Scott Ritter is providing a fresh account of his experience with the end of the Iraqi WMD inspections in 1998 as part of this article, A Farewell to Arms Control Truthdig.com 07/05/07.
I should mention that former UN weapons inspector Ritter was one of the informed people who turned out to be right about the wrongheadedness of invading Iraq. And so therefore our "press corps" doesn't consider him one of the people to be taken seriously. No, our press barons haven't learned very much from the Iraq War experience.
I haven't read Ritter's book on the inspections or combed through the details of the 1998 end of the inspections to know if he's providing new information here. I do know that Saddam's government blocked UN inspectors at some point that year on the grounds that American intelligence had infiltrated the inspection teams. This was true, and the US government admitted that later. It became common in the runup to the 2003 invasion for Bush and others to say that "Saddam kicked out the inspectors" in 1998 but that was also not true. The inspectors decided on their own to withdraw, although I'm unclear whether the UN ordered it or whether Ritter as the head of the team ordered it on his own authority. According to this account, it was President Clinton who order the UN team out:
President Bill Clinton had the gall to claim that Saddam Hussein had refused to cooperate with weapons inspectors in December 1998, evicting the WMD sleuths from Iraq on the eve of the 72-hour bombing campaign known as Desert Fox. Clinton knew full well that his administration had deliberately created a provocation against the Iraqis, seeking to inspect a Baath Party headquarters, and once it became clear the Iraqis would accede to this outrageous demand, it was Clinton, not Saddam, who ordered the inspectors out of Iraq, seeking to cover his tracks with a bombing campaign that ostensibly targeted "WMD sites," but which in reality was a thinly disguised assassination attempt against the Iraqi president. A leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, Hillary Clinton, continues to uphold the fiction of her husband’s policy in Iraq, much to the detriment of truth. (my emphasis)We don't hear that much any more about Operation Desert Fox, although it was a significant military operation. And it's a significant part of the story of the ongoing US conflict with Iraq. I'm not sure how they managed to pick the name "Desert Fox", which is the well-known nickname of the German Field Marshal Ernest Rommel in the Second World War. (Rommel did late in the war join the July 23, 1944, anti-Hitler plot and was allowed to commit suicide rather than be executed for his role in it.)
Tags: iraq, operation desert fox, scott ritter
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