February 23, 2006

Interview by CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

Scott Ritter is fighting a battle he takes very personally: exposing the lie that the United States used to invade Iraq and, he insists with fire in his belly, will use again to bomb Iran in 2007.

A former Marine and military intelligence officer, Ritter went to Iraq as one of the United Nations’ lead weapons inspectors in 1991. He resigned in 1998 after accusations arose that he was spying for Israel.

In his latest book, Iraq Confidential (Nation Books, $26), Ritter lays out what happened. His team worked with Israel and Britain to get intelligence the CIA didn’t want the weapons inspectors to have. Ritter says that’s because both the Bush I and Clinton administrations had no interest in the U.N.’s goal of disarming Iraq. From the time Iraq invaded Kuwait, Ritter says, the U.S. agenda was to overthrow Saddam Hussein — a goal, he says, that Congress not only knew about but backed by appropriating $100 million for the Iraq Liberation Act in 1996.

Ritter, who speaks in Seattle March 1, says the CIA already knew by 1996 that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. The agency knew that the country’s ballistic missile program had been disarmed by 1993, that its nuclear weapons program had been dismantled by 1994, and that Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons were defunct by 1996.

“ The CIA was aware of this, but this was not the data that the executive branch or the legislative branch wanted to hear,” Ritter says. They wanted to hear “that Saddam Hussein was a threat and therefore Saddam Hussein deserved a policy of regime change.”

Real Change: How did the CIA work against the U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq?

Scott Ritter: If one thinks of the inspections as an automobile engine and information as the fuel that makes the engine function, you understand the role that the CIA plays. The CIA, if it controls the flow of information to the inspection machine, gets to dictate the time, the place, the means of an inspection. And this is convenient when you’re trying to manipulate events so that you maintain this perception of a non-compliant Iraq. As weapons inspectors, though, our mandate came from a resolution passed by the Security Council calling for the disarmament of Iraq, not the elimination of Saddam Hussein. I was brought in to create an independent intelligence capability within the inspection process. This means that we had to utilize the technologies and methodologies one normally associates with espionage.

I always challenge: people open up the U.N. phone book and find [its] intelligence agency. You’re not going to find it. It doesn’t exist. So how do we as inspectors go forward with this business? We have to appeal to the membership of the United Nations community to provide assistance. We have to go to the intelligence communities of these member states and say, “Can you help us?” That’s what we did. Nations that had intelligence capability, we asked them for assistance. They provided us with personnel, they provided us with equipment, they provided us with financial support. And we went forward and did our job. [But] the CIA deemed this a threat. So, from the very beginning, and I’m talking 1991, we had a very tenuous relationship with the U.S. government because they resented this independent character of the inspection process.

RC: Then, in 1998, Bill Clinton ordered the weapons inspectors out. You say the popular mythology is that they were thrown out.

Ritter: It’s pure fiction. The inspection process, as imperfect as it was, was successful in getting the job done. One of the ways that we did this was through an agreement called the Modalities for Sensitive Site Inspections. So if we went to a location in Iraq such as a presidential palace, [places] that were sensitive to the national security of Iraq, the inspectors could send in a four-person team to do a survey of the site. If the inspectors found anything they deemed suspicious and possibly relevant to our mandate, then we could come in with as many inspectors as we wanted.

The Iraqis had agreed to this and it had worked very well — too well, in fact, because the United States said inspections are starting to succeed. They can’t have inspections succeed.

So in December 1998, the Clinton Administration unilaterally instructed — and what I mean by that is that they did not go through the Security Council — the United States ordered the inspectors, through their boss, Richard Butler, to unilaterally withdraw from the sensitive site modalities.

The inspectors went to a site. It was the Baath Party headquarters in Adamia, a section of downtown Baghdad. They surrounded the site. The Iraqis said, “This is a sensitive site. It deals with the politics of Iraq. You’re welcome to come in with a four-man team and survey it.” The inspectors said, “No, the modalities don’t apply.” The Iraqis bent over backwards [but later said], “Look, if the modalities don’t apply, you don’t get to inspect the site.” The inspection team was withdrawn at that point in time, the United States saying that the Iraqis had refused to cooperate with the inspectors. It’s absurd. It was the inspection process corrupted by American interference.

