Customer Reviews

War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know

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How incredibly prescient this book has turned out to be, and how unbelievably wrong the neocons were not to listen. I guess the verdict is in, and it doesn't look good for Bush.

Bush blames his Iraq fiasco on "bad intelligence." If the intelligence was so bad, how come Ritter knew the facts on the ground? How was he able to accurately predict EXACTLY what we found--that there were no stockpiles at all? Maybe the problem wasn't bad intelligence, but bad ideology, blindly ignoring what the weapons experts knew to be true.

In the end, though, I can probably agree that Bush does have a problem with bad intelligence. His own!

Having just read this short little book I am absolutely amazed at the foresight Pitt and Ritter displayed in 2002. Almost everything these two men said about the state of Iraq than and now is incredibly accurate. I never would have believed that Scott Ritter, who the mainstream press branded a "lunatic" or "an Iraqi agent", was actually one of the better informed Americans when it came to the nation of Iraq. From WMD to tribal factions to the members of the so called "insurgents", it seems that Scott Ritter is the person the press and the Pentagon should have gone to when they had questions of Saddam and Iraq.

This book is a must read for ANY red blooded, straight thinking American who is genuinely interested in the truth about Iraq.

"War on Iraq" is a Republican military expert's analysis and rejection of the American government's current justification for invading Iraq. All Americans, especially politicians, should pay close attention to this book for two reasons. First, the arguments contained in this book were made by the person who knows the status of Iraq's weapons program and the potential threat posed by Iraq better than anyone else. Scott Ritter is a former intelligence officer and Marine veteran of the Gulf War. When the war ended, Ritter played a critical and highly effective role in inspecting and destroying the Iraqi weapons program. Second, Ritter is a Republican who voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, and who clearly harbors no liberal agenda. If this guy is telling us that the coming war with Iraq is unwarranted and extremely dangerous, we had better take him seriously. Ritter's arguments are summed up below.

IRAQ HAS NO SERIOUS WEAPONS CAPABLITY
Ritter demonstrates that Iraq's chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons were thoroughly dismantled. Rebuilding these programs is easily detectable, and if some chemical or biological agents evaded detection, they have probably exceeded their shelf life.

IRAQ DOES NOT HAVE A FUNDAMENTALIST GOVERNMENT
As evil and nasty as Saddam Hussein might be, he is a secular ruler who has gone to great and brutal lengths to repress religious fundamentalism in Iraq. He has no interest in perpetuating Islamic fundamentalism of the sort that Bin Laden espouses.

SADAM HUSSEIN AND BIN LADEN ARE ENEMIES
Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are enemies. Saddam Hussein outlawed Wahabbism the fundamentalist sect of Islam to which Bin Laden belongs, and Bin Laden declared Saddam Hussein an apostate who should be killed. Even if these two were sympathetic to each other, Ritter proves that there isn't a shred of evidence of a cooperation between Iraq and Al Quaeda.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BIN LADEN WANTS
An American invasion of Iraq has an excellent chance of infuriating other Islamic nations and creating a West vs. Islam polarization.

MORE TERRORISM PLEASE
Even if America has a speedy victory in Iraq (Ritter, a twelve year Marine veteran and former intelligence officer states that this is highly unlikely this time around), extremism and resentment against the U.S. will only increase in the Middle East. More likely, this war will generate tremendous civilian casualties in Iraq and hundreds or thousands of U.S. casualties. If, in a worse case scenario, America resorts to tactical nuclear weapons to help it's pinned down military forces-something Bush has publicly stated as a possibility. Ritter argues that if this happens he can guarantee that Iran and Pakistan will hand over nuclear devices to terrorists and we will experience a nuclear bomb detonation in America within decades.

DEMOCRACY IS IMPOSSIBLE IN IRAQ
Iraq contains a Shiite majority, which shares powerful fundamentalist beliefs with Iran, and which the U.S. definitely does not want to come to power. The U.S. can't put the Kurdish minority in power because Turkey, which has its own issues with the Kurds, would never allow it, which just leaves the Sunni minority from whose ranks Saddam rose to power. The only realistic result, according to Ritter, is another Sunni dictator who is as repressive as Saddam.

IRAQIS WON'T RISE UP AGAINST SADAM
Even if Iraqi civilians ignore the fact that the U.S. bombed, starved and killed many of them during the past ten years, the state apparatus that Saddam built has had more than twenty years to seep into their lives and is too well entrenched.

WHAT ABOUT SADDAM'S BOMB MAKER
Ritter quickly proves that Saddam's alleged bomb maker Khidre Hamza is a fake who never headed Iraq's nuclear program (Jafar al Jafar did) and who did not possess adequate knowledge to develop nuclear weapons. When Hamza first defected in 1994, his intelligence was rejected by the CIA and the intelligence community at large.

