Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein

Friday, October 21st, 2005
Scott Ritter on the Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/21/144258

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We speak with Scott Ritter, the chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 about his new book: "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein." It details how the CIA manipulated and sabotaged the work of UN departments to achieve the foreign policy agenda of the United States in the Middle East. [includes partial transcript] In a major article in The New York Times this weekend, reporter Judith Miller admitted she was wrong when she wrote several of the key articles that claimed Iraq had an extensive weapons of mass destruction program ahead of the 2003 invasion. Miller wrote, "W.M.D. -- I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong." Today we are joined by someone who was not wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - Scott Ritter. He was the United Nations" top weapons inspector in Iraq at UNSCOM between 1991 and 1998. Before working at the UN he served as an officer in the US marines and as a ballistic missile adviser to General Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf war.

Scott Ritter has just published a new book titled "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein." The book details how the CIA manipulated and sabotaged the work of UN departments to achieve the foreign policy agenda of the United States in the Middle East.

* Scott Ritter, was the United Nations' top weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. Before working for the UN he served as an officer in the US marines and as a ballistic missile adviser to General Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf war. He is author of a new book, just out, titled "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein."

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Welcome to Democracy Now!.

SCOTT RITTER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Well, what do you think is the greatest misunderstanding of the American people right now about what has happened in Iraq?

SCOTT RITTER: Well, first of all, the reason that we're there. They think that this was an accident, that this was a noble cause, that people like the president, like Bill Clinton before him, like their respective administrations, journalists like Judith Miller just honestly got it wrong. And I don't think – you know, here we are today in Iraq and it's a disaster. I don't think anybody's going to debate that statement. Some people say though, ‘We're working towards a continuation of this noble objective. We got rid of Saddam Hussein. That's a good thing. And now we're going to try to build on that good.’ I'm not going to debate whether or not getting rid of Saddam Hussein is a good thing or not. But, you know, if you embrace the notion that the ends justify the means, that's about as un-American a notion as you can possibly get into. We're talking about solving a problem. We have yet to define the problem. The problem isn't just what's happening in Iraq but it's the whole process that took place in the United States leading up to the war, this dishonest process of deliberately deceiving the American public. And it's not just George W. Bush. For eight years of the Clinton administration, that administration said the same things. The C.I.A. knew, since 1992, that significant aspects of the Iraqi weapons programs had been completely eliminated, but this was never about disarmament

AMY GOODMAN: How did they know this?

SCOTT RITTER: They knew it, (a) because of their own access to intelligence information and (b) because of the work of the weapons inspectors. In October of 1992, I personally confronted the C.I.A. on the reality that we had accounted for all of Iraq's ballistic missile programs. That same year they had an Iraqi defector who had laid out the totality of the Iraqi biological weapons program and had acknowledged that all of the weapons had been destroyed. The C.I.A. knew this. But, see, the policy wasn't disarmament. The policy was regime change. Disarmament was only useful in so far as it facilitated regime change. That's what people need to understand, that this was not about getting rid of weapons that threatened international peace and security. This has been about, since 1991, solving a domestic political embarrassment. That is the continued survival of Saddam Hussein, a man who in March 1990 was labeled as a true friend of the American people and then in October 1990 in a dramatic flip-flop was called the Middle East equivalent of Adolph Hitler.

JUAN GONZALES: You were involved for quite a long time with UNSCOM. At what point did you, as you were working for the United Nations, reach the conclusion that regime change really was the intent of the program that – well, the United States intent behind the program that you were involved with?

SCOTT RITTER: It wasn't a matter of reaching a conclusion. When I joined in September of 1991, that was already the stated policy of the United States government. I outlined this in the book. The fact that in April, 1991, the United States helps draft and then votes in favor of a Chapter 7 resolution 687 that creates the weapons inspections, call upon Iraq to disarm and in Paragraph 14 says if Iraq complies, economic sanctions will be lifted. This is the law. A few months later, the president, George Herbert Walker Bush and the Secretary of State say economic sanctions will never be lifted against Iraq, even if they comply with their obligation to disarm, until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power. It's the stated policy of the United States government. What we weren't quite aware of is just to what extreme they would go in undermining the credibility and integrity of the United Nations inspection process to achieve this objective.

