Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and the author of Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika and Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union. He served in the Soviet union as an inspector implementing the nuclear control treaty, during the Persian Gulf War, and from 1991 to 1998, served as the chief weapons inspector with the United Nation in Iraq. Scott currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia and the Middle East, as well as arms control and non-proliferation, and he is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In this episode, Scott talks about his views on the Ukraine conflict and why NATO should be a bigger player in it than it is. He also talks about why he thinks Russia is winning the conflict in Ukraine and why the West should be worried about it. He is a frequent guest on Ring of Fire with Mike Papantonio and on his new show, "Ring of Fire: An Internationalist's Guide to the Iraq War" on the History Channel, which he co-hosted in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He's also a regular guest on CNN's "The Situation Room" and on the Tonight Show with John McCain and Sarah Palin, which you can catch on HBO's "Keeping Up With The Righteous" and CBS' "Good Morning America." He's a frequent contributor on CNN and CBS Evening News, and an author and host on the "New York Times" and NPR's "A View From The Ground" -- and he's a regular on "The View From the Ground" and "The Tonight Show." He also writes a book, "The War Room" in which he hosts a podcast, "No Country Is Yours Truly." He's book is out now and is a podcast is out in paperback and also on the air on Amazon Prime and Vimeo, where you can get a free copy of his book on Kindle. and is available on Audible, wherever else you get your own copy of the book is best listened to. If you're looking for a good time, listen to him on the podcast, go do it! Thank you for listening to this episode? Subscribe to his excellent work, subscribe to his podcast, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform, and tell me what you're listening to it's good enough, he's great on it's a good day in your life?
00:00:01.000I'm really pleased to have back on this show Scott Ritter.
00:00:05.000Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and the author of Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, Arms Control, and the End of the Soviet Union.
00:00:15.000He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the Nuclear Control Treaty.
00:00:21.000He served in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War.
00:00:25.000And from 1991 to 1998, served as the chief weapons inspector with the United Nations in Iraq.
00:00:34.000currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia and the Middle East, as well as in arms control and non-proliferation.
00:00:45.000And Scott, I think I can say about you that many people regard you as a contrarian because you do not always, you're not diplomatic and you don't always follow the kind of the official orthodoxies.
00:01:00.000And it's gotten you in a lot of trouble over your career, but you've had an extraordinary record of prescience.
00:01:08.000In fact, Matt By of the New York Times, which, you know, the Times had apologized for its support of the Iraq War, and later it said that your view was the most prescient of all the people who were talking about the war at that time, Americans during the...
00:01:24.000Late 90s, when you were serving as a weapons inspector and then right up to the Gulf War in 2001, regarded you as this kind of unique truth-teller.
00:01:35.000Your opinion was something that people could trust, and it was bracing in many ways, the way that you were willing to depart from official proclamations and orthodoxies.
00:01:48.000I was a very, very strong admirer of yours.
00:01:52.000During that period, I had you on my TV show on Ring of Fire with Mike Papantonio and talk to you for the first time.
00:02:02.000And I'm very, very interested in talking to you now because I'm interested in your take in the Iraq War.
00:02:09.000You have a long history in the Soviet Union and you understand the uses of power, of military power in that part of the world.
00:02:17.000I'd love to start kind of with an overview of what you think the military situation is now in Ukraine.
00:02:25.000The dominant narrative that we see in this country is that the Ukraine is having victory after victory against Russia.
00:02:35.000And that Russia has really been spanked in this war and humiliated.
00:02:39.000I know there is an alternative narrative, and I'd love to hear what your view is.
00:02:46.000Well, first of all, thank you very much for your kind words and for inviting me on.
00:02:50.000Look, the situation in Ukraine, I think we have to start off and note that this is one of the most violent military encounters that has taken place in the world.
00:03:00.000The casualties are beyond comprehension.
00:03:03.000The level of violence is beyond comprehension.
00:03:07.000This is General Kavoli, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, who spoke last January in a defense form in Sweden and said that what's going on in Ukraine was beyond anything NATO could ever imagine.
00:03:18.000The U.S. forces and NATO forces aren't trained, equipped, prepared.
00:03:23.000I think that should shock the average American into the fact is that they don't know anything about what's going on in Ukraine.
00:03:31.000What's going on in Ukraine right now is that Russia is winning a strategic victory, not only against the Ukrainian army, but against the forces of the collective West.
