Former Chief United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter is on a speaking tour focusing on the threat of war with Iran. He visited the Seacoast on Thursday, March 8, speaking at the University of New Hampshire and appearing as a guest on Portsmouth Community Radio, 106.1 FM. The following is an excerpt from his interview with Burt Cohen on WSCA’s “Portside.”

The former major in the U.S. Marines served as chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq, where he was in charge of searching for weapons of mass destruction. Ritter conceived, carried out and participated in more than 40 inspections. He ultimately resigned from UNSCOM, determining that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

In his recent book, “Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change,” Ritter examines the administration’s foreign policy and Iran’s potential to threaten U.S. national security interests. He writes, “The path the United States has currently embarked on regarding Iran is a path that will inevitably lead to war. Such a course of action will make even the historical mistake we made in Iraq pale by comparison.”

In the 2006 version of the national security strategy, Iran was named 16 times as the number-one threat to the national security of the United States. You doubt the veracity of this information and this conclusion?

In that same document, the Bush administration does articulate two reasons why Iran constitutes such a threat. One is in the form of a nuclear weapons program the Bush administration claims they know exists. And the other one is the Bush administration’s proclamation that Iran is the number-one state sponsor of terrorism in the world today.

There’s nothing in the Bush administration’s document to back up these dramatic assertions.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly stated there is no evidence whatsoever to sustain the allegations made by the Bush administration that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.There’s no evidence. All the evidence that has emerged is consistent with the declared intent of Iran to pursue a legitimate nuclear energy program permitted under the nonproliferation treaty. These are the facts. Now, how the Bush administration takes these facts and turns it into absolute certainty that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program boggles the mind.

“State sponsor of terrorism” is the same thing. What does the Bush administration cite as proof positive that Iran has achieved this status? They emphasize Iran’s continued sponsorship of the southern Lebanese political organization called Hezbollah.

I like to look at history and look at cause and effect, and I see that Hezbollah has its birth in the aftermath of an Israeli invasion and occupation of south Lebanon. Hezbollah is a product of the residents of south Lebanon, a legitimate expression of the genuine political concerns of the residents of south Lebanon. In no way, shape or form can you articulate this organization as a terrorist organization. It is a national resistance organization. I don’t condone their methodologies, I’m not supportive of their politics, but one has to be accurate when defining an organization. Hezbollah most certainly is not a terrorist organization. Therefore Iran’s continued support of Hezbollah does not constitute state sponsorship of terrorism.

Isn’t Iran sitting on top of huge oil reserves? Don’t they have all the energy they need? Why would they need nuclear power?

That’s an outstanding argument, one that has been made very aggressively by the Bush administration, in fact. (But) in 1975, the Shah of Iran had his oil ministry conduct a study about the viability of Iran’s long-term economic prospects regarding oil. Iran’s economy is totally dependent upon its ability to extract and export oil. They studied their reserves and realized that there’s a finite amount of oil here. They needed to maximize the ability to export this oil at the same time that their own developing economy was consuming increasing amounts of the indigenous oil they needed to export. They realized that within three or four decades—this was in 1975—there would be a crossover point where Iranians would be consuming more oil than they were exporting. This is devastating for an export-based economy. So they needed an alternative energy source. The decision was to pursue nuclear energy. The American think tanks agreed. The Iranians took this to the U.S. Government in 1976, the Republican administration of then-president Gerald Ford gave two thumbs up to the Iranian nuclear energy program. This was inclusive of the total fuel cycle, meaning Iran can acquire technology to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel rods so that the energy program cannot be held hostage to the vagaries of economic sanctions or embargoes. Who was the secretary of defense in 1976? Donald Rumsfeld. Who was the White House chief of staff overseeing the staffing of this proposal? Dick Cheney.

As Ronald Reagan said, “facts are stubborn things.”

Facts are stubborn things. They’re the only things that matter, I’ll tell you that much. The Bush administration has put forward a considerable body of evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. None of it withstands scrutiny. All the facts pertaining to this situation reinforce Iran’s assertion that its nuclear program is solely dedicated to the pursuit of peaceful nuclear energy.

When you were chief weapons inspector for the United Nations, you found that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but that information seemed to be disregarded because the conclusions had already been reached and the so-called evidence that the Bush-Cheney administration had conflicted with that reality. Is that the reason you resigned from the UN?

I at no time went on record saying that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction. It’s a popular myth that I was running around saying there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I never said that.

