Informed Comment daily updates (09/23/2024)

 

Iraqi Shiite Militias Pledge Aid to Lebanese Hezbollah, Target Israel with Cruise Missiles, Drones Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Tamim al-Hasan at the al-Mada newspaper in Baghdad reports that at a time when an imminent announcement is expected of the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Iraqi paramilitary groups have declared their solidarity with Lebanon’s Hezbollah in the struggle with Israel. Moreover, they are putting their drones where their […]

Connecting the Dots between Climate Destruction and its Financial Backers By Eve Gutman | – ( Waging Nonviolence ) – Standing on a mobile stage in a suburban Philadelphia park on July 3, Ugandan human rights activist Hillary Taylor poured a cup of dirt into a clay vase. “This soil represents all my communities in Uganda and Tanzania,” he said to a crowd of 300 […]

War Forever, Everywhere: Unexploded Ordnance and the Weaponry We Leave Behind ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Count on one thing: armed conflict lasts for decades after battles end and its effects ripple thousands of miles beyond actual battlefields. This has been true of America’s post-9/11 forever wars that, in some minimalist fashion, continue in all too many countries around the world. Yet those wars, which we ignited […]

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INFORMED COMMENT: War Forever, Everywhere: Unexploded Ordnance and the Weaponry We Leave Behind

 

War

War Forever, Everywhere: Unexploded Ordnance and the Weaponry We Leave Behind

Andrea Mazzarino09/23/2024

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Count on one thing: armed conflict lasts for decades after battles end and its effects ripple thousands of miles beyond actual battlefields. This has been true of America’s post-9/11 forever wars that, in some minimalist fashion, continue in all too many countries around the world. Yet those wars, which we ignited in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, are hardly the first to offer such lessons. Prior wars left us plenty to learn from that could have led this country to respond differently after that September day when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Instead, we ignored history and, as a result, among so many other horrific things, left our weaponry — explosives, small arms, you name it — in war zones to kill and maim yet more people there for generations to come.

Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today’s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns) could be a temptation too great to resist.

That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates of gun ownership among today’s veterans, it’s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they’re more likely to die here from accidental wounds.

Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year — many of them kids — happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.

A Deadly Glossary

Many kinds of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn’t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it’s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.

Close cousins of UXO are landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.

As many of us are aware, long before this century’s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It’s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000 Cambodians in what passed for “peacetime” between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.

Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians globally since Hitler’s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.

Cluster munitions are known for killing broadly on impact, so it’s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it’s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, “Suddenly I heard my father screaming, ‘I’ve been hit! I can’t move,’ he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn’t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.”

According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.

How did a noise outside that survivor’s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father’s body? Maybe someone growing up in America’s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war’s violence.

Buy the Book

After the international Cluster Munitions Convention took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise to try to replace the Pentagon’s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower “dud” rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)

Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.

Afghanistan, Every Step You Take

At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union’s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war’s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It’s estimated that well over half of that country’s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Worse yet, the damage isn’t only physical. It’s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written, “The fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.

When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they’re toys.

The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (“We Start When It All Ends”)

And we still haven’t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD), an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.

From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people’s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, “For two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.” If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.

When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: “I don’t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.” My interlocutor’s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.

Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what’s left in the wake of our government’s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That’s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.

In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn’t be more important to bear witness to what’s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it’s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Filed Under: War

About the Author

Andrea Mazzarino , a TomDispatch regular, co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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          IT'S TIME TO INSIST ON A NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT TO STOP 

          ISRAEL'S GENOCIDE!  

         ISRAEL CLOSED THE WEST BANK OFFICE OF AL JAZEERA TO SILENCE 

         THE REPORTING OF ISRAEL'S ABUSE! 

Featured

Iraqi Shiite Militias Pledge Aid to Lebanese Hezbollah, Target Israel with Cruise Missiles, Drones

Juan Cole09/23/2024

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Tamim al-Hasan at the al-Mada newspaper in Baghdad reports that at a time when an imminent announcement is expected of the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Iraqi paramilitary groups have declared their solidarity with Lebanon’s Hezbollah in the struggle with Israel. Moreover, they are putting their drones where their mouths are, attacking Israel on Sunday.

In a rare admission, the Israeli army acknowledged on Sunday that it had intercepted two suspicious airborne objects coming from Iraq, but that there had been no casualties.

The attacks were claimed by the “Islamic Resistance of Iraq,” a coalition of three Shiite paramilitaries, who said that they had fired missiles and let loose unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at targets in Israel. They said that they fired “al-Arqab” advanced cruise missiles. They also said that they had targeted a military base in the northern Jordan Valley using drones, as well as trying to strike at southern Israel. The Resistance group said they would continue to attack the strongholds of the enemy “at an increasing pace in response to the massacres committed by the entity [Israel] against Palestinian civilians, including children, women and the elderly.”

The Lebanese Hezbollah itself launched dozens of rockets at Israeli munitions factories in North Haifa on Sunday, as well.