00:03:40.000Ukraine has been turned into a de facto proxy of NATO. That's not my words.
00:03:46.000That's actually the admission of the Ukrainian Minister of Defense Who said straight up, you need to keep supporting us, Wes, because we are your proxy in this war against Russia.
00:03:57.000And we've had Western leader after Western leader after Western leader acknowledge that this is a war NATO can't afford to lose.
00:04:07.000If NATO is not a direct participant in the conflict, which we're told over and over again, then why is this a war that NATO can't afford to lose?
00:04:15.000It's because NATO is a Not only equipment and financing, but operational assistance, intelligence assistance, planning, logistics, everything short of pulling the trigger.
00:04:28.000And some people would say with the number of Western mercenaries that are on the ground with recent military experience in the NATO countries that, in fact, we are providing trigger pullers.
00:04:39.000But despite all of that, Russia is prevailing.
00:04:42.000Russia is in the process of achieving a historic victory in the city of Bakhmut.
00:05:09.000You need men who are equipped and trained, not just to carry out standard military operations, but offensive military operations against an opponent like Russia requires a level of expertise and preparation that simply doesn't exist in Ukraine today.
00:05:28.000That's why President Zelensky in a moment of lucidity and honesty last week said if Bakhmut falls, that he will be compelled to seek peace with Russia because there is no alternative.
00:05:41.000To continue to fight means the destruction of Ukraine as a modern nation state.
00:05:58.000My son is one of those U.S. soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion, and I'm very happy he's home now, but participated in the Kharkiv offensive as a machine gunner for a special forces unit that was mainly foreign soldiers.
00:06:18.000He speaks with extraordinary admiration about the fighting capacity of the Ukrainian army and of their bravery, their courage, and the way that they have beaten the Russians in battle after battle after battle.
00:06:37.000I think it's improper to look at the Kharkiv offensive that took place in September and view that as being the exemplar for the war as a whole.
00:06:56.000Any army that can suffer 300,000 dead in the span of a year, and that's what the Ukrainians have suffered, and then still be in the field fighting, is an army that deserves everybody's respect.
00:07:30.000You see, in September, the Russian military was overextended.
00:07:34.000They initiated this conflict back in February of 2022 with the goal of, within a span of a month, driving the Ukrainians to the negotiating table.
00:08:49.000And we saw that game change in September when Ukraine was able to launch a successful offensive operation in Kharkov and then later on down in Kherson, taking back a considerable amount But that offensive stopped.
00:09:49.000Their troops are very well trained, very well equipped.
00:09:53.000Ukraine will never again have the opportunity they had in September.
00:09:56.000They had a situation where the Russians had overextended their lines in the Karkov district.
00:10:01.000They were defending a kilometer frontage with 50 to 60 troops with no defense in depth.
00:10:06.000And well-trained special forces like the group that your son was with were able to penetrate the Russian defenses and go in 20, 30 kilometers sometimes without any opposition.
00:10:22.000In fact, every time they tried it after that point, they got killed, slaughtered, because the Russians brought to bear their superiority in firepower.
00:10:29.000And that's what the Russians have today.
00:10:30.000They have superiority in firepower, superiority in numbers, superiority in combat capacity.
00:10:36.000Ukraine has some of the best fighting soldiers the world has ever seen.
00:10:40.000I don't think anybody can take that away.
00:10:42.000But the special forces units that your son was working with, there was a recent interview with a special forces colonel, Ukrainian special forces colonel, that said, I have lost 80% of the men that I had when I started this war.
00:10:53.000And the people I'm getting now don't have the training, don't have the physical fitness.
00:11:06.000There's some guys who have been there from the start, but most of them are dead, wounded, The people that replaced them, a lot of them have been rounded up on the streets by these brute gangs that are going around compelling mobilization at the point of a gun.
00:11:21.000They're giving three to four days worth of training before being sent to the front line, where the average life expectancy of one of these soldiers is around four hours.
00:11:33.000Now, again, I'm not going to denigrate the courage and the tenacity of the Ukrainians.
00:11:38.000One only has to take a look at the casualties Russia has suffered and they have been significant.
00:11:43.000But Russia is winning this war, and unless something dramatically changes in terms of, you know, force structure and capacity, Ukraine is going to lose this war.
