from Truthdig:
Dinner With Ahmed Posted on Mar 17, 2008
By Scott Ritter
Editor’s Note: Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Scott Ritter reconstructs from his memories and notes one of the seminal events in the march to war. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I find myself thinking back on how we got ourselves into this predicament. Like many who played a direct role in the issues surrounding Iraq in the years leading up to the decision to invade, I have wrestled with the demons of history, wondering about the specific impact my actions (or inaction) may have had on the course of human affairs. I’ve also wondered whether or not I have been witness to any events that, if more fully reported, might enable others to have a better understanding of the events that shape our world today, for better or for worse. As I examine where we are today and contemplate our future and those who are positioning themselves to play a role in Iraq, it seems to me that there is at least one such incident, a dinner party I attended at the home of Ahmed Chalabi in June 1998 that is worthy of a more public illumination. About the Author
During my time as a weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), I frequently traveled to Washington, D.C., for liaison purposes. The usual customers, so to speak, included the State Department, the CIA and the Department of Defense. All such meetings were conducted in accordance with instructions I had received from the executive chairman of UNSCOM (from 1991 until July 1997 this post was held by a Swede named Rolf Ekéus and after July by an Australian, Richard Butler) and as such were considered “official business.”
I strayed from the umbrella of “official business” only once during my tenure as an inspector, when, in June 1998, during a scheduled official trip to Washington, D.C., I ventured out into the shadows of back-bench domestic American politics. Bill Clinton was president then, and there was a growing undercurrent of neoconservative ideology that was gripping the nation’s capitol as the right wing of the Republican Party, frustrated by its inability to outmaneuver the president on the domestic front, chose to instead do battle on matters pertaining to foreign policy and national security. Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein was deeply entrenched in Baghdad. Economic sanctions, which served as the primary vehicle for containing the Iraqi dictator by denying him markets for his oil-based economy, were collapsing amid international concern for the humanitarian toll that such sanctions took on the people of Iraq, and in the face of old-fashioned greed. U.N. weapons inspections were floundering and the Clinton administration seemed to lack any coherent plan on how to bring order from the foreign policy chaos that was Iraq.
In early June 1998, UNSCOM weapons inspectors received a technical report from a U.S. military laboratory in Aberdeen, Md., which specialized in chemical and biological agent analysis. In March 1998, UNSCOM had retrieved from Iraq several fragments of ballistic missile warheads from a site that had been used by the Iraqis in their program of unilateral destruction of WMD in the summer of 1991. The Iraqis, in an effort to clarify glaring discrepancies in the accounting of their weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpiles, had admitted that a certain number of these warheads had been filled with chemical and biological agent, in particular nerve agent, and anthrax and botulinum toxin biological agent. In an effort to verify the Iraqi claims, UNSCOM had excavated warhead fragments from the declared destruction sites and sent them to the U.S. military laboratory in Aberdeen for analysis. .......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080317_dinner_with_ahmed/
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