Scott Ritter The controversial former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq says Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are largely disarmed, the "Iraqi threat" is built on a framework of lies and President Bush has betrayed the American people.
By Asla Aydintasbas
Pages 1 2 3 4 5 Share Digg it Del.icio.us My Yahoo RSS Font: S / S+ / S++ Mar 19, 2002 | During the Gulf War, Scott Ritter, then a junior military intelligence analyst, picked a fight with his boss. He filed one report after another challenging Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's claims about the number of destroyed Iraqi Scud missiles. We cannot confirm these kills, Ritter reported, much to Schwarzkopf's bewilderment. Despite pressure from the top, Ritter, a Marine captain from a military family, held his ground, challenging his superiors and the establishment.
That was just a warm-up for the man the New York Times called "the most famous renegade Marine officer since Oliver North."
In the years since, Ritter, who was chief inspector of the United Nations Special Commission to disarm Iraq (UNSCOM) until he abruptly resigned in 1998, has waged two battles -- the first with Saddam Hussein, the second with the government of the United States.
As a weapons inspector, Ritter was Baghdad's bête-noire, working with single-minded -- some said overreaching -- zeal to ferret out Iraq's concealed weapons of mass destruction. In 1997, the Iraqi government accused him of being a spy and refused to let him into sensitive facilities.
In 1998, inspections by Ritter and his teams resulted in the most serious confrontation between Iraq and the United Nations since the Gulf War. The U.S. publicly stood by Ritter, but privately tried to tone down the confrontational nature of the inspections. Saddam expelled UNSCOM; Ritter, who was being investigated by the FBI on charges that he was a spy for Israel, quit in protest over what he described as Washington's refusal to confront Saddam. (Many believe he was forced out of his post because the UNSCOM thought the U.S. had too much influence over it.) The United States ended up staging Operation Desert Fox, the largest military offensive against Iraq since the Gulf War.
Out of the intelligence game, Ritter became a vocal critic of the Clinton administration's policy on Iraq. There was too much pretense, too much infiltration of UNSCOM by the CIA, no real effort to enforce the inspections regime, he charged. He became a nuisance for Washington and a blessing for Republican hawks. During 1998 testimony before Congress, Ritter was hailed as a "true American hero."
But in 1999, Ritter confounded get-Saddam hawks who thought he was in their camp when he published "Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem -- Once and for All." In it, Ritter repeated his charge that UNSCOM's mission had ultimately been compromised by Washington's use of the inspections to spy on Saddam. But the bombshells were his assertion that Iraq was no longer a military threat and his call for the U.S. to quickly give Iraq a clean bill of health and lift its harsh sanctions, which he asserted were killing thousands of innocent Iraqi children. His solution: a Marshall plan to rebuild the country.
Ritter seems to have completely reversed himself regarding Iraq's ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In 1998 he warned a joint hearing of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees that "Iraq will be able to reconstitute the entirety of its former nuclear, chemical and ballistic missile delivery system capabilities within a period of six months." And in a December 1998 article for the New Republic, Ritter stated, "Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed." Yet he now says Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are largely dismantled and pose little or no threat.
His turnaround has caused consternation, to say the least, among many of his former colleagues and current critics. "I have no idea what has overtaken him," his former boss Richard Butler said. On another occasion, Butler said, "I'll say this about Scott, either he's misleading the public now, or he misled me then." Ritter, however, insists he has been saying the same thing all along -- people just paid attention to what fit their political agendas.
In a documentary, "In Shifting Sands," which he describes as chronicling the weapons inspection process and attempting to "de-demonize" Iraq, Ritter makes the explosive charge that in 1998, Butler told him to deliberately provoke a confrontation with Baghdad as a pretext for a U.S. bombing campaign. Butler has vehemently denied the charge. The conservative Weekly Standard attacked Ritter and the film, pointing out that Ritter was allowed back into Iraq with approval of the Iraqi government to make the film. "U.S. intelligence officials and arms control advocates say Ritter has been played -- perhaps unwittingly -- by Saddam Hussein," the Standard reporter argued. "'If you're Scott Ritter,' says one arms expert, 'the former "cowboy" weapons inspector, kicked out by Saddam Hussein, you're not going to get back into Iraq unless Saddam Hussein invites you and wants you there.'"
Ritter, meanwhile, has denied that there's any evidence connecting Saddam to al-Qaida -- as writers such as the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg and the New York Times' William Safire charge. And with Washington beating war drums against Iraq, it's not surprising that few inside the Bush administration are in a mood to listen to a former arms inspector whose views on Saddam's capacity to inflict mayhem appear to have experienced a 180-degree turn. But Ritter, a Republican who appears regularly on TV, is carrying on with his crusade to warn America against what he describes as a dangerous hard-line obsession with removing what he sees as a defanged old dictator. Salon spoke with him late last week.
When you resigned from your position as the chief arms inspector for Iraq, you were hailed as "the American hero." What made you write your book, which in the end cost you the support of many?
If I kept silent about this, that would be a lie. I am a Marine Corps officer. We never operate outside our code of honor and integrity. The truth is paramount. This is not a nation that should be building on a body of lies. As the inconsistencies of consecutive American administrations' policies on Iraq start to emerge, my position is starting to become recognized as a sound position. People start to recognize that much of what the U.S. has done has been outside the international law, outside the framework of United Nations Security Council resolutions, that Washington purports to support.
EDIT: rollingrock- Maybe the reason they didn't bother all that much is because the biological and chemical weapons were way past being useful. You know, expiration dates. LOL I'd 'talk' longer but I have a lot of catching up to do in private messages, emails, and the boards.
EDIT: One more thing I should add. What still remained WAS declared.
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