In related news, influential Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for a reduction in the status of the US diplomatic mission in Baghdad and for an Iraqi boycott of Arab countries that have recognized Israel.

The Islamic Resistance of Iraq comprises the Brigades of the Party of God, the Nobles (al-Nujaba’), and the Brigades of the Prince of Martyrs. All three have had sanctions placed on them by the United States.

The Shiite militias that helped Iraq defeat ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) in 2014-2018 have been recognized as a sort of national guard by the Iraqi Parliament, which helps fund them and put them under the authority of the National Security Advisor, who is nowadays Qasim al-Araji, who hails from one of the groups, the Badr Corps. He is a former Interior Minister (equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security).

He oversees the groups making up the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), including the Badr Corps, the League of the Righteous, the Imam Ali Brigades, and the Brigades of the Army of the Imam.

The three groups making up the Islamic Resistance of Iraq are technically part of the PMF, but they do not accept a command line to al-Araji.

These paramilitaries typically also field political parties in Iraqi elections, with PMF-allied parties gaining 43 seats in parliament in the most recent elections — a significant bloc of the ruling coalition. Prime Minister al-Sudani is therefore beholden to them, and indeed is said to be close to the PMF — though he is closer to the Badr Corps and the civilian bloc of Nouri al-Maliki than to the Islamic Resistance of Iraq.

Al-Mada quoted former member of parliament Mithal al-Alusi as saying that he believed the US had pressured Israel not to retaliate against Iraq. He added that these attacks by the Shiite militias would make it difficult for Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani to maintain his government’s studied neutrality on the Israel-Hamas war.

The Iraqi government is said to be annoyed by the militias’ participation in the Israel-Lebanon fighting.

Abu al-Ala’ al-Wala’i, the leader of the Brigades of the Prince of Martyrs, said after Israel’s booby trap attack on Hezbollah (and anyone around a pager or walkie-talkie), “A flood of Iraqi human beings will come, crowding the borders and trenches of Lebanon. If Hezbollah loses a thousand martyrs, we will provide it with a hundred thousand heroes.”

Although these numbers are of course a vast exaggeration, a multi-national coalition of Shiite parties did help bring down the Sunni fundamentalist rebellion in Syria, and their sheer person-power shouldn’t be underestimated. The PMF claims 230,000 fighters, compared with little Lebanese Hezbollah’s likely 45,000. Iraq’s population is nearly ten times that of the citizen population of Lebanon. So an actual investment in the Lebanese front by the Shiite militias of Iraq would be significant.

On Friday, Iraq’s Brigades of the Party of God announced that an Israeli strike on Damascus had killed its member, Abu Haydar al-Khafaji, who had been forwarded to Damascus as a security counselor.

Prime Minister Sudani is expected to announce a two-phase withdrawal of the 2,500 US troops in Iraq. The Iraqi parliament demanded this move in January 2020, but al-Sudani is the first prime minister to make it a priority, given his closeness to the PMF. A handful of troops will remain after 2026 to liaise with the 900 US troops in Syria.

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Oneindia News: “Israel Under Attack! Iraqi Fighters Team Up with Hezbollah, Multiple Drone Bomb Key IDF Airbase”

Filed Under: Featured, Iraq, Israel/ Palestine

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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Scott Ritter: Remembering Phil Donahue

August 20, 2024

Phil Donahue, the legendary American television talk show host, died Sunday at 88. The author recalls his appearances on Donahue’s top-rated show as he questioned the rationale to invade Iraq in 2003.  

Phil Donahue introduces the North American premiere of the documentary Body of War at the Toronto International Film Festival. (jbach/Flickr)

By Scott Ritter
Telegram

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.

Donahue premiered on July 12, 2002. More than a million people tuned in, making it the top-rated show in America in prime time. As Eric Boehlert wrote in Salon Magazine,

“It was telling that Donahue’s first guest on the inaugural show was Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons inspector turned dove, who argued the United States today has no basis to declare war on Iraq. An ex-Marine and a proud Republican who spent years inspecting Saddam Hussein’s arsenal, Ritter has been surprisingly absent from the national debate about a new war with Iraq. Donahue fixed that oversight in one night.”

According to Jeff, the decision to bring me on created a storm of controversy within NBC/MSNBC. He wrote about the difficulties in booking voices opposed to the war:

“Not every weapons expert had been wrong. Take ex-Marine and former UN inspector Scott Ritter. In the last months of 2002, he told any audience or journalist who would hear him that Iraqi WMD represented no threat to our country. ‘Send in the inspectors,’ urged Ritter, ‘don’t send in the Marines.’

It’s telling that in the run-up to the war, no American TV network hired any on-air analysts from among the experts who questioned White House WMD claims. None would hire Ritter.

Inside MSNBC in 2002, Ritter was the target of a smear that he was receiving covert funds from Saddam Hussein’s government. The baseless slur was obviously aimed at reducing his media appearances. It surfaced like clockwork at MSNBC when we sought to book Ritter as a guest on Donahue.”

