Scott Ritter, former Gulf War marine and head UN weapons inspector in Iraq, correctly stated in 2002 that Iraq had no WMD and that the US was ignoring evidence to such conclusion in a rush to war.
Ritter was roundly denounced as ill-informed and clueless by the most prominent figures in the pre-war debate. He was often catagorized as a traitor, a Saddam collaborator, and in one case, a “Benedict Arnold”.
There were attacks on his credibility and personal life. I recall hearing one accusation on radio news sometime in 2003 that he was involved in child pornography or sex with an underage partner (or something like that). But I never heard anything about this again. I’m thinking it was an effort to discredit him during the early euphoria of the war.
Now I cant find anything on this. Was I mistaken? Was I thinking about John Ritter? To summarize, does anybody know if Scott Ritter was accused of a sex crime or other misdeed?
Yes, and [this report from the Associated Press](the charges were dismissed and the records sealed) says “the charges were dismissed and the records sealed.” The incident occurred in June 2001, but became national news in January 2003 when the story began to circulate again.
Ritter’s critics insist these charges make him an untrustworthy spokesman. His defenders insist the re-airing of the story (and perhaps even the original charges) were a politically motivated campagin to discredit him.
There is a laundry list of other questions concerning Scott Ritter. First, he made a film in 2000 which was financed by an individual who allegedly benefitted from connections to Saddam’s regime. The thrust of the film was anti-sanctions.
In the early 1990s, he met a Georgian woman, who would later become his wife, who was a translator for the Russian government. There are allegations that she had KGB connections. There are stories that he passed intelligence to Israel during his UN days.
As others have said, there’s the Internet sex thing, too.
I have no clue whatsoever if these allegations are true or if they are simply dirty tricks. What concerns me about Scott Ritter the most was not necessarily all this dirt on his personal life, it is the bizarre turnaround in his view of Iraq from his time as a UN arms inspector to the criticism that he levelled at the Bush Administration. The transformation is utterly bizarre.
When he left UNSCOM in 1998, his public comments were akin to any of those that would have come from Wolfowitz, Feith, et al: he accused the US of “caving in” to Saddam in failing to make adequate efforts to discover and disarm Iraqi WMD. In fact, he called for “a major campaign that seeks to destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein” soon after his resignation from the UN. Contrast that with his strident statements of 2002 and 2003, in which he said that UNSCOM had completed its mission, and decried the proposal of war.
By way of background, I consider myself strongly anti-war, but I personally have sympathy with those who express concerns about this bizarre shift in views.
Ravenman, the 180 reversal is puzzling. However, it sounds familiar to the Republican talking point regarding WMDs - basically that Clinton said they had WMDs too.
I think the big difference was that in 1998, we weren’t proposing war. Tough talk towards the Iraqis was a diplomatic tactic.
In 2002, the tough talk was directed at the American public in making a case for war. In 1998, we were still in Iraq conducting inspections. I’m not sure about this, but I imagine Scott Ritter wanted us to stay and keep the pressure on.
About the alleged “turnaround”. It was a policy of the Clinton administration to squeeze Saddam and keep the sanctions on. To do this they perpetually claimed that Saddam had WMDs and they just needed access to Some Other Places. For example, Saddam’s palaces. Saddam refused, the sanctions stayed in place.
Clinton knew, Shrub knew, everyone knew Saddam had no WMDs. The difference was that Shrub went to war.
Note that in Diplomacy Land, you never, ever admit you lied. So you will never hear an official announcement from Clinton or anyone that it was all baloney. But you will see a lot of winking.
For anyone to cite the Clinton-era WMDs-sanction tactic as “proof” of WMDs is really bad logic.
Except that doesn’t make sense. Why was it Clinton’s policy to keep the sanctions and routinely bomb Iraq on if he wasn’t worried about WMD programs? Because, remember, the sanctions were pretty horrific too. Isn’t it more likely to assume that the Clinton White House thought that Iraq had those programs and that they just weren’t sufficient justification to go to war?
Because it was the politically smart thing to do. It allowed him to say he was doing something about Iraq without making some kind of major and dangerous commitment. Same reason he bombed Iraq after the very sketchy evidence that Saddam tried to assassinate George H.W. Bush turned up.
If Clinton was seriously worried about Iraq’s WMD, he would have taken more active measures against them. He preserved the status quo because that was the smart thing for him to do. If he had lessened the sanctions, he would have been savaged for it and gained nothing. As it turned out, of course, the sanctions worked, but with Saddam being Saddam, that wasn’t known with 100% certainty, which was another reason not to remove them.