HITLER DID IT
Ritter correctly points out that while the justification for a first strike may resonate with many Americans still wounded by the memory of 9/11, it is the same excuse Hitler used for attacking Poland. The world may well see an American "first strike" in the same light.

HOW DO YOU SPELL "NEO-CONSERVATIVE"
According to Ritter, you spell it, "Rumsfeld", "Wolfowitz", and "Perle". Donald Rumsfeld, is of course the Bush Administration's Secretary of Defense, while Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle are part of a conservative think tank that is convinced that Iraq is a threat to both Israel and the United States and that is ideologically committed to toppling Saddam Hussein regardless of the potential consequences. These ideologues, according to Ritter, are the key decision makers with respect to Gulf War II, The Vengeance and they have effectively terminated all government debate on the subject. Ritter, who is also a Republican, astutely argues that extremism is the most dangerous way to approach an already volatile Middle East.

FACTS ARE A STUBBORN THING
Unlike any of his critics including the Richard Butler, the careerist who ineptly headed UNSCOM after the Gulf War, Ritter can and does document every argument he makes. Journalists have never found a single error in any of Ritter's claims and his critics are unwilling to debate him in public. Ritter's stance on this issue made him the subject of at least one intense FBI investigation in which he was cleared. Ritter sums up his approach with John Adams's famous statement that "facts are a stubborn thing."

Months prior to the Iraq war, I researched press accounts worldwide, read published UN documents and web-posted reports and evaluations of weapons experts, and read this book by Scott Ritter and published interviews of him, and was convinced that either Iraq had no WMD or had no functioning WMD.

My question is: if I could come to this conclusion without the aid of classified intelligence, how can we even conceive of the President of the United States coming to his false and calamitous conclusion with all of the classified and unclassified intelligence at his disposal? Even the President now agrees that Iraq had no WMD based on the Kay report.

When one considers all the vilification that Scott Ritter has undergone, how his patriotism and professionalism have been questioned, and how he has even been threatened with Court hearings, simply because he spoke the obvious truth long before it was politically chic to speak it, it is clear that the US government owes Mr. Ritter an immense apology. It is also obvious that if the United States government wants to conduct a fair and impartial investigation of this intelligence calamity, it should appoint Scott Ritter to head the investigation.

I find it amusing that all the negative reviews of this interview fail to acknowledge that Ritter has so far proven totally accurate concerning Iraq's alleged WMD's, and pretty much the only analyst who was even remotely accurate. Critics accuse him of being "out of the loop", spouting "conspiracy theories" based on "unsupported facts."

Well read the book and focus on the specific WMD issues he addresses (some of the doomsday war scenarios were way off of course). Its a plausable and so far completely accurate assessment of Iraq's alleged weapons. To paraphrase: Iraq had WMD stockpiles and production facilities, the production infrastructure was wiped out by inspections, most stockpiles were destroyed similarly, and a small fraction of the weapons remainded unnaccounted for after 1998. And the kicker: the unaccounted for stockpiles would have deteriorated to the point of worthlessness. Anthrax for example (remember Mr. Powell's vile at the UN?) has a shelf life of 3-5 years. All of it was made before 1991. Its worthless, assuming it existed in the first place. So no anthrax was shipped off to Syria kids, you can sleep well tonite.

And if you dont believe Ritter, other former UNSCOM officials have weighed in with similar analysis of Iraq's alleged WMDs (check out the writings of Rolf Ekeus and Hans von Sponeck).

This book reviews a number of serious problems with the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq. Its chief claims are that U.N. weapons inspections worked effectively after 1991 to neutralize Saddam Hussein's potential threat to his neighbors and that inspections can continue to do so. (No serious analyst claims that Saddam threatens the United States homeland.) The claim by some amazon.com reviewers that the book is "socialist," "leftist," or "liberal" is ludicrous (as is the implication that the book would automatically be wrong if it actually were coming from any of these perspectives). Ritter is one of a group of moderate Republicans who believe that there are better ways of dealing with Iraq than by invading it. Some hardline, Cheney-Wolfowitz thinking does occasionally slip into the analysis. At one point, for example, Ritter opines, "We really don't want democracy in Iraq [and Ritter makes it plain that he is part of this "we"], because we don't want the Shi'a [i.e., the majority of Iraq's population] to have control. . . . And the truth is that we don't want the Kurds to have independence anymore than the Turks do. . . . The United States has no interest in democratically empowering that 23% of the population" (pp. 59-60). (Actually, Cheney and Wolfowitz would only admit this in private.) Still, this book is a good primer on the type of mess an invasion of Iraq will create for ordinary Iraqis, the region, and ourselves.

