Room for a View

Killing the Defanged Tiger
Interview by Lorna Tychostup

Photo by Lorna Tychostup

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps Intelligence officer, who served with the United Nations Special Commission [UNSCOM] in Iraq from 1991-98. Working with hundreds of others, his job involved tracking down weapons of mass destruction. Before ultimately resigning, Ritter had been promoted to Chief of the Concealment Investigations Unit. His first book, Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem—Once and For All, was published in 1999. Ritter also filmed a documentary, Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq, exposing the ramifications of the failure of the US policy of economic sanctions-based containment of Iraq. Ritter currently serves as the lead on-air analyst for Fox News on issues pertaining to Iraq.

Ritter will be appearing on Tueday, April 23 at 7:30pm at SUNY New Paltz to screen and discuss Shifting Sands. For more information, call 257-4601. Shifting Sands will also be screened by Ritter at TSL Warehouse in Hudson on May 9, as part of TSL’s Time to Talk: Rebuilding Democracy series.

This is the first installment of a two-part interview to be continued in the May issue.
—Lorna Tychostup

Chronogram: Can you define weapons of mass destruction?
Scott Ritter: I’ll use the definition as set forth by section C of the relevant paragraphs of the Security Counsel resolution. Chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers. That’s what we were tasked to disarm in Iraq and that’s what we were going after.

C: You made a movie based on the events that took place over the course of your work in Iraq. Why did you make this movie?

SR: I made the movie because there was an awful lot of misinformation being bandied about by the media and, frankly speaking, by the American government, about the nature of the work of the weapons inspection teams, the nature of their interaction with the Iraqi government, and what the findings of the weapons teams were. In short, I believe the US government was manipulating what actually occurred to create a framework for justifying military action. But this was a framework based upon inaccurate information, incomplete information, and outright distortions. So I felt that.... I was in possession of facts that might offer a complete picture, and the best way to get the facts to as wide an audience as possible is to make a documentary that hopefully could be aired on television.

C: As a result of the work that you did in Iraq, you’ve stated, that to your knowledge, there are no biochemicals in Iraq today.

SR: No, that is not what I have stated. It is not a result of the work I did, it is the result of the work all inspectors did from 1991 to 1998. And what I and others did, including my former boss, Rolf Viques, a Swedish diplomat who headed the inspection organization from 1991 to 1997, we had stated that the weapons inspectors achieved a 90 to 95 percent level of accounting for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. What this means, is that the major factories that produced weapons of mass destruction were identified and destroyed. And the production equipment associated with the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction were identified and destroyed. That the vast majority of the weapons produced by these factories were identified and destroyed. There is a certain amount, 5 to 10 percent, that is unaccounted for. But we have no evidence that Iraq has retained this material. We just can’t account for it. And that because of this we feel, that Iraq was fundamentally disarmed. This means that Iraq is no longer capable of producing biological or chemical weapons, or nuclear weapons or long range ballistic missiles. This is the case. It is based upon fact. And many others share this assessment.

C: The movie states repeatedly that the US set up situations in order to provoke a conflict.

SR: But what is clear is that the US has a policy that is more focused on the removal of Saddam Hussein than the elimination of his weapons of mass destruction. And that weapons inspections were convenient to the US only so far as they assisted in their efforts to isolate, contain and destabilize Saddam Hussein. When inspections started getting on with the task of disarming Iraq— now keep in mind that economic sanctions, which are the cornerstone of the policy of “containing” Saddam, economic sanctions are linked to successful disarmament— the second the inspectors started getting into the position where they can account for Iraq’s weapons, where they can certify that Iraq no longer has viable weapons programs, suddenly this whole containment infrastructure is threatened. So that’s when the US manipulated the process. Either by providing false or misleading information, stopping the work of the inspectors, interfering with the work of the inspectors, using the inspectors to deliberately provoke confrontation, crisis and to spy on Iraq for purposes other than set forth by the Security Counsel. That is, for purposes pertaining more towards the elimination of Saddam Hussein than the elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs.

