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Weapons inspector says US lied
26/04/2003 15:43 - (SA)
Washington - Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq for seven years, said that if the American and British justification for the attack on Iraq turns out to be a fabrication, which he believes to be the case, the war will turn out to be a defeat for the United States and for the international rule of law.
Ritter, speaking to the Palestine Centre, a Washington think tank on the Middle East, said defeating the Iraqi military is not the test of whether the two allies achieve a final victory. The test is whether the operation brings democracy or something like it to the Iraqi people, he said.
And if it turns out the basis for the attack - Iraq's alleged possession and development of weapons of mass destruction - was false, then the Iraq people would never accept an American presence in their country, Washington would have lost the war and U.S. troops would be in Iraq for a long time, the former US Marine major said.
If the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction turns up nothing significant, Ritter added, it would demonstrate that the United Nations inspections had done their job in the past.
Ritter was part of the inspection team in 1995 when General Hussein Kamal, who had been in charge of the weapons of mass destruction programme in Iraq and then defected to Jordan, was interrogated by US intelligence agents and UN inspectors. Kamal said he had supervised the destruction of all of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons. Kamal later returned to Iraq, where he was assassinated.
Ritter said US Secretary of State Colin Powell had misled the UN Security Council earlier this year when he claimed Iraq had purchased 100 tons of uranium ore from the African nation of Niger. Later, when the documents about the alleged purchase were shown to UN inspectors, it took 24 hours for them to determine that they were crude fabrications.
The American government also publicly charged that Iraq had a new supply of Scud missiles, the type of rocket that had hit Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. But American inspection teams, now free to roam Iraq, have found none of those missiles.
The views expressed by Ritter were being echoed by others as the American and British forces fail to find any of the weapons that were a principal justification for the war. Eric Margolies, a foreign editor for the Toronto Sun, said a further charge that Iraq was sponsoring terrorism turned out to be baseless: No terrorist links have so far been found, just one retired Palestinian thug, Abu Abbas. And no link to al-Qaeda.
Some critics, such as Margolies, fear that American troops will shortly discover a smoking gun to justify the invasion, even if one must be created.
Scott Ritter thought that scenario unlikely. The American and British military forces in Iraq, he said, were made up of honourable men and it would be almost impossible to cover up a dishonourable act such as fabricating physical evidence.
Underlying the critics' worries is that if it turns out the invasion was based on false pretences and, in Ritter's caustic words, this turns out to be like "a west Texas lynch job", the United States will have entered a new era of imperialism in which the president and his men have lost their own moral standing, the outspoken Marine said, and credibility and the rule of international law will have been replaced by the law of the jungle, in which might makes right. - Sapa-DP
- SAPA
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