US ‘manipulated UN to provoke Iraq confrontation’
A former United Nations weapons inspector has accused the United States in a new documentary of manipulating the UN to provoke a confrontation with Saddam Hussein as a pretext for US air strikes on Iraq.
Scott Ritter, a former US Marine intelligence officer, says in the 90-minute documentary that he did not provoke the confrontation the Americans wanted in March 1998, but fellow inspector Roger Hill - an Australian - did have a confrontation in December of that year.
Days later, chief UN inspector Richard Butler declared that Iraq was not co-operating with weapons inspectors and the United States and Britain launched air strikes against Iraq in punishment. UN inspectors pulled out of the country ahead of the bombing raids, and Iraq has barred them from returning.
Butler, who was Ritter’s boss, denied any improper collaboration with the United States. The US Mission to the United Nations said it would have no comment on the documentary.
Executive producer Tom Osborne, a former ABC television reporter and producer, said the United Nations in New York was chosen for yesterday’s premiere because it’s ‘‘where it all began where it all continues’’.
The documentary traces the history of the UN Special Commission, known as UNSCOM, which was created by the UN Security Council after the 1991 Gulf War to oversee the destruction of Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons and the missiles used to deliver them. The council replaced it in December 1999 with a new agency, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.
By 1995, Ritter said both he and former chief weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus believed Iraq was ‘‘fundamentally disarmed’’. He noted that the head of Iraq’s weapons programmes Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamal al-Majid told Ekeus after he defected to Jordan in August 1995 that all of Iraq’s banned weapons had been destroyed.
But Ritter said the Security Council was now focused on better targeting sanctions imposed after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait not on returning UN inspectors so they could resume monitoring and prevent any rebuilding of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
‘‘This film will hopefully compel people to start ... taking a harder look at Iraq’s disarmament’’ and then confronting the issue of lifting sanctions, he said.
Ritter resigned from UNSCOM in August 1998, denouncing the Clinton administration for having withdrawn support for the UN agency and undermining weapons inspection.
He has since said Washington used UNSCOM to spy on Iraq - a long-time charge by Baghdad. In the documentary, he repeated the spying charge and made new allegations.
On either February 28 or March 1, 1998, Ritter said he and Butler attended a meeting with then US Ambassador Bill Richardson at the US Mission to the United Nations, hours before he left for Baghdad to lead an inspection mission.
Ritter said Butler drew a line on a blackboard with the UNSCOM timeline for the inspection on one side and the US timeline for military action on the other side, and then told him: ‘‘You have to provoke a confrontation ... so the US can start bombing’’ before March 15, a Muslim holy period.
In Baghdad, Ritter said the Iraqis at first refused to allow his team to carry out orders to search the Ministry of Defence.
At that moment, then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was attending a meeting in Paris, prepared to tell the French why the United States was undertaking military action, he told reporters later. ‘‘All American forces in the Persian Gulf went on high alert, and initial strike elements were actually launched and went into a strike orbit.’’
But the military strikes were called off when the Iraqis later allowed the inspectors in, he said.
Butler, however, said Ritter’s account was ‘‘completely false’’.
The documentary does include Iraqi footage of a confrontation nine months later between UN inspector Hill and an Iraqi official over conditions for entering what Iraq said was the headquarters of the ruling Baath Party. The Iraqis ultimately barred Hill’s team and UNSCOM used this as a key example of Iraq’s non-co-operation, which led to the US bombing.
Ritter said the documentary, In Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq, cost dlrs 530,000 (£350,000) to make and he was looking for buyers.