Scott Ritter has not created a reputation for being a friend to people on all sides of the current issue of the Iraq War. If you support the war then chances are you do not like the author and would discount everything he says as untruthful pro Iraqi propaganda. If you disagree with the Bush administration on the war then this book will further confirm your positions. As I tend to agree with the later I found this book to be interesting and helpful. The most important parts of the book were his comments on the supposed stockpiles of chemical weapons that Iraq has their shelf life, and the overall inspection process. He also has a no spin way of describing the people in the Bush administration that have seemed to be pushing for this war for the past few years.

If you on the fence on this topic then you can learn from this book but if your mind is made up in support I would not expect you would enjoy the book. My only issue with the book was the scope or length of the book. With such a large topic as this there are so many additional items to include getting the book up over 70 pages. I do not want to sound like I am complaining just because of page numbers, but we could have been given a bit more info, for example how did the Iraqi military use chemical weapons in the past, what about the mustard gas that they used so much of during the Iran - Iraq war, more details on exactly how they went about hiding items and how the UN found them. You get my point. Overall the book was good and informative.

As an American Historian and hopeful writer, I can not state enough positive remarks about Will Rivers Pitt's skills and level of honor as a writer getting the "truth out." His keen documentation proves beyond all shadows of doubt what honest and to the point writing is all about - that alone should be enough for most. Whatever the subject, if you can't trust Pitt's writings my suggestion to anyone in disagreement is to first head for the archives and libraries, and prepare to be up all night long, enduring many sleepless nights chasing story after story just to find the "truth." Begin a fact-finding mission, per say on you're own. Till then, no one can substantiate their opinions any differently. As a researcher I know first-hand hard it is to dedicate yourself to the kind of journalism certainly Mr. Pitt lives with on a daily bases and I might add, he's not let me down yet! The difficulty in finding the truth alone, and seperating fiction from facts is a personal journey that leaves not much time for anything else. To write on his level can only come from truth seeking, and dedication to a career that few of us can ever hope to aspire to. Then to have to put the story into the most simpliest of words is an even harder feat. Hat's off to Mr. Will Rivers Pitts for making sure we have somewhere out here to get true journalist news as it happens.

Written in collaboration with former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, War on Iraq parallels "Target Iraq" (by Norman Solomon) in its attempt to "debunk the key arguments" for war. Rivers describes the main arguments proposed by the Bush administration and refutes the credibility of each one. Instead, he offers a grim picture of the dangers posed by an invasion, including increased terrorist activity and heavy casualties. Like Target Iraq, Rivers' book has an explicit political purpose-what he calls "citizen campaigning" in the "tradition of Thomas Paine." If Pitt is correct in his assertions, virtually every reason cited in support of a war in Iraq is untrue, misleading, or at best secondary; the primary motives are never explicitly stated to the general public. Assuming Pitt is correct, the Bush administration's media campaign for the Iraq war is clearly the most deceptive and coercive in recent history. As such, it is a fascinating (if disturbing) case study in the use of propaganda and rhetoric to generate public support for a questionable brand of foreign policy.

Although the was has started and we can now only hope it ends soon and very few people are killed, it would have been nice if our President and his Administration would have told us the whole truth. It would also have been nice if they would have actually tried to avoid war through diplomacy.

Maybe it never would have had to happen if we had known:

1 - Saddam had unacknowledged permission from the Reagan Administration to use the gas against Iran, because the U.S. viewed Iran as the bigger threat. We know he used it, and did not care or even reprimand him. We even continued to give him weapons and finacial aid for years afterward. In 1990, a senatorial delagation led by Bob Dole visited Saddam and basically told him to ignore and not to worry about the growing questions being raised by the U.S. media about Saddam and terror. Of course, once he invaded oil rich Kuwait, we finally turned against him.

2 - Iraq did not kick out the UNSCOM weapons inspectors in 1998. President Clinton and the U.N. pulled them out when the U.S. decided to bomb Iraq during "Operation Desert Fox."

3 - Saddam and Osama bin Laden are not on friendly terms. One could even say that they are enemies. Bin Laden hates Saddam because Saddam has persecuted the Shiite Muslims (Bin Laden's religion). Also, Saddam will not give Al Qaeda any weapons of mass destruction that he may have because Al Qaeda would probably use them againt the Sunni Muslims and Saddam's Baath party. He will only give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda is he thinks that he will lose power and or die.

4 - How can our declared goal of bringing democracy to Iraq be believable when we prop up dictators throughout the Middle East and support military dictators like Musharaf in Pakistan, who overthrew a democratically-elected president?

5 - President Bush cited the UN Resolution of 1990 as the reason he could not march into Baghdad, while supporters of a new attack assert that it is the very reason we can march into Baghdad?

There are more, but you can get the book and read them yourself.

Highly Recommended!