Scott Ritter's Inconsistent Message

Well I guess it didn't take too long for people to figure out that I was actually referring to Justin Sarma's post on the Free Dartmouth blogsite when I wrote in a post on January 12 (“A problem with Percentages): “I recently encountered a web site which claimed 90 percent of the Iraqi WMD were found during the UNSCOM inspections from 1991-1998. Usually people who make this argument refer to comments made by former inspector Scott Ritter, who I believe actually said 95 percent (not 90%) of the Iraqi WMD production capability and Research and Development capability were destroyed."

At the time, I wanted to just deal with the arguments and not make it a response to Justin Sarma, as we have the handicap of not being able to post responses to each other on the same site (though perhaps John Stevenson would invite Sarma to be on the observer). Sarma provided some interesting facts in responding to my post, and he made some fair points.

It seems that Sarma actually agreed with my main argument in the previous post when he wrote: “He argues that UNSCOM claims of 90-95% disarmament are conjectures based only on the weapons that they know exist, and not on the weapons/production plant that could possibly be hidden away somewhere. Admittedly, it is difficult to argue with an opinion whose very premise is non-evidence."

He then addressed my comment that Scott Ritter's opinions were out of the norm with former inspectors. He offered a quote from Richard Butler which seemed to confirm that actually Butler and Ritter felt similarly about the percentages of R&D and weapons production capabilities destroyed. Fair enough. Nevertheless, the fact that both of them claimed a high percentage was found, shouldn't be very relevant, since as I demonstrated in my prior post, any authoritative claim about a percentage found is essentially meaningless.

The more relevant issue would be whether Ritter is the norm or the exception in terms of belief that Iraq does not present a threat today. On this issue, he is very much out of step with former inspectors, including Dr. Spertzel, Kay, and Butler. In fact, Butler has said that he felt Iraq represented a danger both at the time the inspectors were kicked out in 1998 and today. The following interview was with ABC news, but Butler and many of the former inspectors have done numerous interviews with various media agencies in the last couple years. Butler: “Well they were doing the whole range of both chemical and biological weapons in the past. When we were there we destroyed a lot of the manufacturing capability and a lot of the weapons but it is critical to recognize Peter that why they threw us out in 1998 was that we wanted to get all of it and we didn't. And you know, so they're capable in terms of know how, equipment, and I think materials, of doing the whole range. And of course they've been without inspection for three years and reports like that of this guy and other defectors suggest to us quite strongly that they're back in business….. Well Saddam had a nuclear weapons program which we stopped after the Gulf War. At that stage the assessment was he was about six months away from making a bomb. In the meantime he's got a stockpile of raw uranium, some enriched uranium and in the three years without inspection I've seen reports that he's recalled his nuclear weapons design team and Lord knows what he's been able to acquire on the black market. You know I don't know if he's got a nuclear weapons capability but it is established that he wants one and has been seeking one.Ritter's current (2003) disagreement with Butler, Spertzel and other inspectors over the threat represented by Iraq is reflected in the bitter acrimony and name-calling that goes on between them today.

Ironically though, that's essentially what Ritter said in his congressional testimony in 1998, when he quit because of Iraq's refusal to cooperate, only Ritter was more adamant about the threat Iraq posed at the time. I don't think Scott Ritter is a credible source for information because of the inexplicable flip-flops he has made between 1998 and today. These have been well documented. I think the Weekly Standard does a good summary of them here:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/524dplvk.asp?ZoomFont=YES .

Now I know the weekly standard is a conservative publication, but all of those quotations and facts are well documented. If you don't believe that, you could look at the article from New York Times Magazine which came out November 24, 2002:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0717FA3A540C778EDDA80994DA404482 .

Currently that's in the archives so you have to pay a couple dollars if you want to read it in full, but luckily I copied the entire article into a word document at the time. So if anyone is curious I can email you that.