And because Iraq had shown its “unwillingness” to cooperate with the inspection process, the United States and Great Britain had “no choice” but to launch a 72-hour bombing campaign called Operation Desert Fox. And it wasn’t just a bombing of Iraq, per se. It included an assassination attempt against Saddam Hussein [that] failed spectacularly. But one thing that emerged was the Iraqi government recognizing the hand-in-glove relationship between the inspection process and the United States government’s policy of regime change. And the Iraqi government said weapons inspectors are no longer welcome back in Iraq because they are not carrying out the mandate of the United Nations.

RC: You assert this pattern will repeat itself in Iran. Do you think the Iranians intend to build nuclear weapons?

Ritter: Everybody agrees that Iran does not have nuclear weapons right now. The United States and Israel and other countries say that Iran is pursuing the technology and that they have a program dedicated to researching how to convert this technology for weapons and that Iran is anywhere from two to 10 years away from being able to develop a nuclear bomb. But this is questionable. We have not provided any evidence to back this up. We have rumor, we have speculation, we have assertion, but we don’t have fact.

What we do know is that Iran had a nuclear program which they had kept secret for 13 years and finally were compelled to declare in 2003. In declaring it, Iran said, “We will comply fully with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.” They invited U.N. safeguard inspectors in [and] even went a step further: U.N. inspectors got to conduct snap inspections of undeclared facilities.

Even today, with the Iranian government saying we won’t support the additional protocol [of snap inspections anymore], Iran remains in 100 percent compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We need to underscore that. But because the American policy has nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program and everything to do with getting rid of the Iranian government, facts simply don’t matter.

RC: You’ve said the U.S. will end up using nuclear weapons. Why?

Ritter: Because we are overstretched militarily, this is a war that, if it doesn’t go the way the Bush Administration believes it’s going to go — meaning we bomb Iran and the Iranian government is destabilized and the Iranian people overthrow the government — we don’t have the resources conventionally to see this thing through. We can’t defeat Iran conventionally.

This doesn’t require a big stretch of the mind. You already have nuclear weapons that have been redesigned by the Bush Administration so that they are called “usable nukes.” Now, I don’t know what usable nukes means to you. To me, when someone says they have a usable nuclear weapon, it means they can use it. [And] many of the people who are in the senior decision-making positions today in the Bush Administration are people who believed in winnable nuclear war with the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. If they thought they could fight and win a thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, imagine what they think their nuclear weapons can do for them in Iran.

RC: Is the American public going to accept war with Iran, knowing what we know now about the lack of WMDs in Iraq?

Ritter: The American public certainly doesn’t seem to care about the lack of WMDs in Iraq. Where’s the screaming for an investigation? Where’s the call for the president’s head on a platter? Instead, the American public continues to support the ongoing war, maybe not in the massive numbers, but most Americans say that a withdraw-now strategy isn’t right, we need to stay the course. When push comes to shove, the president does not have to go to the American people for permission to go into Iran. Congress has already given him permission to fight the war on terror, and they are saying that Iran is part of this war on terror.

RC: You’ve said the peace movement needs to get much more proactive. How?

Ritter: Well, start being a peace movement, first of all. Stop being the everything movement. When I go to these peace rallies, it’s not peace they’re talking about. It’s everything. They bring in every issue that they deem to be of importance, which means that they’ve created the perfect circumstances for their opponents — let’s call them the war movement — to divide and conquer. Oh, sure, the peace movement was capable of surging people into the streets on a given date at a given time, but that was just a mass effort of self-gratification. That was everybody patting themselves on the back and saying, “Hey, I demonstrated in the streets today.” Well, what did you do the next day? And the day after that?

Until the peace movement recognizes that it got beat, that it’s getting beat, and that its current strategies and tactics aren’t working, there’s not going to be any hope. The peace movement [needs to] start saying, “Hey, we can influence elections, we can start picking candidates and say if you’re not a peace candidate, if you’re not someone who’s standing up against this war, you’re not going to get elected.” Right now, the peace movement doesn’t have that kind of power. n

[Event]

Scott Ritter, a former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, will read from his latest book, Iraq Confidential, on Wed., March 1, 7:30 p.m. ($5) at Town Hall, 1119 8th Avenue (corner of 8th and Seneca), Seattle. For information, call 206-682-4255.