This is what occurred. This is one of the main reasons why weapons inspectors are no longer in Iraq ... Keep in mind, that the US is one of five permanent members of the Security Counsel, and that we voted for these resolutions, and that we, in theory, supported these resolutions and their full implementations. The reality, sadly was that while the [US] government told me one thing, oftentimes they were doing another thing behind my back.

C: In 1998 you resigned. Why?

SR: Because I could no longer faithfully execute the mission given to me of carrying out the provisions of the Security Counsel Resolution 687, and other related resolutions. This required me going into Iraq and adhering assiduously to only that which we were authorized to do. And now we had a situation where the US was unilaterally manipulating the weapons inspection process, trying to deliberately provoke confrontation, and worse—because of the difficult situation we found ourselves in with the Iraqi’s not providing us full access to the information they were required to by law—we oftentimes were carrying out inspection tasks that were unconventional in nature and could resemble espionage ... I had an obligation to protect the lives of the inspectors working for me, and the best way to protect them was to make sure they were never being used for intelligence gathering outside the framework of our immediate goal of disarming Iraq. And when the US started manipulating these inspection methodologies and using my inspectors in operations I was responsible for, collecting intelligence related to the security of Saddam Hussein, I felt that morally, I could simply not continue. So I resigned.

C: At that point, you also felt that Iraq was a “defanged tiger,” as you put it.

SR: Every inspector has their own interpretations and insights. What I would say is that the facts gathered by the weapons inspectors supported a 90 to 95 percent level of disarmament. And the facts gathered by the inspectors supported a finding that we had monitoring inspection teams in every major Iraqi industrial facility for over four years, and that these inspectors had never once uncovered any evidence of, not only retained capability, but reconstituted capability ... This was a common position held by all inspectors when we wrote our reports, never once could we state that we had evidence or proof that Iraq was in possession of prohibitive weapons.

C: Fast forward three years to the present. We’ve had 9/11. It seems there are rumblings rising about weapons of mass destruction— Korea, Iraq. Some are saying Iraq has had three years with no inspections to proceed and produce more of these weapons.

SR: I share the concern of everybody who wonders what is going on in Iraq in the intervening three years. But I think that any responsible individual rejects outright “absolute” findings based upon unsubstantiated speculation. And that is what is taking place here with people running around stating, as though it were fact, that Iraq has reconstituted its programs, that Iraq is in possession of biological weapons, that Iraq is working hard on a nuclear weapons program. Sounds great. It certainly pushes the fear button. Fear buttons that are more sensitive since September 11. But there are no facts to back this up. There is no substantive information that remotely suggests that this is taking place. In fact, all information available suggests just the opposite. It is only rhetoric that we have to build a case against Iraq. No facts.

I would tell people to calm down. Take a deep breath. Sit back and reflect on what we can bring to the table. We can bring to the table that Iraq was fundamentally disarmed in 1998, that we had taken Iraq’s capability to produce weapons of mass destruction down to as close to zero as you can get, and we can also understand the reality of just how difficult it is to produce weapons of mass destruction— chemical, biological, and nuclear. Take it out of the realm of fiction and bring it back into the world of fact and people might start to understand—even if Saddam wanted to rebuild these weapons programs, and I’ll make an argument in a second that he doesn’t want to—but even if he wanted to, he doesn’t have the ability to. Because of the economic sanctions. He doesn’t have the money, access to the technology, he no longer has the industrial infrastructure. It is pretty much physically impossible for him to rebuild these weapons of mass destruction programs in any meaningful way, even in three years. But if he had— understanding that you do not do this in a basement, or a cave—this requires industrial infrastructure that lends itself to detection by the very capable intelligence capabilities—not only of the US—but the rest of the world. And nobody, nobody, has detected such capability.
But I will also put forward that Iraq is a nation that has been defeated militarily, and has suffered egregiously due to over ten years of economic sanctions, and Saddam Hussein understands that sanctions can only be lifted when he has satisfied the international community’s concern about his weapons of mass destruction. Eventually weapons inspectors must be allowed back in. And he knows how good we were last time. He doesn’t allow us back in, because the US manipulated the program. The US turned the inspectors into a vehicle, not of disarmament, but of containing Iraq through continued sanctions and of spying on the Iraqi regime. That’s why the inspectors aren’t there. Iraq did not kick them out. The US ordered them out on the eve of a bombing campaign.