So is this article from the Washington Post:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/000731.htm

Skeletons in the Closet

Now just incase you don't look at those sites, I highlight a few of Ritter's notable flip flops. In his statement of resignation Ritter wrote in 1998: ''The sad truth is that Iraq today is not disarmed anywhere near the level required." Then, in his subsequent hearing in the Senate on September 3, 1998 Ritter was even more outspoken. Here is the complete transcript of his that Senate hearing: http://www.ceip.org/programs/npp/ritter.htm
Some highlights:
- “Iraq today is not disarmed, and remains an ugly threat to its neighbors and to world peace. I'm here today to provide you with specific details about the scope and nature of interference by this administration in UNSCOM, the debilitating effect that such interference has on the ability of UNSCOM to carry out its disarmament mission in Iraq
- “But what I can say is that we have clear evidence that Iraq is retaining prohibited weapons capabilities in the fields of chemical, biological and ballistic- missile delivery systems of a range of greater than 150 kilometers. And if Iraq has undertaken a concerted effort run at the highest levels inside Iraq to retain these capabilities, then I see no reason why they would not exercise the same sort of concealment efforts for their nuclear programs.
- “It's a very important discovery. It's one that shows clearly that, A, Iraq has not disarmed, and they've lied across the board about not just VX, but once we get to the bottom of the VX issue, we'll find it exposes additional lies, which cause concern for a number weapons issues.
- “We do not know the totality of what Iraq has. What we do know is that the declarations they have made to the Special Commission to date are false. And the explanations that they give to us about how they disposed of weapons are wrong.
“Iraq has positioned itself today that once effective inspection regimes have been terminated, Iraq will be able to reconstitute the entirety of its former nuclear, chemical and ballistic missile delivery system capabilities within a period of six months.
- “There is no question that Saddam Hussein is the problem here. All decisions pertaining to his retention of weapons of mass destruction in direct disobedience of international law, are made by him and him alone. And he is the only one who can make the decision to comply with Security Council resolution. So I would agree with you that Saddam Hussein is the problem. How you resolve the problem of Saddam Hussein is an issue that's better left to people whose responsibility that is.
- “It's a question of how he chooses to acquire enriched uranium, either through indigenous enrichment or through procurement from abroad. If it's indigenous, it would take some time because the IAEA has effectively dismantled the internal enrichment -- but they have not dismantled the weaponization program per se….For a total reconstruction, it would be a period of several years to reconstruct enrichment capability….I believe within a period of six months Iraq could reconstitute its biological-weapons and chemical-weapons capability….We know in fact that Iraq has a plan to have a breakout scenario for reconstitution of long-range ballistic missiles within six months of the "go" signal from the president of Iraq.
- “SEN. INHOFE: Do you think, in your evaluation of the type of person that Saddam Hussein is, that he would hesitate in any way from using a weapon of mass destruction and delivering it to the United States, if he had the capability? MR. RITTER: My experience with the Iraqi government is that it is a ruthless government and that it would carry out such a task if that was the decision of the president of Iraq.
- “The intent [of Saddam Hussein] is clear; to retain the capability to possess weapons of mass destruction. Back in -- he made a strategic decision in the 1980s to get this capability. He's linked his capability directly to his person. And today his goal is to retain this capability, so that he can menace the region and project himself as a regional superpower.

Now, five years later, one would expect Iraq to be more dangerous and have more WMD capabilities than it did when the inspectors first left in 1998. However, now Ritter is saying the exact opposite things from before. Just to give one example, in July of 2002 Ritter said on Phil Donahue's show on MSNBC: “Iraq has been disarmed fundamentally. Their weapons programs have been eliminated. Iraq poses no threat to any of its neighbors. It does not threaten its region. It does not threaten the United States. It does not threaten the world." To Ritter's bad luck Senator Inhofe also happened to be on the show that night, and also happened to have the transcript of Ritter's 1998 Senate Hearing, which I mentioned above. Ritter also claims now that he would ''be surprised if there is anything in Iraq worth finding and that Iraq is “fundamentally disarmed.

If that weren't enough, his attempts to bridge the gap between these statements and justify his inconsistency, are themselves inconsistent. He recently said: “''I'm a great analyst, and ''I've never been wrong.'' Other times he denies the inconsistency saying “''I don't see where I've changed one iota.'' And other times he attempts an explanation: ''It's not that I was lying or misleading anyone. 'It's just that I said things very forcefully when the fact is there should have been a statement afterward, a 'but' kind of thing. When accused of flip-flopping in his beliefs to a reporter, Ritter said: “''I think 'evolved' is a term I am comfortable with, because it implies a passage of time and everything changes over time. I mean, my taste in beer might evolve over time.'' Not the most convincing explanation.

