Scott Ritter

Speaks Out on Iraq

 

Scott Ritter in December, made his first visit to Australia to promote his new book, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America’s Intelligence Conspiracy which claims the CIA manipulated and sabotaged the work of UN departments to achieve the US’s long-held agenda of getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

History will harshly judge the UN’s former chief weapons inspector, Australian Richard Butler according to former weapons inspector and author, Scott Ritter who gave a public lecture at the University of Sydney.

Mr Ritter said his former boss who was head of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) from 1997 to 1999, was operating as a servant of America’s foreign policy of regime change in Iraq rather than being answerable to the UN Security Council.

"Richard Butler did weapons inspectors a disservice. He could have established that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and there would have been no war in Iraq," Ritter said.

"The Iraq war is a ‘failed policy’" says former weapons inspector. Ritter served as a major with the US Marine Corps in the first Gulf War and later as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He resigned in 1998 in protest at what he said was US manipulation of the UNSCOM mandate to disarm Iraq.

"The Iraq."The weapons inspections were just a tool to facilitate regime change in Iraq. It was never about disarmament, in fact disarmament was the enemy of American policy."

Scott Ritter said Iraq did have a large biological and nuclear weapons program but by 1991 all of Iraq’s WMDs had been destroyed.

"Saddam Hussein’s WMDs ‘framed’ the case for war in Iraq and the intelligence was fixed around it. The case for war made by George W. Bush was based on lies, distortion and deliberate misrepresentation of fact."

Mr Ritter described the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 as a war of aggression and occupation in violation of international law. He said the other members of the ‘coalition of the billing’; Britain and Australia were just "pliant puppets of the United States".

He said the war in Iraq is now acknowledged in the US as a "failed policy" but no American politicians are prepared to say the war was a mistake.

Scott Ritter described Iraq as a nation on fire. "There’s a horrific problem that faces not only the people of Iraq but the US and the entire world. And the fuel that feeds that fire is the presence of American and British troops….We’ve created a nightmare scenario in Iraq and the best we can do is mitigate failure. There’s not going to be victory in Iraq."

Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America’s Intelligence Conspiracy is published by I.B. Tauris. Palgrave Macmillan Publishers