One man against the war

One man against the war

By Nathan Guttman

WASHINGTON - When Iraq announced last week that it had agreed to the return of the UN weapons inspectors, Scott Ritter was doing an interview in CNN's "Crossfire" studio. It was like music to his ears: Here was confirmation that the American war cries were totally superfluous and erroneous.

"Get the inspectors back in," he told his interviewers. "Let them do their job. And if Saddam fumbles, if he doesn't allow this to happen, now you have a case for war ... If Iraq screws up and says well, hold on, you can't come here, or no, we put on a condition here, it's all over. Now Bush has a case for war. And guess what? I'll be right there with him, volunteering my service," Ritter said.

The interviewers were unrelenting. Since he appeared on TV from Baghdad two weeks ago calling George W. Bush to stop the American drive toward war, Ritter has become a regular studio guest on many TV shows. Almost always he is on the receiving end - either from his interviewers or from representatives of the Bush administration - who counter everything he has to say with arguments of their own. They have said diplomatically that Ritter is not "up to speed" with all the latest details, which is why he was prepared to believe his Iraqi hosts when they said that they do not have any weapons of mass destruction.

Behind the scenes, however, Ritter has become the subject of scorn - a man who has sold his soul to Saddam Hussein.

For Ritter, the terminology is completely different. "I am a Marine, an American patriot, a conservative and a Republican," he said when he addressed a Congressional committee two years ago. Since then he has repeatedly tried to argue that he is not fighting in Saddam's corner, but doing everything in his power to prevent an unnecessary war.

But more than the argument over his current stance, his personality has also been a subject of some interest, from the day he resigned as head of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) - the weapons inspectors - in August 1998, on the grounds that the Clinton administration was not hard enough on Saddam, and up to his address to the Iraqi parliament, where he argued passionately that the country is not hiding any weapons of mass destruction.

Ritter, 41, caused a great uproar when he resigned his UNSCOM post. He is well known as a person who wears his heart on his sleeve. He talks quickly, in a loud voice and in a style that is unmistakably "Marine."

When he had a grievance against Saddam, he let everybody know loud and clear, and when he decided to step down he made sure that his letter of resignation was made available to the world media. He held interview after interview, blaming the U.S. government and the UN for not backing him and for their hesitant policy on Iraq.

Ritter said that the U.S. administration had opted for a diplomatic course, and dropped the path of sanctions and the threat of taking military action in order to force Saddam to comply with the demands of the weapons inspectors.

He claimed that his team had been on the verge of uncovering Iraq's weapons-hiding plans, but that without the backing of the Clinton administration and the UN Security Council the work had to be halted at a crucial juncture.

"The failure to push aggressively ahead with the inspections was a surrender to Iraqi leadership that made a farce of the commission's efforts to prove that Iraq was concealing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs," Ritter wrote before walking out of his job.

Mission impossible

Ritter had worked for UNSCOM since it was set up in 1991. He was considered the driving force of the inspection teams. Working alongside a Swedish diplomat and a Russian expert, the Marines intelligence officer demanded aggressive action to uncover Saddam's arsenals. He knew that the Iraqi leader was lying to the UN, and after the defection of Hussein Kamal in 1995 the entire world knew that Saddam was hiding weaponry, but the inspectors' ability to act was very limited.

That fact became apparent after the first year of UNSCOM's work. When the echoes of the Gulf War were still in the air, an inspection team headed by Ritter tried to enter a building in the Iraqi Agriculture Ministry after a tip-off led them to believe that weapons were being hidden there. The Iraqi authorities refused to let the inspectors in, so Ritter decided that he and his team would surround the building and would besiege it until the Security Council decided what to do.

Ritter recounted the incident in an interview: "`Okay. Security Council, they're not letting us in.' Nothing. Day goes by - `Excuse me, gentlemen, we're parked out in front of the Agriculture Ministry. They're not letting us in. We want to do an inspection.' Silence. Nothing."

Eventually, after one of the inspectors had been attacked by Iraqi demonstrators, Ritter was forced to move his team out and, as he recalls, he realized that he could only expect partial backing at best from the higher echelons.

