Partial transcript of the Scott Ritter Interview of 12/02/09

This is a partial transcript of the interview given to Antiwar.com Radio by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter on 12/02/09.

The interviewer is Scott Horton. The URL for the interview is http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/12/04/scott-ritter-10/, and for the mp3 is http://dissentradio.com/radio/09_12_02_ritter.mp3.

This transcript will be updated as work completes on it.

(The transcription currently begins at time=5:48)

RITTER: As an inspector, my job was to carry out the mandate of inspection. And I was not being allowed to do that. And my mandate of inspections was based upon not only Iraq's past record of behavior in terms of lying to us, and retaining weaponry in violation of their obligation to disarm but also Iraq's behavior since then wherein they were obstructive to the work of inspectors.

So it led us to be suspicious, — uh, that Iraq led us as inspectors to be suspicious as to what Iraq's true intent was, what was going on here. We needed to clarify it. We sat down and laid out all the facts on the table. We wrote report after report after report that said "we can account for almost every missile there is", "there is no viable chemical weapons capability in Iraq today", "Iraq cannot produce a biological weapon".

We wrote these reports. But our job was 100% verification of Iraqi compliance, and we could not give that. And so we carried out inspections that were designed to get that.

And so long as the United States would not allow a qualitative assessment to be made — see, if the United States had said, "Well just, you know, bottom line — can Iraq produce weapons of mass destruction?" the answer was no. But that's not the benchmark that the United States and Great Britain and others put out there. They said, "100% compliance". And as long as that was the benchmark, we couldn't — we couldn't state that Iraq had achieved that benchmark, and so we as inspectors were going forward.

Now, when I resigned, I was allowed to apply qualitative assessments. In fact I wrote, I think, the definitive article on this issue, which is "The Case for the Qualitative Disarmament of Iraq" published in Arms Control Today in June of 2000. And it clearly states the case, and that case was borne out after the invasion in 2003, when the CIA's reports exactly matched that which I wrote in June of 2000, which says Iraq was fundamentally disarmed, that there was no weapons of mass destruction program still there. The thing that held us back was the requirement for quantitative disarmament, to account for 100% of everything. That was our job as inspectors, we weren't allowed to do that job, but — it was pretty much a moot job to begin with. But as an inspector, I'm not allowed to say that. I have to do the job that I'm mandated to do by Security Council resolution.

HORTON: Well, and so, this is actually the origin of what, from a very vague right-wing, pro-Iraq-war point of view was what they saw as your flip-flop from "This is the guy that used to be on TV saying 'it's not 100%' and 'Iraq is a danger', and now he's saying 'it might as well be 100%, it's close enough, and no, they're: not' ".

RITTER: Well, let's just be clear. What I said was, "You defined Iraq as a danger, so long as Iraq is not in compliance. So in order to reach your level of compliance, you have to let us do these inspections. And if you block us from doing these inspections, by your own definition, Iraq continues to be a danger." So I was basically throwing their words back in their face. But, the bottom line is, when you step back and say "well, is Iraq really a danger?", this is what the United States didn't want, was a debate to be held in the Security Council about why Scott Ritter and the other inspectors were going into Iraq kicking down doors and causing trouble. Why is it every couple of months we have an international crisis in Iraq over aggressive weapons inspections? What are the inspectors looking for?

I can guarantee you that in November of 1997, that was a question the Security Council was asking. "What exactly is it you're looking for?" And we had to craft, uh, you know, some very detailed presentations to present to the Security Council to explain what exactly we were looking for. Uh, you know, but in the end many in the Security Council, including the Russians, the French, the Chinese, said, you know, "But that's really — nothin.' " I mean, compared to what Iraq had, what you're looking for, is nothing. You don't even have hard evidence that this stuff exists. This is the last debate that the United States wanted to occur in the Security Council. They wanted to make it a clean debate which is "Iraq is non-compliant" as opposed to a murky debate that said "Yeah, y'know, might not be able to get 100% compliance, but um — gosh, haven't we fundamentally disarmed them? Iraq no longer poses a threat. Isn't this right?" And that was not the debate the United States wanted.

[time=10:23]

HORTON: Mm-hm. Now Andrew Cockburn reported that in 1997 — in fact I think I went back and found the, uh, y'know, some sort of corroboration in official statements back at the time. But he told a story where Madeleine Albright in 1997 was actually prepared to — somehow, I'm not sure of the exact terminology — somehow certify Iraq as weapons-of-mass-destruction free, but that then a decision was made, and I guess it was the president, Bill Clinton himself, preempted her, by saying that "as long as Saddam Hussein is in power, the sanctions will not be lifted". And so then that put all the pressure on him to — or put him in the position I guess where the most rational thing for him to do was say, "Well, then why should I allow any inspections at all? Why should I cooperate with any of this?"