00:11:52.000One of the things my son told me that was really frightening is he started out as a drone operator for this unit, and he said that as soon as he turned his drone on, the Russians knew where he was and would pound the area with artillery, and the artillery shells kill everything within a football field within 100 meters.
00:12:15.000I mean, we're used to fighting wars where we're dropping bombs in the desert or doing drone strikes with no anti-aircraft artillery and total domination of the skies.
00:12:31.000But the Russians actually have really good assets and they have very good trained pilots and they have a devastating artillery system.
00:12:44.000We used to train for this kind of war.
00:12:46.000When I was in the Marine Corps back in the 1980s, we trained for large-scale ground combat in a European environment.
00:12:51.000That was back when we had 300,000 troops on the ground in West Germany, and we could fly in another quarter of a million troops in 10 days.
00:12:59.000And, you know, we were planning to go to war against a Soviet group of forces in Germany, the 400,000, 500,000 strong.
00:13:05.000But after the Cold War ended, we stopped preparing for this kind of fight.
00:13:09.000The Gulf War, we won because we brought the best military in the world to bear on the problem.
00:13:15.000We fought the world's fourth largest army.
00:13:16.000So anybody who thinks the Iraqis were not capable of fighting, you don't know the Iraqis.
00:13:23.000But you can't stand up against an opponent like the United States Army and the United States military in the early 1990s.
00:13:29.000We had prepared for decades to fight a Soviet army that could bring to bear a lot of violence.
00:13:34.000But then we entered the global war on terror.
00:13:37.000And as you said, we're fighting an enemy that was tenacious, but not capable of dealing death like the Russians and the Ukrainians could do right now.
00:13:45.000We haven't fought a campaign against an integrated air defense system since Desert Storm.
00:13:51.000I mean, there's a little bit of that against Serbia in 1999.
00:13:55.000But what the Russians have in terms of air defense is mind-boggling.
00:13:58.000And anybody who thinks that American or NATO air power would turn this around, you don't know what you're talking about.
00:14:04.000Talk to the Ukrainian pilots right now.
00:14:06.000The Russians have brought in their fourth-generation fighter, the Su-35, and their radar and long-range missile capability basically makes it impossible for the Ukrainian Air Force to take off.
00:14:17.000Because they're shot down as soon as they get up in the air.
00:14:20.000That would be the fate of much of NATO's air power if they tried to engage the Russians.
00:14:24.000Again, the level of violence, as you said, what's happening here is electronic warfare.
00:14:28.000See, when your son turned on his drone, it emits a signal.
00:14:32.000That signal is picked up immediately by Russian electronic warfare, who then triangulate the signal and put artillery down on that target.
00:14:39.000And so what drone operators have to do is offset their position with an antenna that's set, you know, a couple kilometers away, so that when the signal's detected, the artillery shells land over there.
00:14:51.000But that trick, remember, the Russians aren't stupid.
00:14:54.000They'll do that trick once, and then the Russians will start to search for the signals.
00:15:24.000I am very happy your son came home safely, but I think he understands that there before the grace of God goes him in terms of the number of people who did lose their lives.
00:15:34.000War is an unforgiving business, and this war in particular, because no one has imagined this conflict.
00:15:40.000We haven't had a situation where this many people died this quickly in armed conflict.
00:15:45.000I mean, one of the frightening things about this war is, and I think the Polish foreign minister mentioned this the other day, that the plan is if the Ukraine collapses, NATO will then go in.
00:15:58.000You know, that's, I think, a very, very frightening thought, that we then would get a full-out You talked about the competency of the Russian pilots and the quality of their aircraft.
00:16:20.000How would they stand up against American aircraft?
00:16:25.000Back in the day, giving away my age here, we used to run an exercise in Nellis Air Force Base called Red Flag.
00:16:33.000And Red Flag was a force-on-force U.S. versus Soviet realistic dogfights.
00:16:39.000But we haven't done that in a long time.
00:16:41.000We now have resumed it, but we bring a lot of bias into our planning.
00:16:45.000And so whenever you hear somebody say that we are planning against a near-peer opponent, that means they're planning against somebody that is designed to be inferior to the Americans.
00:16:54.000So a lot of operational assumptions are based upon certain aspects of superiority that are automatically given to the American side in this war game.
00:17:31.000And anybody who has been in combat will tell you that unless you train as you're going to fight, the first time you go into combat, you're going to be making a lot of mistakes, mistakes that should have been made in training.