I am convinced that Iraq wants inspectors back in. If Iraq is going to let inspectors back in, Iraq knows that if they have done anything it will be detected. So I don’t think Iraq has done a darn thing in the last three years. I think this is all panic. We won’t know until we get inspectors back in, but I certainly would say that we can not justify going to war against Iraq because of our fear of the unknown. We go to war because there is a real risk to our national security interests. A risk that can be quantified with substantive fact. No one has put fact on the table— no fact worthy of our nation going to war.

C: According to a March 10 Reuters report, Iraq says it won’t allow arms inspectors to return.

SR: Iraq never said that. Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said that. That’s not Iraq. If you go back and read what he said yesterday, March 17, you will see that he reversed course on that statement. He said Iraq will consider [allowing] weapons inspectors back in. Understand that Iraq is playing political games. Dick Cheney is traveling around the world right now trying to beat the drums of war.

We have to be careful about these statements made in a politically charged environment. The facts are, Iraq sent their foreign minister Naji Sabri to the UN to meet with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and weapons inspections were out on the table. Their deputy Prime Minister, Tareq Aziz, made a statement that Iraq hasn’t rejected weapons inspections, they just don’t want that to be the only thing the UN focuses on. There are other things that are of concern—the enforcement of no-fly zones and the economic sanctions.

Ramadan is a hard liner. He came out and said, “We don’t want to let these spies back in.” He put a marker on the table saying that the American demands that when inspectors come back in they get full access to presidential palaces, to security institutions, to intelligence facilities and even greater access to Iraq then even UNSCOM had had. This is plainly unacceptable to the Iraqis. So Ramadan made that statement. Keep in mind, he just made another statement which contradicted [the first]. You don’t want to hang your hat on statements made by various political players. That is like condemning President Bush for every word that comes out of a Beltway debate.

C: It seems that with the media, they take one statement or one item and blast it everywhere, like smoke. The American public has to make their way through this smoky field to really figure out what the truth is, or what the truths are.

SR: If the American public even bothers working their way through the smoky field. If you take a look at the poll figures, the public accepts the smoke. When you’ve got 75 to 80 percent of the American public ready to go to war against Iraq based on the misinformation that has been spread, I don’t even think they take the time to go through the smoke. They just accept it at face value.

It’s curious. There was a poll just put out based upon the perceptions of Kuwait. This is the Kuwait that we went to war for back in 1991. I don’t know the exact numbers, but a very high number of Kuwaiti citizens polled think that Americans deserve 9/11. That we had it coming. That we’re to blame. Why do they feel that way? Because they are exposed to a lot of garbage and crap information.

When Americans take a look at the Kuwaiti poll figures, they say, “How in the world can they believe this stuff?” When the rest of the world looks at the American poll figures, they say, “What is going on in America? How can they be so ignorant?”

The fact of the matter is, with all due respect for the American public, by and large they are ignorant. They accept at face value the information they receive in the media, they don’t question it and wade through the smoke and as a result we get misleading poll figures that the government bases political decisions on. We’re going to go to war because President Bush looks at poll figures that say 75 to 80 percent of the American public support him going to war. Support that is derived from bad data, bad information.

C: The media are corporately driven. Even CNN, I don’t know what they are doing. They are putting forth stories that don’t make any sense compared to the information I get from alternative news sources. They’re not asking questions. They’re not probing deep enough.

SR: That is the big issue. The failure to probe... But the media is a tool. Anybody who allows themselves to sit in front of a TV, turn it on and turn off their brain and just accept at face value anything they see, anybody who listens to a politician speaking understands that there is an agenda being pushed someplace.

