming that the people who sold us on the Iraq War were making honest mistakes. If they were lying for their own personal reasons, then they were concealing something and deliberately lied us into a war.
Don Quijote says:

February 22, 2012 at 8:17 pm

I don’t want the Republican party to come to a consensus on the point that Bush was an evil liar, on par with a pervert. I just want them to avoid trying to repeat his (probably well-intentioned) mistakes.

Are you kidding me?

The entire Bush administration was a bunch of liars, and anyone who paid the slightest bit of attention would have realized that in five seconds flat. These are the people who told that we should be afraid of Iraqi Drones bombing US cities… http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,79450,00.html

If Bush wasn’t a US President, he would be sitting at the Hague being tried for War Crimes.
Sean says:

February 22, 2012 at 8:32 pm

@Edward Hamilton: I have known dozens of people who are now dead thanks to what you blithely dismiss as a “bad policy” by a “good person.” “Good people” don’t confuse intentions for results, and when their intentions don’t pan out, “good people” are honest enough to notice and adjust. “Good people” also don’t violate the basic tenets of intelligence analysis, or put political pressure on intel agencies to come up with a particular conclusion. “Good people” don’t dissemble on the subject of torture or claim to be above the law.

Ritter is a sick, twisted pervert. But his actions don’t pose any measurable threat to the constitution, nor do they further destabilize an entire region of the world. I’d say that Bush isn’t even close to being “on a par with a pervert,” because an individual pervert is so limited in the damage he can do. Bush’s ad policies actually harmed me and hundreds of thousands of others. Ritter couldn’t have that kind of effect if he made it his life’s goal.

The scale of evil matters, you know.
Liam says:

February 22, 2012 at 8:57 pm

Proving that Macchiavelli was right (in the descriptive sense)….
Mr. Patrick says:

February 22, 2012 at 9:10 pm

Peter Nelson writes:
“And the fact that Iraq isn’t even an issue in the DEM primary race tells you that the peace activists, or at least DEM voters, weren’t interested in stopping any bloodshed from the Iraq debacle.”
Not sure what you mean here. If you are talking about this year, besides the fact that Obama is uncontested by someone like Kucinich, there’s the fact that we’ve already done our now-standard “Peace With Honor” shtick in Iraq. Afghanistan is still in pointless extra innings though.

If you mean 2008, I think other folks here have pointed out that Mrs. Clinton’s fate was essentially sealed by the 2002 war resolution. Obama wasn’t the anti-war candidate, but he was the “War–meh, what is it good for?” candidate.

It’s hardly my job to defend anti-interventionist conservative journalism’s rigor, but it would be much more relevant and biting at this point, to talk about Syria, Yemen, Libya, indefinite detention and extrajudicial killing of US Citizens. Which, if you click around here, you’ll see happens pretty darn often.
Fran Macadam says:

February 22, 2012 at 10:54 pm

The problem with going against the grain in public policy so publicly and being a lightning rod due to inherent official credibility, will be the resulting ostracism to the point of being unable to earn an income. Whistle-blowers’ lives and careers most often lie in ruins once they expose corporate or government wrong-doing.

That some people should have mental crackups when subjected to this should be no surprise; certainly veterans subjected to war stress often have similarly severe problems. We know that some our psychological campaigns against those we seek to “break” are most often accomplished through sexual humiliation and domination, which produces severe dysfunctional effects on the subject’s psyche.

It seems somewhat hypocritical, when there is so much that is much more evil being done on all sides, even if couched in language of high moral dudgeon, with real blood-and-guts destruction, that a person’s breakdown would be used to justify obscuring the truths they revealed at considerable risk to themselves.

More politely put than the comment I made that wasn’t allowed to be read, is that any number of people have done things for which they would be publicly pilloried, if they had been discovered, at some time in their lives. As a person who has been privy to private confessions of behavior that have never come to light, this is irrefutable by experience.

I learned long ago that there is no one without sin, not one – as the Bible makes clear. If moral perfection were required to have one’s well-founded arguments taken seriously, no one could ever credibly be believed whatever the evidence.

The fact is, Ritter’s entrapment and convictions,complete with an untenable finding of him as a violent sex offender, probably by those who, like most, find Ritter’s anti-war activism repugnant, as a majority in our nation traditionally have, will falsely conflate his own personal sins with the uncomfortable truths of what he revealed to us about ourselves and thereby justify our delusions which have much greater destructive consequences than his personal failures.

If resistance to wrong policy requires perfection, then we are lost, because the number of people required to successfully stand up will not contain enough persons of stamina sufficient to overcome the status quo. We cannot wait for a personal perfection that may never come to take action on what we nevertheless know is the right thing to do.
hattio says:

February 23, 2012 at 2:42 am

A previous commenter states
“Charles Pierce, meanwhile, got fired from his spot on the LA Times Op-Ed page and has only re-emerged in an online feature for Esquire. Phil Donahue was removed from his show on MSNBC because the channel didn’t want to be seen as the “anti-war news channel” (which gives you an idea of what the situation was– any channel with even one voice criticizing the war would have pegged it as the “anti-war channel”).”

But, the media is liberal. That’s so obvious EVERYONE says it’s true.
jamesvkruse says:

February 23, 2012 at 3:09 am

Anyone who hasn’t yet should read Ritter’s book, “Iraq Confidential.”
Lulu says:

February 23, 2012 at 3:10 am

America is a big place made up of lots of people; quite a few Americans have a problem with America’s foreign policy, military and intellectual elites’ perpetrating this disaster and getting away with it, but these elites are very powerful; they marginalize any American who opposes them.
MBunge says:

February 23, 2012 at 11:04 am

Some have brought up Hillary Clinton being harmed by her support of the Iraq War. That only proves the public held it against her, which the public also clearly did or does against folks like Bush II and Cheney.

The problem is that our elites will not hold their fellow elites responsible for anything, with Christopher Hitchens being the best modern evidence of that. He was an unrepentant cheerleader for the Iraq debacle and, best as I can tell, suffered no cost for that even though virtually his entire audience, close peers and almost all of his employers fell into the anti-Iraq War camp.

Mike
Bill Kurtz says:

February 23, 2012 at 12:29 pm

Dave D, you said “people expected Iraq to be as bloodless to us and as quick an intervention as it was. One that was fought with minimal US casualties or presence on the ground.”
Who promised that kind of war, one that would pay for itself? Hint: It wasn’t Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, or Ron Paul, to cite some of the political honor roll. Nor was it Charles Pierce, Phil Donahue, Pat Buchanan or Paul Craig Roberts, to cite some of the media honor roll.
And I don’t think 4,000-plus US casualties would be defined as “minimal” by anyone but a neocon.
Peter B. Nelson says:

February 23, 2012 at 1:00 pm

Dear Mr. Patrick, thanks for the reply. Actually, I thought I answered my own point in the posting, but to be clear: while agreeing with everything you wrote, nevertheless my complaint is that Rod’s tone seems lopsided – eviscerating hawkish Republicans with a meat cleaver but fencing hawkish Democrats with a toothpick.

However, in an encouraging turn, I noticed this morning our dear blogmaster making a nod in the right direction with “Obama has not ruled out war against Iran either, though it is reasonable to believe he would be much less willing to cross that line than either Santorum or Romney.” I dispute the adverb much, but his tone is better.

Other than that, I was subtly aluding to a point others have made before me, namely: the so-called “peace movement” turned out to be more anti-GOP than anti-WAR, as evidenced by its near total disintegration post 2008. An anectdote: did you see on CNN yesterday that the IRS is now going after peace-protestor Cindy Sheehan for back taxes from 2005/6 – what changed between 2007 and now?