Let’s not forget that one of Ritter’s biggest problems with the US during his period as inspector and afterwards: he alleged that the CIA was using the UN inspections as a means to conduct espionage (i.e., CIA operatives going w/ the UN teams on their inspections, so that they could get access to all sorts of places … which infuriated Saddam, naturally).
Whether or not that can be proven is a subject for GD, but it is irrefutable that, during Ritter’s time as an inspector before he resigned in 1998, he was perhaps the most outspoken in claiming that Saddam had something hidden somewhere else – the New Yorker carried a story in November 1998 entitled “Scott Ritter’s Private War” – and his methods of aggressive, unannounced inspections were even viewed as controversial among the other inspectors. Regardless of what any President may have said publicly or thought in his heart of hearts, the fact is that Ritter was a hardass in the extreme in pinning Saddam to the wall for WMD right through 1998. It is a fact.
However, this is another bizarre twist in his story. Ritter has more or less openly admitted that he was a prime contact between various intelligence agencies and the UN inspectors. I quote from Hans Blix’s book, “Disarming Iraq,” page 37: “Scott Ritter’s description in interviews… of American domination of UNSCOM and of his own extensive cooperation with American and Israeli intelligence had an impact [in critically damaging the credibility of UNSCOM], even though they were in part refuted by Richard Bulter and Rolf Ekeus.”
All I know is, leading up to the war in 2002, I saw Ritter regularly on TV stating that Iraq did not have significant WMD, and that the Bush team was cherry-picking information to imply that they did. Since he was one of the primary UN inspectors in the 1990s, I figured he should know as good as anyone.
What he said in the mid-1990s kinda of gave him credibility. ie. he used to be on the other side, and switched, probably for a good reason.
Fox News CNN, etc. denounced him as a wacko and lumped him in with the likes of Congressman Jim McDermott (aka Bahgdad Jim)…another guy who had it right all along.
Scott Ritter’s turnaround could also indicate that he is a good and moral man with a conscience and foresight.
Scott has a military background and had a very unique perspective of Iraq militarily and socially, as well as an insiders view of our own policy. He might have foreseen the morass that was to come and felt a duty to his brothers and sisters in the American Military to prevent their needless deaths and fight the political apparatus that would be sending them to their deaths with a huge lie.
I don’t disagree with this but want to add that this was almost exactly Bush’s strategy as well from 1/20/2001 until 9/11/2001. After 9-11, (or if we accept the Downing street memo at face value we can say at least by 7/23/02) U.S. policy shifted. It became, paraphrasing what Bush himself said, no longer acceptable to have Saddam doing Og knows what with WMD’s. But I think making a Clinton, Bush II (Or for that matter Bush-I) policy distinction on Iraq, without mentioning 9-11, is incomplete.
Let me start by saying that what follows is not a rhetorical question. My understanding is that over the relevant period, Saddam went from being coy and giving the impression he might have WMD, to eventually succumbing to pressure and essentially bent over let inspectors inspect everywhere, up to and including his palace.
Is a possible simple explanation that Ritter thought Saddam had WMD and said so in 1998, but by 2002 when full inspections had been allowed and nothing had been found, Ritter accepted he had been wrong.
As I say, I don’t know if the answer, but your comments don’t seem to even cover off this possibility. Admitting one is wrong when further information comes to light may be a rare trait, but it isn’t bizarre.
You’re right that he didn’t do anything different and I know what his comments about Iraq were prior September 11th, but we don’t really know what his long-term strategy regarding Iraq was at that time.
It is entirely possible that Ritter simply woke up one morning and decided that he had been wrong. It is also possible that he had an agenda. This being GQ, I think the best that can be done is state that attributing one motivation or another to his change in views in an incredibly difficult thing to establish factually. Mind you, I haven’t read his book, so there might be interesting information there.
As far as the timeline goes, Ritter resigned from UNSCOM in August 1998. UNSCOM was out of Iraq in December 1998. He became an outspoken opponent of the war by, at latest, mid-2002, if not earlier. UNMOVIK, the new UN arms inspectors, did not arrive in Iraq until December 2002, so there had been four years without UN inspections of any sort in Iraq. His claims of “no WMD” clearly began at a time when he was not involved in inspections, and his opposition to the war predated new UN inspections by at least half a year.