People have forgotten how to ask probing questions. I call it the cocoon of comfort. We have our cocoon of comfort that insulates us from a world that is growing in complexity. It’s not just putting the kitty out. It’s earning a living, paying the bills, it is tax season right now, it’s caring about local political issues. These are the things that more directly break into your cocoon of comfort. Do you want a Home Depot to be put up on Route 9W? What do you want to do about dredging of the Hudson River? These are local issues that people will definitely get excited about. How are we going to deal with a water shortage? By the time people finish with their life, they just don’t have the energy or the inclination to sit there and probe deeply into these other major issues: Afghanistan, terror, Iraq. And so when they turn on the TV they’re basically in brain dead mode and they just absorb what is given to them.

C: They are being fed like an infant in a highchair.

SR: Absolutely. I understand the concept of mitigating circumstance. But in the end, they are not infants, they are adults. And they don’t have to sit there and accept at face value what they are being fed. They need to ask the probing questions. And they need to not only hold their government officials accountable, they need to hold the journalists accountable. When they see a journalist doing a garbage job, [they should] write a letter, write a letter to the editor, write a letter to the producer of a show. If you get enough people to do that maybe the journalists will start at least modifying their approach somewhat.

C: That was the next question: What can people do?

SR: People know how to debate. We have arguments over a beer with friends at the bar. We know how to debate. Why do we forget our debating skills when it comes to issues like Iraq? And Iraq has to take on more of a preeminent position in people. Talk about the cocoon of comfort. But we’re getting ready to go to war.

C: We are at war.

SR: Well, yeah. You’re absolutely right ... We’re at war in Afghanistan. We’re at war against Iraq too.

C: We’re at war everywhere. We’re just at war. We are at war against an unseen, an unknown multitude of enemies who live everywhere.

SR: Ill-defined enemies ... Who may or may not exist.

C: People are starting to question: Did we really want Osama bin Laden’s head? Did we really want Saddam’s head? Even right now, given activities of the US government in the past, we have terrorists living in this country, former leaders of military who perpetrated torture upon people. Some of them live in Florida. Someone from Pol Pot’s regime lives in Westchester. A lot of people are starting to say, this didn’t start on 9/11. This didn’t start with Iraq. It’s oil. It’s all about oil.

SR: Look. It’s much more complicated than that because it is not about any one thing in particular. Oil is a major, major issue. It runs our economy. It runs the economy of the world. It’s got big money associated with it. Any time you’ve got big money associated with anything, it plays a dominant role. Of course it’s more than Sept 11. Of course, everything didn’t start with the collapse of the WTC. But we are in Afghanistan because of 9/11. We wouldn’t be in Afghanistan because of oil, I can tell you that much, We’re in Afghanistan because that is where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were.

C: There were reports in various journals [Indiareacts.com; Jane’s Defense] well before 9/11 that the US planned to invade Afghanistan sometime in October. Reportedly, [former National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski stated in his book, Total War, that “in 1979 President Carter authorized $500 million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilize the Soviet Union.” That is where the name “Taliban” came up, because the CIA [operated under] Operation Cyclone [which] poured $4 billion into the “setting up of Islamic training schools in Pakistan.” Taliban means student. In addition some of these young zealots were brought to a CIA training camp in Virginia, where members of al-Qaeda were taught “sabotage” skills.

SR: You’ve got to understand you have to separate Cold War activities and what is happening—the motivation for what occurred in the Cold War and what is occurring now—because once you set something in motion there is a blowback effect. I am sure we are seeing that today. The people that we are confronting today, their history goes back to confronting the Soviets.

We’re not in Afghanistan because of what happened in 1979—in terms of direct activity. It is not as though there is this master plan back in 1979 to get into Afghanistan. We’re in Afghanistan because they brought down the WTC. That’s why we’re there. Plain and simple. We’re there because we thought we were going to destroy the Taliban, get al-Qaeda and get Osama bin Laden.

We failed. Miserably.

Part two of Chronogram’s interview with Scott Ritter will continue in our May issue, when Ritter will discuss the CIA intelligence apparatus, why America was taken by surprise on September 11, and the uses of ideology in the War on Terror.

—Lorna Tychostup