What I said is that we could account for 95 to 98 percent of these weapons. There’s some that’s unaccounted for, we don’t know what the final disposition of it is, but we were monitoring the factories and we know they weren’t building new ones.

George W. Bush isn’t saying that he thinks there might be small amounts of WMD left in Iraq. What he said is there’s massive stockpiles of chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, long-range ballistic missiles. That cannot be. This cannot happen unless you can demonstrate how Iraq has miraculously risen from the ashes, reconstituted the totality of its industrial infrastructure and has been pumping this stuff out.

And you know what? If they were doing that we would have absolute proof that this was occurring. But the fact that the Bush administration made the rhetoric but could not back it up with evidence means that this was purely a rhetorical case, it was a hyped-up case. Furthermore, when UN inspectors did return in 2002 and 2003, one of the first lists they were given was from the CIA with over 25 sites where the CIA said we know Iraq is reconstituting WMD. Inspectors went in, investigated and found out that nothing was going on there.

Donald Rumsfeld received this report and said, “This is the clearest proof yet. The fact that UN weapons inspectors haven’t found weapons of mass destruction proves that there are weapons of mass destruction.” He honestly said that. It’s absurd. But it’s the same logic that’s being applied today in Iran. We have inspectors in Iran who are not finding any evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. And what does the Bush administration say? “This proves that there is an Iranian weapons program.”

They say that it’s buried underground. They said that about Saddam’s weapons all the time, that it’s buried underground. I led inspection after inspection after inspection going after buried facilities. Some of it was hilarious. I received intelligence that there’s a buried facility under this plain. So I bring in the world’s best geophysicist, and I’m out there plotting my grand mission of looking for buried factories, and the scientist comes up and hits me over the head with a shovel. He says, “Ritter, dig a hole.” I start digging a hole. I get down two feet, it starts filling up with water. He says, “Dig deeper.” I dig deeper, it keeps filling up. He says, “That’s a water table.” He was educating me. He says, “What happens if you take a factory and put it under ground in an area that has such a high water table? Have you heard of the term buoyancy?” He gave me another education there. If you bury a facility underground where there’s a high water table, buoyancy will cause the factory to pop up to the top of the ground unless you have massive water pumps pumping the water away. He said, “Look around. Do you see any water pumps?” I said, “No.” He said, “Don’t even bother anymore. There’s not an underground facility here.” But the myth continued, the myth persisted.

Bush is saying that the weapons used in Iraq come from not just individuals in Iran, but the government in Iran. Could you comment on that?

This needs to be put in context. Mexico shares a long border with America. If we find Mexicans in south Texas, southern Arizona, southern California, is this an unnatural thing? No. It’s a natural reflection of reality. We’re neighbors.

Iran shares a long border with Iraq. America is separated by Iraq by thousands of miles. It’s more unnatural for an American to be in Iraq than it is for an Iranian. The unnatural act that is occurring in Iraq is not the presence of Iranian influence, it’s the presence of American occupation. That’s the unnatural act.

The Iranians have a logical reason (to be there), especially when one considers that Iran fought an eight-year war with Iraq, a war of national survival, and they don’t want to see a post-Saddam Iraq emerge as a government espousing the same aggressive policies in relation to Iran that Saddam had. They have a vested interest in ensuring that there is a peace-loving, stable government that is not openly hostile to Iran. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

It’s the United States that invaded Iraq, not Iran. And it’s the United States that invited, as part of the opposition coalition to Saddam, certain Islamist groups that were based out of Iran. 

I wonder what you think the real reason for invading and occupying Iraq was. Could it have been because there was this previous antipathy toward Iran ever since our guy, the shah, was kicked out? Or is it simply oil? Could it be that simple?

It’s about the accumulation of power. It’s about American dominance. A term that they use is hegemony. A term that I use is empire.

If you read these documents put out by the Bush administration and the idealogues who draft it, you’ll see that they even go beyond that.

They are talking about China as the greatest threat to the United States of America, and that in order to deal with China—which has one of the largest developing economies in the world today, an economy that is able to outpace America when it comes to pure capitalism and thus constitutes a threat to capitalistic America—therefore we must be in a position to dictate the pace of growth of the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is totally dependent upon outside sources of energy for its growth. The Middle East and Central Asia provide China with its energy, therefore we must control the energy of the Middle East and Central Asia.

So people say, ‘Oh, it’s all about oil,’ but it’s much more complicated than that. Oil plays a big role in this overall power equation. China is what motivates us in Iran. It’s about global domination, it’s about global empire.

