Whatever Happened to Scott Ritter?
January 2003

Remember him? Perhaps the most hawkish of the United Nations weapons inspectors who made the daily rounds in Iraq, searching for weapons of all kinds, including those of mass destruction. Today, he's making the rounds of talk shows speaking against any US or allied aggression against Saddam Hussein. What happened?

Ritter keeps saying that Iraq was "qualitatively disarmed" as of 1998, when the last UN inspectors were "kicked out" by Saddam -- and the US, under President Clinton (at the time bogged down in the Monica Lewinsky scandals) didn't press the UN to insist on further weapons inspections. 

What's surprising is that Ritter -- who once seemed so savvy about Iraq and who once condemned the Clinton administration and the UN for allowing Saddam's representatives to "bounce" the inspectors around while possibly moving weapons research projects to new locations, keeping inspectors from doing their jobs -- Ritter now acts as though there couldn't be any such mobile weapons research that's beyond inspection and satellite penetration. He seems to believe that inspectors covered every inch of Iraq and can call that nation "clean" of all weaponry.

And Ritter, also surprisingly, appears not to believe that Saddam in the almost four years since inspections ceased could have gained new momentum in chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons development. 

Ritter's assertions are especially notable because of recent reports that under the Reagan administration, Saddam was given chemical and possibly biological weapons "secrets" to help in Iraq's war with Iran. If the reports are true, it would make sense that Saddam and his scientists have been sitting on such "secrets" and could have easily kept them from weapons inspectors. 

When a crash program is underway to build weapons, four years is a long time. A lot of weapons can be researched, developed and manufactured in that amount of time, given momentum by the possession of any weapons "secrets" to begin with. Ritter must know this.

Saddam accused Ritter more than once of being a CIA operative, essentially spying on Iraq during his time as a UN weapons inspector. 

What if Saddam were correct in that assertion? If he were, it may go further than any other explanation as to why the political about-face of one Scott Ritter.

-- Mike Shiloh