00:17:41.000But if we're not training properly, that means the mistakes are going to meet on the front line.
00:17:45.000The Russians have had a year now to go up against a NATO-style military.
00:19:44.000If you take a look at the conflict in Libya, you take a look at Afghanistan even.
00:19:48.000These are all Article 4 fights, the fight against Serbia, Article 4.
00:19:51.000That is where NATO comes together and determines that a security threat exists that warrants NATO intervention.
00:19:58.000But it requires the unanimous consent of NATO. And Poland is not going to get the unanimous consent of NATO for a military adventure into Western Ukraine that could lead to World War III. So Poland would have to go in alone.
00:20:11.000And if there's an army in Europe that's not prepared for large-scale ground combat in Europe against a Russian-style enemy, it's Poland.
00:21:04.000Well, we have a good idea of what he did want when he went in there.
00:21:08.000That's the peace treaty that was negotiated.
00:21:10.000It seems to me that the Russians put on the table what their demands were, and what they got in that peace treaty, what they wanted, was recognition that Crimea is Russia forever.
00:21:22.000They were seeking at the time the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, the two Donbass republics.
00:21:28.000And from the Russian perspective, after eight years of the citizens of Donbass being treated as terrorists by the government in Kiev, bombarded on a daily basis, there could be nothing less.
00:21:39.000You can't ask Lugansk and Donetsk, the primary majority ethnic Russian populations, to return under the wing of Ukraine.
00:21:47.000They wanted Ukraine to commit that they would never join NATO. That's been a Russian demand since 2008, when William Burns, current CIA director, then US ambassador to Russia, wrote a memorandum called Net Means Net, where he outlined the Russian position.
00:22:02.000They will not tolerate Ukraine becoming part of NATO. We knew that in 2008.
00:22:06.000Russia insists that that's the condition today.
00:22:25.000If the Ukrainians had taken that deal, it would have been a good deal compared to what they have today.
00:22:29.000Now Russia has taken Tereson, Zaporizhia, Lugansk, and Donetsk.
00:22:34.000All four of those territories are now, from the Russian perspective, part of Russia.
00:22:38.000And with all due respect, that's the only perspective that counts.
00:22:40.000Because they have a constitution that they believe in, just like we believe in ours.
00:22:43.000And that constitution has been adapted to recognize these territories as Russia.
00:22:48.000They will never get them, Ukraine will never get them back.
00:22:51.000The reason why I say that is because now that it's part of Russia, it's protected by the totality of Russia's military capability, which includes nuclear weapons.
00:22:58.000So if there's any dream on the part of NATO that through the use of military force they can recapture these territories, that's like the Russians coming into Mexico and telling the Mexicans they can take back Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico.
00:23:13.000The United States would view that as an existential threat, and we would use every means necessary, including nuclear weapons, to prevent that from happening.
00:23:22.000What Russia has said is what they're looking for now is the social and economic revitalization of these new Russian territories, that they have no desire to acquire additional territory, but they still require demilitarization.
00:23:37.000That means NATO infrastructure is removed.
00:23:39.000It also means that Ukraine's army, We'll now have to pull back 150 kilometers from the new Russian border, because Russia will never again tolerate a situation where Ukraine is firing artillery shells against Russian civilian targets, which Ukraine does on a daily basis, killing two to three, sometimes more Ukrainian civilians a day in Donetsk and other areas.
00:24:00.000No NATO. And the last one is going to be a more difficult one.
00:24:04.000I don't know how Russia is going to pull it off, but they insist they're going to be able to do this.
00:24:09.000That means to get rid of the far-right, ultranationalistic parties that have taken over the government in Ukraine, to delegitimize, deplatform the ideology of Stepan Bandera.
00:24:21.000An odious historical character who fought alongside Adolf Hitler, has the blood of tens of thousands of Jews, hundreds of thousands of Poles and Russians on his hands.
00:24:31.000He is the national hero of Ukraine today, and Bandera is, from an ideological perspective, he's in the DNA of the Zelensky government.
00:24:40.000And so the Russians have said that has to be eliminated.
00:24:42.000I don't know how they're going to achieve that.
00:24:44.000But the good news for Ukraine is Russia's willing to stop this war And give Ukraine, for instance, the city of Odessa.