Ritter's main grievances were against the Clinton administration, which he claimed did not have a broad proactive policy on Iraq, and only reacted when crises arose. He also claims that the UN secretary general and the Security Council tried to appease Saddam at the expense of the inspectors.

At the end of 1997 the inspectors' work became more difficult, impossible, according to Ritter. His requests to be allowed to inspect various sites were constantly refused and UNSCOM's policy, which was led by Ritter, as it went looking for other sites where weapons might be manufactured or stored, caused a series of confrontations with Baghdad and pushed the U.S. to make a decision on the matter.

Ritter thinks that at that stage the U.S. should have used military force to make the Iraqis bow to the UN resolutions that facilitated UNSCOM's work. In the U.S. administration, however, there were those who thought that Ritter himself was the cause of all the problems; they began to voice disapproval of his actions. Within a matter of months two things occurred - Ritter felt that his presence was no longer wanted by the people who had sent him; he left his post, and a military confrontation took place when Operation Desert Fox brought an eventual end to weapons inspections.

"The strikes were totally the wrong thing to do. I have never been in favor of bombing for bombing's sake ... Nothing was gained from the strikes and much was lost, including UNSCOM itself," Ritter said.

That, perhaps, was the turning point for Ritter. Added to his immense hatred of Saddam Hussein, whom to this day he describes as an "evil dictator," he also began to despise the U.S. government and the UN, which did not provide him with the backing he had asked for. In the four years that have passed since then, these two forces have managed to remodel Ritter's new perceptions and have made him a main preacher against a war with Iraq.

But unlike other anti-war campaigners, Ritter is still heavily influenced by his years in Iraq. He is against war at the present time, but if it is proved that military action is the only course, then, he says, he will be there, on the front line.

Some six months after he resigned from UNSCOM, Ritter published his book "Endgame" where his fury at the administration is apparent. Critics say that the main theme of the book is a conspiracy theory in which the U.S. had managed to introduce CIA agents into the inspection teams in order to spy on Saddam and gather information to eventually cause his downfall.

Undermining UNSCOM

Ritter claims that the CIA was party to planning UNSCOM actions and steered them in line with its own espionage needs - which had nothing to do with inspection at all. CIA personnel who had secretly joined the UNSCOM ranks in 1996 used the inspectors' facilities to spy on Iraq and continued to do so when they entered weapons sites that had been checked.

Those actions, Ritter claimed, completely undermined UNSCOM's legal and international base, upon which the inspection tasks were built.

Ritter's book sidelined him for good in the U.S. military-diplomatic debate. His claims were refuted completely by the State Department, while the Pentagon ran an intensive campaign against the book's very publication, claiming that Ritter's contract with the Defense Department forbade him to write without permission about his service as a weapons inspector.

Ritter was soon turned from a person with a legitimate opinion on U.S. policy in the Gulf to a crank fighting his own battle in a long-forgotten incident from the past.

For the U.S. administration, this was a comfortable situation, and it caused Ritter to become more and more entrenched in his own ideas as he continued to follow his government's "mistaken" policies on Iraq.

Ritter faced Congress in May 2000 on the matter of economic sanctions against Iraq when he came out on the side of those who were against imposing sanctions, claiming that continuing to pursue such a policy made no sense.

He blamed the Clinton administration for demonizing Saddam, which prevents a serious look at the issues which need to be resolved. "While Saddam Hussein is a horrible leader, a brutal dictator, and is clearly repressing the innocent people of Iraq, he is not the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler," he told the Congressional committee.

On the same occasion he also outlined his belief that Saddam's Iraq does not pose an unconventional threat to the world.

He said that Saddam may indeed have in his possession chemical and biological capabilities, but there is no real danger because his abilities to deliver such weapons are almost nonexistent and the weapons materials, which were manufactured before the war in 1991, are no longer effective.

Ritter went on to say that Iraq's current ability to manufacture chemical and biological material is very limited. To this day, he uses the same arguments as he lambasts the Bush administration's plans to attack Saddam.

U.S. preparations to go to war against Saddam have given Ritter another opportunity to hit the headlines, again as a voice of the opposition. He says that George W. Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein is a threat to world peace are unfounded.

