Jun 9-11, 2006
Drawing on a 12-year career in the US Marine Corps and US Intelligence Community, Scott Ritter will provide a series of lectures and interactive processes that are designed to teach how to use skills and methodologies developed over the years that collectively have come to be known as the “Art of War.” Concepts such as center of gravity, campaigning, and coalition building, which have long been attributed to military matters, are skills that can be used to develop and sustain the peace movement. The methodologies taught are non-confrontational, non-violent, and in total conformity with the law. The idea is how to use the military’s organizational and focus-oriented skills for waging war to organize and focus anti-war efforts in a highly effective and successful manner.
Ritter will introduce us to military thinkers such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and discuss their philosophies on organization and operations, helping the attendees extract lessons from these works that are useful in assembling and leading an anti-war movement.
Practical exercises will concentrate on how to apply skills normally associated with military thinking to purposes aligned with the anti-war movement. Team-building exercises, drawing upon Ritter’s experience as a Marine officer and UN Chief Weapons inspector, will train the attendee in basic leadership and management skills and methodologies that will enable the participants to organize anti-war efforts that are sustainable and achievable.
The Traprock Center http://www.traprockpeace.org/scott_ritter.html is co-sponsoring this event.
Scott Ritter was born in to a military family and joined the United States Marine Corps after university. He served as the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. During the Gulf War he served as a ballistic missile expert under General Norman Schwarzkopf and joined the United Nations Special Commission (Unscom) in late 1991, where he took part in more than 30 inspection missions, 14 as team leader. His unannounced visits surprised Iraqi officials, who accused him of being a US spy in 1997. In August 1998, Mr. Ritter resigned from his job. In 1999 his book, Endgame, argued that Unscom’s mission had been compromised by Washington’s use of inspections to spy on the Iraqis and blamed the US and the UK for the breakdown. Iraq Confidential reveals how the CIA manipulated and sabotaged the work of UN departments to achieve the hidden foreign policy agenda of the U.S. in the Middle East. As the US and UK prepared to invade Iraq, Ritter asserted that his team was satisfied that Iraq had destroyed 98% of its weapons by 1995. He said “ Iraq today is not a threat to its neighbors and is not acting in a manner that threatens” Having been proved right about WMDs and Iraq in general, Scott’s voice is more needed than ever. “By any standard, the ongoing American occupation of Iraq is a disaster”.The invasion of Iraq was a crime of gigantic proportions, for which politicians, the media, and the public share responsibility.” Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America is Ritter’s compelling and impassioned critique of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. The book offers strategies for repairing American democracy and restoring our credibility abroad. Rowe is honored to welcome this lucid and honorable world figure to our humble Center.