AMY GOODMAN: Something that has been repeated over and over again is that Saddam Hussein kicked out the U.N. weapons inspectors. Can you tell us what happened?

SCOTT RITTER: Well, there are several periods of time, but the most dramatic is the December 1998 period right before Bill Clinton got on national TV, talked about the threat of W.M.D. and said he is launching an air campaign, 72 hours of bombardment called Operation Desert Fox. No, Saddam did not kick the inspectors out. Actually, what was happening at that point in time is that the Iraqi government was complying with every single requirement set forth by the Security Counsel and the inspectors. They were cooperating with the inspectors, giving the inspectors access in accordance to something called the ‘modalities of sensitive site inspections.’

Public perception is that the Iraqis were confrontational and blocking the work of the inspectors. In 98% of the inspections, the Iraqis did everything we asked them to because it dealt with disarmament. However when we got into issues of sensitivity, such as coming close to presidential security installations, Iraqis raised a flag and said, “Time out. We got a C.I.A. out there that's trying to kill our president and we're not very happy about giving you access to the most sensitive installations and the most sensitive personalities in Iraq.” So we had these modalities, where we agreed that if we came to a site and the Iraqis called it ‘sensitive,’ we go in with four people.

In 1998, the inspection team went to a site. It was the Baath Party headquarters, like going to Republican Party headquarters or Democratic Party headquarters. The Iraqis said, “You can't come in – you can come in. Come on in.” The inspectors said, “The modalities no longer apply.” The Iraqis said, “If you don't agree to the modalities, we can't support letting you in,” and the Iraqis wouldn't allow the inspections to take place.

Bill Clinton said, “This proves the Iraqis are not cooperating,” and he ordered the inspectors out. But you know the United States government ordered the inspectors to withdraw from the modalities without conferring with the Security Council. It took Iraqis by surprise. Iraqis were saying, “We're playing by the rules, why aren’t you? If you're not going play by the rules, then it’s a game that we don't want to participate in.” Bill Clinton ordered the inspectors out. Saddam didn't kick them out.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Your point that this kind of deception occurred under both Democrats and Republicans would at least suggest that what's happened in Iraq is not just a question of a bunch – of a cabal of zealots in the White House right now that are conducting this – that are hijacking policy but that there are deeper interests involved in the United States and the kind of policy that we've had in Iraq. You get into some of that in the book. Could you talk about that a little bit?

SCOTT RITTER: Well, I don't want to sound – I'm not somebody who’s into conspiracy theories, and I'm not somebody who’s out there saying this is about global oil. The tragedy of Iraq is that it’s about domestic American politics. This is a president, George Herbert Walker Bush, who in 1990, traps himself rhetorically by linking Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler. Once you do that, once you speak of a Nuremburg-like retribution, you can't negotiate your way out of that problem. Now it's either deliver Saddam Hussein's head on a platter or you failed. He tried to during the Gulf War. I was part of a team that was targeting Saddam. We didn't succeed.

Now the C.I.A. says, “Don't worry, Saddam will be gone in six months. All you have to do is contain him, put these sanctions in place and keep him bottled up and he'll collapse.” Six months later Saddam Hussein is still there. His continued survival became a political embarrassment that had to be dealt with.

This was inherited by Bill Clinton. The irony is that Bill Clinton – and I'm very critical of Bill Clinton, but you know, in the period between his election in 1992 and his being sworn in, his administration reached out to the Iraqis in saying, “Look, this is a ridiculous policy, let's figure out how we can get sanctions lifted and get you back into the family of nations.” But when politicians in Congress, both Democrat and Republican, found out about this, they said, “You can't do this. We have told our constituents this man is Hitler, and we can't negotiate with the devil.”

We were trapped by this policy. And this cabal we speak of, the neoconservatives, they may not have originated this policy but they exploited eight years of Clinton administration's ineffective policy of dealing with Saddam. Saddam's survival for eight years empowered the neoconservatives to use regime change as a rallying cry for the Republican Party. [break]

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