Former U.N. weapons inspector says U.S. war against Iran imminent

When does a retired Marine and self-described conservative Republican get a standing ovation from a fired-up crowd of anti-war activists in Spokane?

When he calls for the impeachment of President Bush to avoid another war “based on lies.”

Scott Ritter, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, told a packed house at The Met on Thursday evening that the Bush administration has ordered the Pentagon to prepare a military attack against Iran as early as next month.

“We must go home tonight, look in the mirror and ask ourselves, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ ” Ritter said at the end of a rally of nearly 750 people organized by a local anti-war group made up mostly of Peace and Justice Action League members.

Ritter said the United States is headed down the same path that led the nation to occupy Iraq. There, Ritter said, Americans were told military action was necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein and sever Iraq’s ties to al Qaeda.

Just as untruthful, Ritter said, is the notion that Iran is seeking to build a nuclear weapon.

“There is no Iranian nuclear weapons program,” Ritter said. “Only a nuclear enrichment program approved in 1976 by the Ford administration.”

President Ford’s chief of staff and secretary of defense were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Ritter noted. So when you hear them today say that Iran must be seeking a nuclear weapons program, otherwise they would not need to develop an enrichment program, “they are lying.”

The objective, as in Iraq, is regime change, he said.

“This is insane,” Ritter said. “We are in no position to start another war.”

That didn’t stop the administration in Iraq, Ritter said. The United States launched a war to remove Saddam with no viable alternative, and it meant a descent into chaos. And once again, he said, Americans will be told the Iranians want change and will rise up in support of the people who bomb them.

Ritter, who resigned as weapons inspector in 1998 out of frustration, believes Saddam resisted inspection because of the threat to his rule posed by CIA infiltration of the U.N. team.

For his criticism of the U.S. rationale for war, Ritter himself has been the subject of much criticism, including allegations that his 2000 trip to Iraq to film a documentary critical of U.S. foreign policy was financed by an Iraqi-American businessman sympathetic to Saddam.

The U.N. Security Council resolution that maintained sanctions against Iraq after Saddam’s army was driven out of Kuwait was written by the United States, not to disarm Iraq as stated, but to destabilize the regime until it could be overthrown, Ritter said.

The current administration is not alone in maintaining the ruse, Ritter said. The U.S. intelligence community has known since the summer of 1991 that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but the sanctions remained, and resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Ritter denounced the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, which concluded that U.S. intelligence was “woefully inadequate,” and the president’s task force that labeled the CIA “dead wrong” about WMDs.

“This was not an intelligence failure,” Ritter said. “It was a failure of our government to tell the American people the truth. The end result is we went to war based on a lie.”

And soon, he said, American troops, who are sworn to defend the Constitution, will be called upon to go to another war, based on another lie.

“It is incumbent on us as Americans not to shame that sacrifice they are prepared to make,” said the retired Marine major, who served in the Gulf War. “We must hold the government accountable.”