The famous American journalist and political commentator, Bill Moyers, asked Donahue about this in 2007:

BILL MOYERS: You had Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector. Who was saying that if we invade, it will be a historic blunder.

PHIL DONOHUE: You didn’t have him alone. He had to be there with someone else who supported the war. In other words, you couldn’t have Scott Ritter alone. You could have Richard Perle alone.

BILL MOYERS: You could have the conservative.

PHIL DONOHUE: You could have the supporters of the President alone. And they would say why this war is important. You couldn’t have a dissenter alone. Our producers were instructed to feature two conservatives for every liberal.

BILL MOYERS: You’re kidding.

PHIL DONOHUE: No this is absolutely true.

On Feb. 25, 2003, [three weeks before the March 19 invasion of Iraq] MSNBC canceled Donahue, its top-rated show.

An internal NBC report described host Phil Donahue as “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” noting that senior management worried that Donahue’s show could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

The straw that broke the camel’s back was my last appearance on Donahue, on Jan. 15, 2003. I appeared side by side with Richard Butler, my former boss at the United Nations. 

The transcript speaks for itself:

DONAHUE: Mr. Ritter, a comment on the final point that he made-briefly, please.

RITTER: What I’ll say is this, is, I take strong disagreement with the contention that you know that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

BUTLER: Oh, come on, Scott. That’s on the public record.

RITTER: Of course it’s not. The public record actually says, with all due respect…

BUTLER: You signed the papers to me, when you worked for me, advising me-with all of your intellect and knowledge, you signed pieces of paper to me saying that Iraq has hidden weapons of mass destruction.

RITTER: Never. I signed pieces of paper to you that said we have credible intelligence information that says Iraq has it. And I asked you permission to carry out an inspection. But, understand, it’s an investigation. You just made a definitive statement that says you know Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. But, with all due respect, Richard, that is never reflected in any of the documents, even the one you just mentioned.

BUTLER: That’s not true.

RITTER: It is true. I have it here tonight. Do you want to go through the document page by page and show the people?

DONAHUE: Well, probably not.

(LAUGHTER)

BUTLER: It’s absolutely established that Iraq has not accounted for…

RITTER: Bingo. I agree with that, has not accounted for. But that’s an accounting issue.

BUTLER: So, where are the 500 shells with mustard in them? Where is the 400 tons of…

RITTER: These are good questions, but do you have evidence that they have it?

BUTLER: Where are the missiles?

RITTER: Do you know they have it for a fact, that they possess it as we speak? Or is the problem that Iraq has provided an accounting that we don’t have evidence to back it up, that we can’t confirm the Iraqi version of disposition? My point is…

BUTLER: Why are you assuming such a degree of innocence on the part of the Iraqis?

U.S. Army paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade prepare to board C-17 Globemaster III’s bound for Iraq on March 23, 2003 at Aviano Air Base, Italy. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Stephen Faulisi)

RITTER: Because 200,000 Americans are going to war based upon a perception of a threat. You testified before the U.S. Senate that Iraq has these weapons. And people listened to you and they gave that credibility, when the fact is, you do not know with absolute certainty that Iraq has these weapons.

BUTLER: Scott, the United States…

(APPLAUSE)

RITTER: And I’m not going to stand by and let Americans die in combat because people like you mislead the American Congress. I just won’t allow that to happen.

BUTLER: Oh, for God’s sake, for God’s sake, I mislead the American Congress?

RITTER: You said you know where the weapons are. Where are they?

BUTLER: Please allow me to finish. There is on the record at the United Nations pieces of paper signed by you…

RITTER: I have them here.

BUTLER: … addressed to me, saying, these people have concealed weapons. Please authorize me to go find them.

RITTER: And you signed those documents.

BUTLER: Sometimes I did and sometimes I told you no.

RITTER: Give me an example when you said no.

BUTLER: I told you no because I thought what you were doing was excessive.

RITTER: Give me an example, Richard.

BUTLER: Come on.

RITTER: No, please, in front of the people here tonight. You’ve said this many times. You’ve brought my credibility into question. I can document every time we’ve met, every time I briefed you, and every time you signed it. Please, for the benefit of the public tonight, one example of when you turned me down.

Phil Donahue cut off the debate at that point.

It should be noted that the documents I referred to were part of the archive seized by the F.B.I. when they raided my home on August 7.

I last saw Phil Donahue at the Fighting Bob Festival, in Wisconsin, in 2008. He was in good spirits, and we exchanged reminisces of the time we tried to stop the war in Iraq which was, at that time, still raging.

We had both been proven right in our opposition to this war.

Those who promoted the war continued to draw large salaries in their jobs at NBC and MSNBC, while Phil and I spoke to local crowds in Chautauqua.

Looking back, Phil and I got the better of the deal.

We retained our honor and integrity.

Phil Donahue died this past Sunday.

And with his passing went one of the last honest journalists in America.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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