Now some people explain Ritter's behavior by accusing him of being bribed. They point to the fact that, after being expelled in 1998, he was given $400,000 dollars by an Iraqi-American businessman Shakir al-Khafaji with ties to high-level Iraqi officials to produce a documentary “In shifting sands." Ritter himself admits that Khafaji was “"openly sympathetic with the regime in Baghdad." Frankly though, while I cannot provide a competing explanation for Ritter's inexplicable behavior, I am willing to give him – a former marine – the benefit of the doubt that this was not a quid pro quo deal in which he agreed to sellout his country. Regardless, I find it hard to understand why people continue to cite Ritter as a credible source. (By the way, you can verify this info on Ritter from, among other places, those two links I provided above from the weekly standard, and the nytimes )

I will say that, to my knowledge, Ritter always had some degree of faith in the possibility of weapon inspections. This distinguishes him from Dr. Spertzel and Dr. Kay – both former weapons inspectors I mentioned in my last post and whom I talked about more extensively in my article in the D: http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=200210290202

Tracing WMD - In Particular Chemical and Biological Weapons

As I explain in my article in the D, I lack confidence in the inspections process. Here is a brief section from my column:

The necessity to disarm Iraq should be clear, but there is still some question about how that should be done. Some have advocated new weapons inspections, despite the fact that inspectors failed to disarm the country from 1991 to 1998, when they were kicked out. In 1991, Hussein claimed, like he does now, that he had no weapons of mass destruction. It was only after the UNSCOM inspections uncovered sites throughout the country that Hussein revised his story. During the inspections, U.N. inspectors were deceived, threatened, physically forced out of buildings while documents were destroyed and in one case were held in a parking lot for four days. Only an extremely small proportion of the inspection sites were visited by surprise. The Iraqi biological weapon program was only discovered in 1995 on the basis of information released by Iraqi defectors. As the inspectors discovered, many of Hussein's weapons labs were in mobile vans, hidden in schools, underground or disguised with dual purposes (nerve gas/pesticides). Because of this, former Chief Biological Weapons Inspector Dr. Richard Spertzel testified to Congress that monitoring these kinds of weapons is "virtually impossible."

Similarly Dr. David Kay, former UNSCOM Chief Weapons Inspector, testified that disarming Hussein would take "tremendous resources, actually … resources beyond anything I can imagine," and that the only inspection regime that could possibly work would be "very much like an occupation." That's because inspections are designed to confirm the progress of a cooperating government -- not a hostile regime that is determined to thwart inspectors. We can have no confidence that a few dozen U.N. inspectors -- even with "unfettered access" -- can stop a totalitarian regime that has spent approximately 20 years and $40 billion dollars, and employed 40,000 Iraqis, for the sole purpose of developing these weapons. Both Dr. Kay and Dr. Spertzel agree that "ultimately, the only way out of this is the replacement of Saddam."

Justin Sarma claimed that Spertzel is an unreliable source because: “it appears that Spertzel was intentionally subverting the UN inspections regime in order to make it look ineffective to the international community." He based that on an accusation from Ritter (on which he provided a link), but he didn't provide any other specific evidence on that. Since that's a rather harsh accusation, I think it deserves some more evidence to support it.

Sarma also wrote: “2) Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons often leave traces in labs after they are moved, which makes it hard for Iraq to simply "move stuff around"." I think this statement is a little misleading in the false sense of confidence it inspires. I will admit I'm no expert on chemical weapons detection techniques, but I do know a few things about it. One is that yes, chemical and biological weapons “often leave traces," but also that there are very sophisticated techniques to eliminate or disguise these traces, which the Iraqi government can use. For one thing, due to similarities in chemical composition, chemical weapons production can be disguised with innocuous substances. As I said above, one example is nerve gas and pesticides. In addition to this, chemical compounds can be added to chemical weapons to disguise their presence and sophisticated efforts to sanitize production facilities can make traces virtually impossible to detect. Moreover, traces are usually found in extremely small areas, so one has to know precisely where to look first or else search every single square nanometer of territory in Iraq. Finally, even if traces were found, they alone do not indicate where the chemical weapons were moved to. It's not like following clear footprints. Many of these weapons are produced in mobile vans, not fixed production locations. See the following two sites:

http://www.acronym.org.uk/textonly/dd/dd31/31gulf.htm
http://www.inece.org/1stvol1/haar.htm

The only thing about the current inspections that reassures me is the ability of the inspectors to interview Iraqi scientists outside the country and to move the families of the scientists out. In the last inspections regime, some of the most important breakthroughs occured due to the bravery of some Iraqi defectors. There are some complications, however, in the process of interviewing scientists and getting their entire families safely out of Iraq, which I won't get into here.

Lastly, I want to ask John Stevenson again to invite Sarma to post on the Observer.



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