"The Bush administration provides only speculation, failing to detail any factually based information to bolster its claims concerning Iraq's continuing possession of weapons of mass destruction," he wrote in the Boston Globe in July.

Ritter called on the U.S. Congress to rein in the president and said it was imperative to uncover the truth: that Bush's real aim is not based on the fear of weapons of mass destruction, but to bring about the downfall of Saddam.

Earlier this month, Ritter reached the conclusion that he was the one who would have to save the world from war. He went to a UN conference in Johannesburg, where he met Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi deputy prime minister. "I told him that if Iraq did not let the inspectors in, the U.S. would go to war and his country would be devastated," Ritter recounted.

He says he requested permission to go to Baghdad and say the same things; that is how he ended up addressing the Iraqi parliament.

The U.S. public learned of Ritter's initiative last weekend on television, where he was seen being interviewed by all the networks in front of a large mosque in Baghdad. He argued vehemently that there are no unconventional weapons in the area. The public and the interviewers saw his actions as a crossing of the lines. While in Europe and the Middle East his words were given some attention, in the U.S. he convinced nobody. Spokesmen for the administration brushed Ritter aside and the public has remained convinced that war against Saddam is the only option.

Since his return, Ritter has continued to argue that the U.S. administration does not show any proof to back up its claims against Iraq and is relying on vague intelligence information that Saddam is an unconventional threat on the region and the world.

"What is the U.S. policy? Disarmament or a change of the regime?" Ritter asks. Nobody is answering him, however.

The Israeli connection

Scott Ritter is considered to be the person who initiated cooperation between UNSCOM and Israel.

In 1992, when he found that he was not receiving help from the U.S. and the UN, Ritter suggested using Israel's proven ability in deciphering aerial photographs on suspected Iraqi military installations and places where weapons might be hidden.

"The Israelis happen to have an entire cadre of highly qualified photo interpreters, and they were more than willing to help us," he recounted.

Ritter said that Israel's assistance in deciphering the photographs had been the key to UNSCOM's success. "If it weren't for the government of Israel and the assistance it provided the special commission, the information fuel that feeds the inspection process would have run dry by the end of 1995. It was Israel and Israel alone that kept us going," he said when speaking on the TV program "Frontline."

Soon after he quit UNSCOM, Ritter was questioned by the CIA on suspicion of passing on information to Israel. The investigation did not unearth anything, mainly because Ritter had documented all his meetings with Israeli officials and had received the backing of the then head of UNSCOM, Rolf Ekeus, and from the U.S. State Department.

Even after he began to criticize the U.S., Ritter has remained a supporter of Israel - which he believes should lead the resistance to a war with Iraq because Israel itself will be the one to suffer most. "War against Iraq would be disastrous for Israel," he told Ha'aretz after returning from Baghdad. He said that Saddam Hussein would try to attack Israel with either conventional or unconventional weapons.

Ritter claims that a U.S. strike without the consent of the rest of the world would increase instability in the region and hatred in the Muslim world toward the U.S. and Israel. He also says that war would increase instances of terrorist actions against Israeli citizens. "Saddam is not the problem for Israel, rather it is Iraq and its unconventional weapons," Ritter said.

"A war would not be good for Israel, and I would be surprised if anybody in Israel would favor such a move," he said.

Ritter does not claim to know just how much Israel's fears of Iraq are founded on fact. In 1998 he came to the conclusion that Iraq is not able to pose a threat to Israel with unconventional weapons - not with chemical or biological materials - nor capable of launching missiles against it. "Even the Israeli government agrees with this assessment," he says.

Ritter claims that the weapons inspectors were 90-95 percent certain that they had matters covered, but he does not know what Saddam has managed to do since the inspectors left. He thinks that if Iraq did manage to build up secret stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, they could not be very effective.

The Iraqis, Ritter claims, have also not been able to restore their missile-launching capability because of international sanctions.

In Ritter's opinion Israel is in a tough position anyway - if Bush decides to attack Iraq, Israel will become a target for Saddam. The only way to avoid this scenario, he claims, is to reinstate the weapons inspection teams and hope that Saddam does not try to upset the apple cart.