00:24:52.000That allows Ukraine continued access to the Black Sea, which means Ukraine can survive as a modern nation state.
00:24:57.000They can have Nyepetrovsk, a major industrial facility that gives Ukraine an industrial heartland.
00:25:02.000They can have Kharkov, again, another industrial city.
00:25:05.000But if Ukraine continues this fight at the behest of NATO, which we see, we see the United States and NATO urging Ukraine to continue, Russia will take those three cities, and those three cities will become Russian.
00:26:03.000We've tried to do that, for instance, to highlight the differences between Russia's continuing friendship with India and to make that a wedge between Russia and China because China has difficulties with India.
00:26:18.000What the Russians and Chinese have said, well, that's an issue that we'll talk about over here, but it doesn't affect what we're doing over here in Ukraine.
00:26:25.000The nexus of Russia and China goes beyond simply uniting one of the world's great economies, China, with one of the world's great land masses and reservoirs of natural resources, which is Russia.
00:26:39.000You bring those two things together and you create a world-beating team.
00:26:45.000And this is something the United States and Europe need to wake up to, that thanks to the policy of the United States, we've brought these two nations together and they're not going to drift apart.
00:26:54.000They are unbeatable in terms of their economy, their resources.
00:26:58.000And as long as their military ambition is limited to defending themselves, then they won't get involved in the kind of military misadventures that the United States has.
00:27:09.000You won't see the Chinese army bleeding itself out in the Middle East like you saw the United States.
00:27:14.000You won't see the Chinese army bashing its head in a conflict with Australia, trying to take Australia.
00:27:21.000They will fight for the South Chinese Sea, for these new islands.
00:27:24.000They will fight for Taiwan, and they will defend their borders against India and anybody else.
00:27:29.000But China's global projection is economic, and there they're unmatched.
00:27:33.000I mean, if you take a look at what the Biden administration tried to do in the most recent G7 meetings last summer, it was almost embarrassing.
00:27:39.000It's almost embarrassing because we're encouraging the seven most developed economies in the world to come up with a $600 billion fund for global development.
00:27:40.000Because we were encouraging the seven most developed economies in the world to come up with a $600 billion fund for global development.
00:27:49.000After a decade, where China has pumped in $7 to $10 trillion in global development, as if what we were going to do was going to have any impact, it won't.
00:27:58.000We can't compete with the Chinese on the scope and scale that they have.
00:28:02.000And now when we take a look at the economic impact of the pandemic, we take a look at the blowback from the sanctioning of Russian energy, which has created havoc in the European economy and even our economy.
00:28:14.000People have to understand, you know, when the Saudi Arabians just agreed to a 500,000 barrel a day reduction in oil, look what oil prices have done.
00:28:23.000Russia says they're going to follow suit.
00:28:25.000This blows the pricing beyond the $60 cap that Europe's put on.
00:28:30.000Nobody's going to recognize that $60 cap.
00:28:33.000And then you combine that with the fact that basically China and India and Saudi Arabia have all said, we refuse to tie our oil To an artificial pricing mechanism, Brent's standard, which is a European pricing mechanism.
00:28:48.000They're now going to go to a new standard.
00:28:50.000I think they're calling it the Dubai standard or something, which means they are totally divorcing themselves from the West.
00:28:57.000This Trans-Eurasian Economic Union that Russia and China are creating and the process of creating We're good to go.
00:29:22.000And the fact that Brazil just entered an agreement with China to conduct trade using the Chinese yuan and the Brazilian real, I think it is.
00:29:31.000What he said is they're not using the dollar anymore.
00:30:11.000Look what they did in the Middle East.
00:30:13.000After four decades of America trying to transform the Middle East into an arc of chaos designed to subvert Iran by using Saudi-funded countries.
00:30:23.000Gulf Arab states to create trouble from Lebanon, through Syria, into Iraq, down into, you know, in Afghanistan, into Yemen.
00:30:33.000This is the Shiite Crescent, which is the Shiite Crescent.
00:30:38.000The Shiite Crescent that Abdullah, King Abdullah, talked about in 2004.
00:30:42.000Yeah, which is unifying all of these, the Gulf states with Saudi Arabia money and Oman and Qatar and Abu Dhabi all the way up to Lebanon.
