Socialist Outlook : SO/08 - Winter 2005

Review

Iraq Confidential

Scott Ritter (with an introduction by Seymour Hersh)
David Coen

The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein

In 1998 Scott Ritter resigned as the Chief Weapons Inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) set up 7 years earlier to implement UN resolution 687 which demanded the destruction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The penalty for non-compliance was the tight economic sanctions imposed on Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait in 1991.

What Ritter didn’t know then, but his bosses in the US government (as well as the British) probably did, was that Saddam Hussein had already destroyed Iraq’s WMD in the summer of 1991, once it became clear that the US was not going to follow up the destruction of his army in Kuwait by marching on Baghdad.

Scott Ritter is a former intelligence officer in the US marines with the rank of major. A ballistic missiles expert, he was a missiles adviser to General Norman Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf War in 1991. Though the inspection teams assembled by UNSCOM were drawn from many countries, key personnel were usually from the US and it relied heavily on US, British and Israeli intelligence in order to conduct its searches. For all that he was a ‘true blue’ American patriot, Ritter realised that UNSCOM had to have at least the appearance of impartiality in order to credibly carry out its work. But such ‘impartiality’ was also required by the US to give weight to its demands for ‘tough action’ should the inspection show that disarmament had not been carried out. This was a constant issue, especially when the US would brief US personnel in UNSCOM separately and the other UN inspectors were not allowed access to that intelligence.

The book details Ritter’s growing disillusion as he sees through the long drawn out process of inspections, how UNSCOM was an unwitting tool of US foreign policy. Even as resolution 687 was being debated at the UN, the Bush (Snr) government had made it clear that economic sanctions against Iraq would not be lifted even if it destroyed its WMD. The arrival of Bill Clinton in 1992 made no difference to the policy. A clinching moment came in 1996 when the US attempted to foment a coup against Saddam Hussein with the help of Iraqi exiles in the US and London. One of the plotters was one Iyad Alawi, M16 asset and former Iraqi intelligence officer who had monitored the activities of Iraqi students in London in the 1970s and was later appointed Prime Minster of the post-invasion government by Paul Bremner.

When Iraqi Intelligence rolled up the plot and the plotters were executed, UNSCOM was discredited even more seriously than it had been before. For what was becoming clear to Ritter was that the CIA were setting up a series of wild goose chases with the intention of keeping pressure on Saddam and then preparing for military intervention. According to the UN’s own figures, the effect of sanctions was the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In 1997, the British confirmed that the CIA was using UNSCOM as a cover for secret monitoring of communications inside Iraq. When he reports this to Charles Duelfer, the American deputy director of UNSCOM, he’s told to ‘forget it’ despite the danger this posed to inspectors in Iraq.

From early in the investigation Ritter had concluded that the Inspectors had accounted for 90 – 95% of Iraq’s weapons, including documents and records that might enable Iraq to resume production at a later date. Though Saddam Hussein had destroyed the WMD he couldn’t risk revealing it because this would undermine him politically. More importantly, Ritter discovered that Saddam’s minders in the Special Republican Guard (SRG) had originally been involved in destroying the weapons and later concealing the documentation. To have in-depth investigations into the SRG would have threatened Saddam’s security when the US was trying to have him assassinated and so there was little chance of UNSCOM achieving 100 percent certainty.

Of course the CIA were not the only players in this long drama. Another was Ahmed Chalabi, fraudster, friend of the US neo-conservatives. who wanted him installed as President of Iraq (he was a member of the interim governing council immediately after the invasion) and described as Iraq’s Ian Paisley because of his willingness to stir up sectarian hatred between Shia and Sunni. Though Ritter doesn’t mention it, Chalabi is very close to the Iranian regime and it seems that some of his ‘intelligence’ about Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, came from Iran. One of Chalabi’s chief outlets in the US press was Judith Miller, the New York Times journalist whose stories about Saddam’s alleged WMD prepared the east coast intelligentsia for Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Generously funded by the CIA since the foundation of his Iraqi National Congress in 1992, he attempted to speed US intervention by fabricating sources and feeding the CIA damming information about Saddam’s weapons programme later found to be false. Despite repeatedly drawing blanks, Charles Duelfer, the deputy director of UNSCOM continued to urge Ritter to take Chalabi seriously. Ritter remarks that key parts of Bush’s justification for war were based on intelligence ‘gaps’ which he had provided to Chalabi 5 years before.

By 1998 Ritter, frustrated by what he saw as the efforts of the Clinton administration to hinder his efforts to prove that Iraq had no WMD, because to do so would result in the lifting of sanctions, realised that the policy since 1991 had been the removal of Saddam Hussein, not disarming Iraq of its WND. Ritter is no radical. An honest servant of the US ruling class, he had become very disturbed by the misuse of intelligence which undermines the very ‘freedom and democracy which he thought he was defending.

David Coen is a member of Socialist Outlook’s editorial board.

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