Ritter's Metanoia

The metamorphosis of Scott Ritter has been a strange spectacle to behold.

In December of 1998, on the heels of UNSCOM's withdrawal from Iraq, he wrote in the New Republic:

"Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. UNSCOM lacks a full
declaration from Iraq concerning its prohibited capabilities, making any
absolute pronouncement about the extent of Iraq's retained proscribed
arsenal inherently tentative. But, based on highly credible
intelligence, UNSCOM suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like
anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient
quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as
well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq
probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well
as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery
shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains
significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to
rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production ...

"These capabilities may seem paltry compared with what Iraq had before
the Gulf war. But they represent a vital "seed stock" that can and will
be used by Saddam Hussein to reconstitute his former arsenal. His
strategy for doing so has emerged over the past seven years of struggle
with UNSCOM. That struggle began almost as soon as the commission was
created to verity a declaration Iraq was supposed to provide to the
Security Council 15 days after the end of the Gulf war. A Security
Council resolution required Iraq to set forth the totality of its
proscribed arsenal, as well as all its components and the means of
producing it. But, instead of telling the truth, Iraq gave a radically
misleading and incomplete account. UNSCOM's original mandate, a
seemingly simple exercise in conventional arms control verification,
evolved into an endless game of cat and mouse."

In a new "Afterword" appended in 2002 to his book "Endgame: Solving The Iraq Crisis," Ritter recounted a meeting with Tariq Aziz in July 2000, undertaken for a "documentary" Ritter was filming:

" 'Well Mr. Ritter," [Aziz] said, 'the question of inspectors is part of the whole story. There are U.N. resolutions, mainly Resolution 687, and we had to implement it. And we did. We accepted this resolution formally, and we implemented this resolution for seven-and-a-half years. And I can say also that we still abide by this resolution' ...Tariq Aziz was repeating the mantra of the Iraqi government, playing the innocent in the face of incontrovertible evidence that established that Iraq in fact had not fully complied with Security Council resolutions concerning its disarmament obligations."

So far so good.

"And yet now, more than ten years after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that had set this whole chain of events into motion, Tariq Aziz's words rang with a new credibility. As the lead investigator for UNSCOM, I knew firsthand the lengths to which Iraq would go to keep the inspectors, and the international community at bay. And yet I also knew that, during the course of our difficult work we inspectors had uncovered the lion's share of Iraq's illegal arsenal. What was left, if anything, represented nothing more than documents and scraps of material, seed-stock, perhaps, for any reconstitution effort that might take place in the future, but by and of themselves, not a viable weapons program." [emphasis added].

Not only is this assertion not supported contextually with anything other than a selective appeal to the authority of Rolf Ekeus - it flatly contradicts the details and tone of the book's Appendix, in which Ritter lays out his assessment of Iraq's WMD/prohibited weaponry inventory (the book was originally published in '99).

What accounts for Ritter's about-face? We may now know more definitively; in this article in The Australian it is alleged that,

"Documents found in Iraq's old ministry of oil reveal that hundreds of prominent individuals received vouchers to buy Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices and sell it on the open market -- at tremendous, often seven-figure, profits.

"Those named include not just [Benon] Sevan [administrator of oil-for-food] but a vast array of Russian politicians, close friends of French President Jacques Chirac (including France's former minister of the interior), British Labour MP George Galloway, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and, closer to home, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.

"In short, it's a who's who list of high-profile anti-war and anti-sanctions voices, all revealed to be shills for Saddam."

(Tip of the hat to Glenn)

So perhaps Ritter had his own Damascus Road experience - Babylon Highway, actually - but the divinity that stirred his soul was Mammon. Old wine, new bottle.