By William A. Mayer, Editor & Publisher - PipeBombNews.com
Until his resignation in 1998, Scott Ritter was the chief inspector for the UN’s “UNSCOM” team that was responsible for the detection and elimination of Sadam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
For the past couple of weeks he has been trotted out – a powerful walking talking dog and pony show – as the featured guest on left-wing soapboxes such as National Public Radio and television programs underwritten by the National Corporation For Public Broadcasting - he was the featured guest on the September 28th News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
Ritter has engaged in a nasty war of words with Vice President Richard Cheney over Cheney’s assertions that not only did UNSCOM inspectors miss significant numbers of Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction, sub factories and caches - but that inspectors, when faced by a regime with a verifiable 20 year history of weapon concealment, can not – ever – be trusted to find every concealed weapon.
It is the administration’s belief that when the potentially concealed weapons might be nuclear, only a policy of zero tolerance is acceptable.
Ritter has experienced a rather strange metamorphosis since he resigned in 1998 – claiming [correctly] that the Clinton administration, acting through Madeline Albright and Sandy Berger were no longer supporting the effort to discover what Sadam was up to, that they refused to push the UN to allow Ritter and his team to proceed as required by UN Security Council resolution 1154, which set strict inspection standards following Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War.
“The bottom line is we haven't had-the United States hasn't had this kind of Security Council support for many years now, and Security Council support is eroding, eroding in large part because of a lack of American leadership…they made me a lightning rod for attention, and there many in the U.S. administration of Madeleine Albright included, who felt that my inclusion on certain inspections would attract attention and would become the cause for conflict…” McNeil Lehrer News Hour - August 31, 1998.
And in another forum:
“…if Iraq were able to obtain fissile material of the quality and of the proper physical properties conducive to such a weapon, then they could assemble three nuclear devices in a very short period of time.” House International Relations Committee - September 15, 1998
Ritter said that he did not have the support that supposedly would have been necessary for a complete – at least in his mind – disclosure from Iraq.
“Iraq still has prescribed weapons capability. There needs to be a careful distinction here. Iraq today is challenging the special commission to come up with a weapon and say where is the weapon in Iraq, and yet part of their efforts to conceal their capabilities, I believe, have been to disassemble weapons into various components and to hide these components throughout Iraq” McNeil Lehrer News Hour - August 31, 1998.
It seems that what Mr. Ritter was saying in 1998 is diametrically opposed to what he is saying now:
“They would need a reconstituted enrichment program that was eradicated completely and this is not something that’s going to be done void of detection. The Israeli army chief of staff came out yesterday and said he is not losing any sleep over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. If Israel, which will bear the brunt of any Iraqi attack, isn't concerned, I don't see why Dick Cheney is.”
And in the same forum:
“I can tell you right now that while Iraqi cooperation wasn't perfect and while they did conceal what Vice President Cheney said to the American people is tantamount to a lie. The CIA knows that.” NewsHour with Jim Lehrer - August 28, 2002
Lest we forget, UNSCOM was withdrawn from Iraq for the last time to make way for operation Desert Fox - a 72-hour campaign launched on December 17, 1998 - not so curiously, just two days before Clinton was impeached by a courageous Republican House of Representatives.
Given Ritter's bomb throwing tour of America's least patriotic news institutions, it would seem that his real antipathy should be reserved for the guy who orchestrated the tail-wagging dog, but of course that would deny him a forum.
Clinton's Machiavellian machinations were the sole reason for the UNSCOM inspectors being removed and they remain the single reasonable reason why Sadam refuses to allow them to re-enter Iraq. Since Ritter has also publicly stated that the targeting coordinates used in Desert Fox were provided by UNSCOM and were not consistent with removing weapons of mass destruction but rather to attempt to kill Sadam, a big gamble for Clinton who thought that removing the hated dictator Sadam would deflect the heat of public opinion, then focused on his impeachment.
So what is going on inside Major Ritter’s head?
Well maybe a couple of things.
He has always been a prickly personality, to put it in the most charitable light.
In a process quite reminiscent of his current flame war with Cheney, he contradicted Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, during the Gulf War, over the verification of the number of Scud missiles destroyed in Desert Storm and fought a highly public battle with him that bordered on insubordination.
Ritter is, for whatever reason, wedded to the belief that the United Nation’s phony agenda trumps US national security concerns - he manifestly does not support the removal of Sadam [regime change] regardless of Ritter's rather voluminous accounting of Sadam's efforts to obfuscate.
Ritter's arrogance is so profound that he simply refuses to believe that anything was beyond his gaze during his stay in Iraq - this despite the fact that his UNSCOM team totally and completely missed Sadam's professional hijacking school which was located in Salam Pak.
This terror school was revealed by Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, an Iraqi military officer who defected from Iraq to Turkey in 1999 and thereafter exhaustively debriefed by US intelligence.
It was during these debriefings that Alami described the school in detail, about how the "students" got to practice the intricacies of the hijacker's art on a full-sized Boeing 707 jet airliner.
The date?
1995 to at least 1998, right smack in the middle of Ritter's UNSCOM tour.
Add to that, Ritter - incredibly - thinks that somehow Sadam will, if inspectors are allowed back into Iraq - play ball our way – something that borders on the ridiculous, since all evidence points to the contrary.
Possibly, most damning to Ritter's reputation are these two considerations:
First, Ritter does not take into account the fact that even one nuclear weapon in Sadam’s hands is unacceptable, and that the driven dictator will continue to seek such until he either succeeds or he is terminated.
Sadam's creation of a hit squad to attempt to assassinate President George Herbert Walker Bush [narrowly averted] during his visit to Kuwait in 1993 should have been all the warning Ritter should have needed to assess Hussein's long term goals and murderous intent.
Second, Ritter in pigheaded pursuit of his little vendetta against the Vice President, is playing directly into the hands of those who seek to undermine US security – this is his real sin – he could be pursuing this behind closed doors and away from the public spotlight, but then that would not serve what apparently is his bottom line – promoting his book.
So consider this one of the most circuitous, self-righteous book publicity tours in recent history.
The captured media just loves it, a square jawed, clear-eyed, terribly misguided Marine Major who every day does great harm to the country he once so proudly served.