Controversial former United Nations weapons inspector and United States Marine Corps veteran Scott Ritter believes that South Africa is one of three countries that could help restore Iraq’s confidence in a UN arms inspections process.
Ritter, who stopped over in Johannesburg on his way to Iraq, spoke to the Mail & Guardian last week. He has been the centre of media attention for the past few months since he cast aspersions on the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq is known to possess weapons of mass destruction and is actively seeking to reconstitute weapons production capabilities.
As US President George W Bush does the rounds to mobilise global support for military action against Iraq, Ritter has been zooming across the planet on a mission to prevent war.
He said South Africa, as the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, with Belgium and Canada, could help create conditions conducive to the resumption of arms inspections.
He raised the proposal again while addressing the Iraqi National Assembly this week, suggesting an “honest broker mechanism” that would enable UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq. Iraq shut its doors to UN arms inspections in 1998 and has refused to allow in any inspectors since then, despite numerous UN resolutions.
Ritter said there is a need for a “confidence-building mechanism” that would monitor interaction between weapons inspectors and Iraq to ensure that the inspectors do not deviate from the mandate of disarmament and that Iraq does not obstruct the work of the inspectors.
Ritter (40) speaks from experience. He quit his job as an arms inspector in Iraq in 1998, claiming to be a casualty of deviation from the UN mandate, namely interference by the US government and the obstruction of his work by Iraq.
The maverick former inspector is under several FBI investigations. One involves claims that Ritter is a spy for the Israeli government.
In January 1998 the Iraqi government accused Ritter of being a US spy. This almost led to the US initiating military strikes against Iraq, before UN Secretary General Kofi Annan defused the situation. Annan managed to negotiate an agreement that established new ground rules for weapon inspectors.
Ritter quit in March, and in August that year Iraq suspended cooperation with the UN Special Commission in charge of inspections in Iraq, known as Unscom.
Over the years Ritter, who is a Republican, has become an active proponent of lifting UN sanctions imposed on Iraq and a resumption of the weapons inspection process.
Ritter told the M&G that there is no factual evidence that Iraq has begun to reconstitute its weapons productions capabilities.
He said in the seven years he spent as chief weapons inspector in Iraq, the inspection team ascertained a 90% to 95% level of “verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factor associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment and the majority of weapons and agents produced by Iraq.”
He said while Iraq to an extent had the capability to reconstitute its chemical weapons programme, there was no evidence that it had done so.
In an article in The Boston Globe earlier this month Ritter said: “With the exception of mustard agent, all chemical agent produced by Iraq prior to 1990 would have degraded within five years (the jury is still out regarding Iraq’s VX nerve agent program [sic]) — while inspectors have accounted for the laboratories, production equipment and most of the agent produced from 1990/91, major discrepancies in the Iraqi accounting preclude any final disposition at this time.”
He said Iraq had the capacity to reconstitute its biological weapons programme but did not have the capacity to resuscitate its nuclear programme.
Ritter wrote in The Boston Globe that “effective monitoring inspections, fully implemented from 1994 to 1998 without any significant obstruction from Iraq, never once detected any evidence of retained proscribed activity or effort by Iraq” to reconstitute its biological warfare programme.
However, The Washington Post reported in July this year that Iraq may still possess actual biowarfare bombs. It pointed out that in a report to the UN Security Council in 1999, Unscom concluded that Iraq had concealed nearly 160 bombs and more than two dozen missile warheads filled with anthrax or other pathogens.
“Detailed accounts of what were described as secret labs were given to US intelligence officials last fall by Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, an engineer specialising in constructing dust-free ‘clean rooms’ needed for certain types of laboratory work. After fleeing Iraq in early December, he reported that as many as 300 secret weapons facilities had been ‘reactivated’ since the withdrawal of UN inspectors.”
The paper reported that the engineer was being kept in a safe house by the Defense Intelligence Agency and requests to interview Saeed were declined. “But according to a transcript of his debriefing session, which was made available by the Iraqi National Congress, a leading opposition group, Saeed said most of the facilities were small and cleverly disguised.”
Ritter maintained that his statements were based on the data that he had accumulated in his seven-year tenure with Unscom. He has said that no one knows what has transpired within Iraq in the past four years, which is why the Bush administration must provide conclusive proof.
He dismissed the Unscom chairperson — his former boss — Richard Butler’s affirmation of the Bush administration’s stance as being “emotionally influenced by political rhetoric”. Ritter asserts that Butler has the same data that he has.
Doesn’t he find it ironic that having once been assailed by the Iraqi administration, he is now being hailed as a hero by the anti-Iraq sanctions lobby? “No it is not ironic, I was trying to do my job then and I am still trying to do what I must do as an American citizen. I am not here for the Iraqi people — I am here for the American people.”
He says back in the 1990s he was trying to do his job for the UN as independently as he could, resisting pressure from the Iraqis and the US administration, whose only agenda was to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Now he believes that democracy in the US is under threat.
As he wrote in The Boston Globe, in its “apparent unwillingness” to “exercise its constitutional mandate of oversight, especially with regards to war” by not asking Bush to provide evidence and allowing his administration to “rush toward conflict with Iraq, to circumvent the concepts of democratic accountability, the [US] Congress is failing those to whom they are ultimately responsible — the American people.”