U.S. Must Exit Iraq Now, Ex-Inspector Says
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by Eva-Marie Ayala
Published on Friday, June 25, 2004 by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Texas)
DALLAS - The United States must pull out of Iraq immediately and leave that country's future up to its people, a former U.N. weapons inspector said Thursday.
Scott Ritter, an outspoken critic of the war who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, said the United States will not be able to create a stable government there because its involvement is questionable.
"We got into this war on a lie, and the foundation of our involvement is corrupt," he said. "Therefore, whatever we try to build in Iraq is doomed to collapse."
Ritter said that while he was an inspector, the United Nations found about 90 percent to 95 percent of the weapons of mass destruction Iraq had. The inspectors were removed from the country before completing their inquiry, but he said "there is no evidence that Iraq retained these weapons."
Ritter, author of Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America, was the featured speaker of the Dallas Peace Center's summer dinner lecture in Richardson.
Before his speech, he said the only way out is to just leave.
The United States will suffer the same fate as Israel when that country went after the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon and ended up struggling with Hezbollah as well, he said.
"The longer we stay in Iraq the more [likely] it is we are going to create an Iraqi Hezbollah -- an amalgamation of Islamic fundamentalism and Iraqi nationalism -- that will defeat us," he said.
But if the United States just withdrew, "whatever comes out of that will be less of a threat to us than this future Hezbollah," he said.
Since Ritter resigned as a U.N. weapons inspector in 1998, he has said that Washington used the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, to spy on Iraq and that Iraq no longer is capable of creating or deploying weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S. State Department has said that Ritter's assertions are inaccurate, misleading and only helpful to the enemy.
This Report Contains Material From the Associated Press and The New York Times.
© Knight-Ridder 2004
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