00:30:53.000So the Shia Crescent was the youth, the fulcrum of U.S. strategy, which is to unite Saudi Arabia, Oman, the Gulf states, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, all the way up to Lebanon as a barrier against Iranian expansion in the Mideast. all the way up to Lebanon as a barrier against And that was our whole strategy for the past 40 years.
00:31:45.000Donald Trump wanted to launch a retaliatory strike against Iran.
00:31:49.000And the military wisely said, hey, boss, while we can do that, understand that we will set off a chain of events that we can't control.
00:31:57.000And the Iranians are going to rain death and destruction on everything in the Middle East, including our bases.
00:32:04.000But more importantly, they're going to destroy Saudi oil infrastructure.
00:32:08.000United Arab Emirates Infrastructure, the entire Middle East oil-producing economy will be destroyed, and then it will take us probably three to five years to build up combat power to be able to defeat Iran, if we could defeat Iran.
00:32:22.000But the world economy will collapse in the meantime.
00:32:25.000And Trump had to pull back because there was a recognition that, yes, while we could do damage to Iran, Iran would do damage to everybody else, and it would be a mutually assured destruction-type suicide pact.
00:32:36.000Now, we didn't learn that lesson because we continued to promote this anti-Shia crescent policy.
00:32:44.000They had a big wake-up call in 2019 when the Houthi fired a couple Iranian-made drones and shut down an Aramco facility, sending the signal, we can shut you down anytime we want.
00:32:55.000And the Saudis, you know, they're engaged in something called Saudi Arabia 2030, which is this massive revitalization of the Saudi economy and society, etc.
00:33:05.000It requires money, money to be poured in, money that can't be poured in if you're busy buying weapons for a war, and if it's ever fought, means the end of your economy to begin with.
00:33:27.000China came in without any military power, sat down, and negotiated an agreement between the Saudis and Iranians to end these four decades of American-driven conflict.
00:34:51.000The Chinese are going around the world right now preaching economic prosperity and peace.
00:34:56.000And all we can preach is death and destruction and war.
00:35:00.000So we have spent approximately the equivalent on weapons as the Chinese have spent on development.
00:35:10.000And development without the strings attached.
00:35:13.000They go to these countries and, you know, they end up getting a lot.
00:35:17.000They end up getting control of those natural resources.
00:35:19.000All we have is to offer weapons in exchange for those natural resources.
00:35:25.000And these countries are beginning to catch on.
00:35:27.000The big issue is that we project our military power around the globe and the Chinese population Reject economic power, and they're winning this battle because economic power is a lot more attractive.
00:35:42.000Bombing somebody into oblivion does not make friends.
00:36:32.000I just ask every American to imagine that once every five years, somebody came in and just blew up your house and killed your children, killed your friends, your relatives, then you spend the next five years rebuilding for them to come in five years later and do it again.
00:36:46.000And it's a perpetual cycle of death, destruction, and violence.
00:36:49.000You can never dig out from underneath it.
00:36:52.000You would not view that as your friend.
00:36:55.000Now imagine, if you would, the equivalent of FEMA coming in and rebuilding your home, offering the helping hand, helping rebuild schools, etc.
00:37:40.000Not a hand attached to our own moral codes, our own belief system, our own values.
00:37:45.000A genuine helping hand that says, we're here to help you rebuild.
00:37:50.000And what happens when you don't have the strings?
00:37:52.000See, we put those strings on because we have this insecurity that says we have to control everything.
00:37:57.000But if you actually help somebody without strings, the goodwill that will be engendered is the best mechanism of control because you're not controlling them.
00:38:07.000They're volunteering to be with you and help you and view you as a friend to come to your assistance.
00:38:12.000We have to radically change our approach to interfacing with the world.
00:38:39.000The ability of America to do what is necessary to do the right thing.
00:38:43.000We have to stop taking that energy away.
00:38:46.000And perverting it by turning it into this war list.
00:38:50.000Because the same dedication, the same willingness to sacrifice that it takes to have a Marine cross the line of departure to close with and destroy the enemy for firepower maneuver to save it, to lay his life down for those.
00:39:02.000We direct that into him going over in a different capacity.
00:39:07.000One of a helping hand to help people build without preconditions, without strings, and people would fall in love with America again.
00:39:17.000We haven't gotten too far down the rabbit hole to prevent that.
00:39:19.000I'm reminding my uncle, President Kennedy, because my uncle came into office immediately, you know, four days after Eisenhower made his speech, probably the most important speech now in American history, warning against the domination of the military industrial complex.
