EDITOR—”Iran does not need to attack Israel” declares Scott Ritter, arguing that Israel is being consumed by its own fanatical military over-reach and ideological contradictions fuelled by Zionism. Ritter does not see the two-state solution as feasible. The process will be much more gradual, he declares. Israel is the problem. Zionism is the problem. The Israeli people are the problem..they are not worth saving…because they believe in Zionism and the necessity of [enabling] an apartheid state. Thus, for peace and justice to have a chance in the Middle East, Israel [the concept] has to go away. Then perhaps a single state, Palestine, may arise to provide a home to Palestinians, Christians and Jews, to live in peace as the Holy Land was intended to do. “Israel now, due to its irrational policies is a sinking ship that left to its own devices will fail.” Ritter is not alone in his opinions. Other respected observers of the Middle East situation have come to the same conclusion, including prominent Jewish thinkers and activists such as Norman Finkelstein (“Israel is a lunatic state”); Miko Peled (“Israel must be dismantled to have peace in Palestine”), Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, Katia Halper, Glenn Greenwald, etc.
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SCOTT RITTER—I got to know Phil in 2002, when he returned to the television talk show circuit on MSNBC as the host of Donahue.
America was, at that time, collectively beating the drums of war, with the Bush administration making the case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to world peace sufficient enough to justify a military invasion.
Phil, however, thought it was important to ask questions before signing on to the government case for war. He asked his producer, Jeff Cohen, to find a voice in opposition to the war. Jeff called me, and asked if I would be the guest on Phil’s premier. I accepted.
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EDITORS—Kursk is a different type of operation. This is a NATO army, blatantly trained by British, Americans, French and other instructors, using highly integrated tactics and advanced western weapons and ISR, plus company-sized French and Polish units, fighting as units. The idea was to capture some key objectives, such as the Kursk NPP and hold the captured territory, while blackmailing and humiliating Russia and embarrassing Putin. . None of this has panned out as envisioned by the collective West. People forget that Russia is not at war. Russia has been fighting a special military operation. The Kursk invasion may have changed all that, and the collective West and Ukraine will finally see what defying Russia means.
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SCOTT RITTER—By subjecting Julian Assange to five years of imprisonment under horrific conditions in a British maximum-security prison, where he was held under solitary confinement 23 hours a day, the US government broke the spirit and will of a man whose cause had come to personify the fundamental issue of free speech.
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EDITOR—Scott Ritter reminds Americans that the US and its allies are now on the brink of a highly probable (and totally avoidable) nuclear war with Russia, as the US, after dismantling all crucial nuclear weapons accords with Moscow that guaranteed mutually assured destruction (and thereby kept the peace through a balance of terror), continues to seek first- strike nuclear capability, a reckless and criminal idea that almost guarantees a nuclear Armageddon.
Scott wonders aloud how we could come to this point, surely a huge failure of democracy (in that regard Scott still talks as if we had a genuine Constitutional democracy in the US, or still have it, which is a civics textbook ideal, but not a reality in America for at least 175 years. It is only through the patience and wisdom of Russian leadership that we have avoided a nuclear war, notes Scott.
