Tim Blair

SCOTT THE TRUSTWORTHY

Richard Glover in the Sydney Morning Herald:

For a long time, Scott Ritter, the UN's chief weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998, was virtually alone in expressing doubts about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

And for a long time Ritter expressed exactly the opposite. Here, again, is an extract from his 1999 book, Endgame - Solving the Iraq Problem Once and For All:

I have grown convinced that there has been a total breakdown in the willingness of the international community to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein is well on the road to getting his sanctions lifted and keeping his weapons in the bargain. A resurgent Iraq, reinvigorated economically and politically by standing up successfully to the United States and the United Nations, will be a very dangerous Iraq -- one that sooner or later will have to be confronted by American military might.

Glover, who usually doesn’t give free passes to bunko artists like Ritter, is presumably unaware of Ritter’s earlier hawkish attitude. So he lets him get away with crap like this:

In his role as a weapons inspector, he told me, he liaised with intelligence officials from Israel from 1994 to 1998. By the end of that period, Israel had reassessed the threat from Iraq, believing it had been fundamentally disarmed. In the same period, he says, the CIA came to the same conclusion. So, he asks, what happened to change that view, if not the arrival in the White House of George Bush.

That sounds like the reason Ritter changed his views. By the way, Glover also fails to mention Ritter's role as an underage girl inspector at the local Burger King.

Ritter still speaks the military language of patriotism and service, which he now uses to condemn both the leaders who demanded faulty intelligence, and the spineless agencies which went out to find it. "An intelligence officer's job," he said, "is never to tell the boss what they want to hear, but what the facts are."

Interesting. We’re still waiting for Ritter to tell us the facts about Iraq’s toddler gulag:

The prison in question is at the General Security Services headquarters, which was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children — toddlers up to pre-adolescents — whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I'm not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace.

Wage on, faker.

Posted by Tim Blair at February 7, 2004 12:41 AM