00:39:35.000And specifically warning against that this was what was going to happen to us.
00:39:40.000We would become an imperium abroad and a security state at the moment.
00:39:45.000We would lose our democracy and we would lose our friendships around the world.
00:39:49.000And my uncle came in, you know, and immediately two months into office, he was he got tricked and lied to by his joint chiefs of staff, by Curtis LeMay, Louis Lamentzer, and Alan Tulles and Charles Cabal of the CIA.
00:40:05.000And they said he didn't want to go into Cuba.
00:40:08.000He didn't want the Bay of Pigs invasion to happen, and he refused to use U.S. military vessels to transport the troops, you know, the Cuban revolutionaries.
00:40:18.000And they had to get vessels from United Fruit Company in Texaco to bring them over because my Uncle Jack wouldn't do it.
00:40:24.000And then he said, when the invasion happened and it was failing, and they said, okay, now you got to send in the Essex aircraft carrier and we got to invade.
00:40:34.000And he realized that was their plan all along.
00:40:36.000They knew it was going to fail, but they thought they would trick him into evading.
00:40:40.000He walked out of the Oval Office and he said to Robert McNamara, I want to take the CIA, batter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.
00:40:49.000And he never trusted his military advisors again.
00:40:54.000And when they tried to get him to go into Laos, he refused.
00:40:57.000When they tried to get him to send combat troops to Vietnam, put tremendous pressure on him to send 250,000 men, he refused.
00:41:05.000He never sent any combat troop abroad during his presidency.
00:41:08.000He sent 16,000 advisors, you know, to Vietnam, who technically weren't allowed to participate in combat.
00:41:17.000But that was fewer troops than he sent to get James Meredith into the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss.
00:41:24.000And a week before he died, he signed national security order ordering all troops out of the end of 1965, the first thousand in November.
00:41:34.000And of course, two weeks later, he was killed.
00:41:36.000And Johnson reversed, Wyland and Johnson reversed that order.
00:41:39.000My uncle said he didn't want the face of America that people knew abroad to be the face of a He wanted it to be a Peace Corpsman, bringing food, bringing technology, digging wells.
00:41:52.000And he started the Kennedy Milk Program to give nutrition to every child in the world.
00:41:57.000He started the Alliance for Progress to give direct aid to the poor rather than the oligarchs in the military.
00:42:03.000I'm saying all this stuff because, you know, it's hard to judge the success of any presidency objectively.
00:42:11.000But if you want to measure the success of the presidency, based upon this metric, the number of hospitals, universities, boulevards, buildings, Our name for that president abroad, none of them can rival my uncle.
00:42:30.000There is a Kennedy Avenue or Boulevard in almost every capital in Africa and Latin America.
00:42:36.000There are universities, there's hospitals, there are statues to them in Ethiopia, all over Africa and Asia.
00:42:44.000And people loved our country at that time, genuinely loved our country.
00:42:49.000And they looked at us as a beacon of freedom, of moral authority around the world.
00:43:00.000And my uncle, you know, was during World War II, he was marooned on an island after his PT boat got cut in two with the Japanese, which was an imperial army, looking for him.
00:43:13.000And his life was saved by two Solomon Islanders who resented the Japanese invasion and the Japanese takeover of their country.
00:43:22.000And they took a coconut that he had carved his coordinates on and they paddled it 30 miles across the ocean at the British base and gave it to him.
00:43:31.000So his life was saved by colonial people.
00:43:35.000And I think that that lesson that, you know, he learned that these are people who should be governing themselves.
00:43:42.000We shouldn't be governing them either with hard colonialism of the British or with the soft colonialism of corporate military aid, you know, from the United States.
00:43:53.000And the payoff, you know, anybody can look at it around the world.
00:43:56.000Just go for a walk in one of those capitals and you'll see something.
00:43:59.000My uncle used to say that there are children in Africa who are named for Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, but there's none named for Marx and Lenin.
00:44:10.000But I think the greatest honor that he would have felt if he knew it after his death was the number of African children and Latin American children whose name is Kennedy.
00:44:22.000Because people admired our country and they loved our country then.
00:44:26.000And the economic and security payoffs of that kind of foreign policy are so much higher.
00:44:58.000Scott Ritter, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for continuing to be outspoken about these issues and continuing to tell the truth to the American people.