Fresh Insights on Iraq Jude Wanniski November 11, 2003

Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Ritter, Fisk, Bearden, Zbig

As the casualties mount in Iraq amid evidence of greater sophistication in the use of tactics by guerrillas in the Sunni Triangle, we are seeing more reports from the antiwar reporters on what’s going on and what we might expect in the weeks and months ahead. Today’s memo provides some links to these fresh insights, which we find at least credible, if not totally persuasive.

1. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter writes in the Christian Science Monitor that while he was doing his snooping for weapons of mass destruction between 1991 and 1998 he observed Iraqis being taught how to make simple devices that could be used to blow up convoys and bring down helicopters – as if Saddam Hussein knew way back then that this is what it would come to. Very interesting.

2. Milt Bearden, a former CIA operations chief, writes in the Seattle Times that “the insurgents' strategy could have been crafted by Sun Tzu, the Chinese military tactician, who more than 2,500 years ago wrote, in "The Art of War," that the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy's strategy. This does sound authoritative, coming from someone who spent 30 years working on these issues.

3. A first-rate British scribe, Robert Fisk, writes in the New Zealand Herald that the recent bombings directed against the House of Saud by Osama bin Laden and his boys may be partly as paybacks for the government’s “secret” assistance to the U.S. in permitting several hundred air sorties to be flow out of Saudi Arabia against Iraq last spring. There are “Frightening Winds Blowing Around the House of Saud.”

4. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski writes in The Washington Post that when UN General Assembly resolutions on the Middle East are now passing by 133-to-4 and 144-to-4, with the United States, Israel, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia on the short end, there is definitely a problem with U.S. foreign policy and credibility. This was condensed from a Zbig speech given two weeks ago and has been must reading in Democratic circles.