RITTER: Well, I — I — it gets — it's more complicated than that. In 1995, Clinton — well, let's even go back further. When Bill Clinton came into office, during his transition period, the Clinton administration had reached out, officials from the future Clinton administration, from the transition team, had reached out to the Iraqi government through intermediaries in Jordan where they carried out extensive discussions, um, about what would happen when Clinton came into office. And basically the deal was that Iraq would fully cooperate with the weapons inspectors and that Bill Clinton would use this cooperation as the trigger for the eventual lifting of economic sanctions and the return to normalcy, bringing Iraq back into the family of nations. I remember sitting down with the oil minister, the chief weapons official, Amir Rashid, and he gloating that the "age of the inspectors was virtually over" — that with this new president things were going to change dramatically.

Uh, the problem was that when Bill Clinton got sworn in, in 1993, the last act of President George Herbert Walker Bush was to order military strikes against Iraq so that as Bill Clinton was being sworn in, we were technically at war with Iraq. Lot of Americans don't realize that, that we had active bombing campaign going on as Bill Clinton was being sworn in. Then Bill Clinton managed to navigate through that crisis, then we had the alleged assassination attempt against George Herbert Walker Bush when he was visiting Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government producing, you know, the culprits, producing weaponry, &c. Turns out that was all false, 100%. There was never an assassination attempt. But in the rush to judgment, based upon the political pressure based on Bill Clinton, er — put on Bill Clinton and his administration, the Clinton administration attacked Iraq — attacked the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in June of 1993 certifying the assassination attempt as legitimate. And once you do that, you cannot negotiate with Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein becomes a pariah that has to be dealt with. But Bill Clinton didn't have a plan to do that, he endorsed the Bush administration's regime change policy without funding it, but in 1995, Saddam Hussein's continued intransigence compelled Bill Clinton to order the CIA to up the ante. So in 1996 you had active ongoing assassination attempts, some of which used the UN weapons inspections as a front to gain access to Saddam Hussein, and these failed. They failed eggregiously. Uh, this embarrassed the United States. Now in 1997 the United States was at a crossroads. "What do we do with Iraq? Do we move forward with a disarmament mandate, or do we regime change?" I don't think that Madeleine Albright was on the verge of saying let's s — I know she was under pressure from outgoing Chairman Rolf Ekeus who was saying, y'know, "we think that we've accounted for everything we're going to account for, or we could mitigate against what might remain by noting that we have the most intrusive on-site inspection regime in the world, monitoring the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure." These are reports that were being given to Madeleine Albright, but in the end, Bill Clinton was under pressure from the Neo-Conservatives, and the Right Wing of his own party to hold Saddam Hussein to account.

[14:40]

So they embraced a policy of regime change. The cornerstone of regime change was the continuation of economic sanctions that were imposed on Iraq in August of 1990, sustained by Security Council resolutions linking the lifting of economic sanctions with Iraq's disarmament obligation. Therefore it became incumbent upon the United States to maintain the perception of Iraqi non-compliance as a vehicle of maintaining economic sanctions that served to destabilize and isolate and contain Saddam until which time an effective means of removing him from power could be achieved. This is why in 1997 every time the weapons inspectors started moving forward aggressively on an inspection issue, Madeleine Albright would pull the plug because she did not want to have a debate in the Security Council about why we were doing these inspections. She didn't want inspections that cleared up the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. She wanted an inspection program that sustained the notion of Iraqi non-compliance, and aggressive inspections became an enemy not a friend of American foreign policy.

HORTON: Now did you understand that at the time, you and your team?

RITTER: Ab-so-lutely we understood it. We understood even more in the Spring of 1998 when Madeleine Albright finally approved a series of aggressive inspections — March of 1998, an inspection that I led into Iraq, where the United States inserted the Iraqi Ministry of Defense as the dominant target, even though we didn't want to go to the Ministry of Defense, there's no compelling reason to go to the Ministry of Defense, in a White House meeting, where I was in the situation room with the National Security leaders of the United States, the United States said you will do this inspection but thinking, because Tariq Aziz has said that if you try to inspect the Ministry of Defense, this is an act of war.

So the United States was hoping that Iraq would reject the inspectors. And they had their military force all lined up.
They had cruise missiles targeted, with the coordinates loaded in, ready to strike. We were supposed to go to Iraq, attempt an inspection, get turned away, and as we left Iraq the cruise missiles were comin' in. That was the plan. Problem is, as a weapons inspector, my job isn't to facilitate military action. My job is to carry out my mandate of inspections, and I was able to work out a compromise agreement with the Iraqi government that gave me full access to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, me and my inspectors, and we inspected that facility thoroughly, and uh, and effectively. And we got rid of the threat of war.

[17:07]

Madeleine Albright was so incensed — she was sitting in Paris, France at the time bragging to the French government how in a few hours Saddam would be committing suicide. So when she got the phone call that, "no, the inspectors are under way, everything is goin' fine", and she just turned beet red in the face; she couldn't even talk to her French counterparts.

Clinton was accused of undermining the inspections. He gave a speech in April of 1998 in which he promised to give the inspectors every support — all the support they needed. Meanwhile, Albright, Berger, and the rest of the National Security establishment is meeting, drafted and passed a — y'know, new policy guidelines which said the United States will not support any aggressive inspections at all. And then they sold this to the British, and the British bought into it, and the result is that the two major powers in the Security Council who were proponents of weapons inspections in Iraq, or allegedly proponents, basically turned their back on the weapons inspection regime.