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We had a moment in history, between 1988 and 1991, where we could have worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to make his vision of perestroika succeed. Inste… - Scott Ritter
" "We had a moment in history, between 1988 and 1991, where we could have worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to make his vision of perestroika succeed. Instead, we allowed him to fail, without any real plan on how we would live with what emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Save for a short period of time during the Second World War where we needed the Soviet Union to defeat Germany and Japan, we have been in a continual state of political conflict with the Soviet Union. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, we viewed the Russian Federation more as a defeated enemy that we needed to keep down, than a friend in need of a helping hand up. Yeltsin’s Russia was useful to the US and NATO only to the extent that we could exploit it economically while controlling its domestic politics in a manner that kept Russia in a perpetual state of weakness. The Obama “reset” was simply a ploy to remove Vladimir Putin, who rejected the vision of Russia projected by the west, and replace him with Dmitri Medvedev, whom Obama believed could be remade in the figure of Yeltsin. The fact that Putin believes in a strong Russia has upset the plans of the US, NATO, and Europe for post-Cold War hegemony, predicated as they were on a weak, compliant Russian state.
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About Scott Ritter
William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served with the United Nations implementing arms control treaties, with General Norman Schwarzkopf in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq, overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and as a United Nations weapons inspector, from 1991 to 1998. He later became a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming according to The New York Times "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction." A registered sex offender, Ritter was arrested in 2001 in connection with police stings in which officers posed as under-aged girls to arrange meetings of a sexual nature and later convicted of sex offenses in 2011. He served 30 months of his prison sentence. He has defended Russia during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and written opinion pieces for various state media outlets.
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William Scott Ritter, Jr.
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William Scott Ritter
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Additional quotes by Scott Ritter
The American people have allowed themselves to be dumbed down to the point that their opinions are easily manipulated by corporate-owned and controlled mainstream media. The inability to function as a viable component of government has resulted in the “people” fracturing into competing ideological and socio-economic fiefdoms. American democracy is little more than feudalistic plutocracy. It’s an unsustainable model doomed to collapse in on itself.
After decades of ignoring Russia’s national security concerns, the West is confronted with a military invasion of Ukraine which serves as a precursor for a new Cold War that will define Russia’s relationship with the West for years to come. Let there be no mistake, on Feb. 24, the world awoke to a new reality. Prior to this date, Russia was treated by the West as an annoyance, belittled by economic and even military elites as little more than a “giant gas station masquerading as a nation,” to quote John McCain... Russian President Vladimir Putin had been subjected to a series of sophomoric psychological profiles that trivialized Russian national concerns as little more than the psychotic whim of a troubled individual. The caricatures that emerged of the Russian state and its leadership colored the analysis of Russia’s oft-stated concerns over what it viewed as its legitimate national security. This blinded the West to the reality of what was transpiring. Because no one took Russia seriously, no one could imagine a large-scale ground war in Europe....
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