I throw out that term not lightly. Find me an historical case of an empire ending happily ever after. All empires end badly. If America chooses the path of empire, I will make this prediction: We will end badly. And that’s not a future I want for myself, for my kids, or for my grandkids. …

Now we’ve got EFPs, explosively formed projectiles, and we’re told by the president that these EFPs are the most dangerous threat facing American service members in Iraq today. That they represent an order of magnitude of development of technology that can only be provided by the Iranian government. Well, I’m just a simple former Marine. In 1986, I took a course on anti-terrorism and things like that. One of the things they taught us to build were explosively formed projectiles. It is the most primitive form of anti-tank weapon you can come up with.

Those who use this weapon do not hunt down American tanks. They bury them in their neighborhood as a means of self-defense against those forces who are intruding upon their neighborhood. So imagine that. If American forces weren’t in Iraq, they wouldn’t be dying. But because they’re in Iraq and they are intruding in aggressive, hostile, brutal fashion in the neighborhoods of Iraqi citizens who live there, they’re going to defend themselves, and they choose to use the technology that is available, which is a primitive form of anti-tank weapon.
Now we were told only the Iranians can provide this. And yet a week after George Bush gave his public statement, American forces raided a warehouse in Baghdad where they found an EFP factory. We were told that this was too sophisticated for the Iraqi insurgents to be doing, but the Iraqi insurgents are the ones making it. The Iranian government is not making it. The Iranian government has no interest in making these. This is about defending Iraqi neighborhoods from foreign aggression. EFPs have tragically been responsible for the deaths of upwards of 170 Americans, while 3,200 Americans have died in Iraq. The vast majority of them die combating Sunni insurgents, not Shiia insurgents. It’s the Sunnis that are very aggressive in killing Americans. The Shiia only kill Americans when Americans go into Shiia neighborhoods.

What do you believe Bush’s real goal is regarding Iran? Are we on a path that will inevitably lead to war, and do you think things may have changed recently with Condi Rice seemingly talking to hostile governments?

First of all, Condi Rice is not talking to anybody. It’s just hype. Find me the Iranian official she’s talking to. She hasn’t. … She is pursuing the Bush administration’s policy of regional transformation, i.e., America’s drive to global empire.

And the scary thing is Condi Rice may be the secretary of state, but the State Department is no longer the lead agency when it comes to defining foreign policy. It is the Department of Defense that dictates how we interact with nations around the world, especially nations in targeted areas of interest. And it’s the Pentagon that’s building America’s policy in the Middle East. Meaning that, any policy we seek with Iran or the so-called Iranian problem will be a military solution.

We’re not talking about lifting sanctions, reaching out, creating conditions from within Iran where the legitimate expression of the people is articulated in nonviolent action to achieve a change in the nature of the regime. That’s regime change I would support. What we’re talking about is bombing Iran, neutralizing their security mechanisms, decapitating their leadership and creating a so-called window of opportunity for the Iranian people to rise up and take matters into their own hands.

Nice on paper. The problem is, I’m a student of history. I don’t find too many examples in history where we bomb a people, then they embrace us.

There’s a real chance if we go to war in Iran, we’re going to get militarily defeated. And if we go to war in Iran, we’re going to war against an enemy that has been preparing for some time to receive the American invaders.
The Iranians are not in search of enemies. They’re not out there casting about, picking a fight with America. It’s America that is in search of enemies. We’re the ones picking a fight, we’re the ones asking for trouble. And I’m here to tell you right now that if we go into Iran, they will give us much more than we can handle.

Similar to Iraq.

But the difference is, the Iraqi people didn’t have a viable military. Their nation had been devastated by the combined effects of an eight-year war with Iran, a decisive defeat in 1991 with the United States-led coalition, a decade of economic sanctions that denied them the ability to rebuild a viable military. Yet this destroyed nation-state called Iraq is kicking our butt left and right.

We’re going to go into Iran, a nation of 70 million, two and a half times the size of Iraq, that has a viable economy, a viable government, a viable military, intact infrastructure? Think again. …
New Hampshire needs to recognize the unique role it plays in presidential politics, and they need to step up to the plate and start taking advantage of that and genuinely shaping this.

Somebody’s going to have to take the lead on Iran. It’s going to require serious initiatives in Congress to de-fund a war in Iran before it begins. That means a new Bolland-type amendment needs to be passed by Congress right now, prohibiting the expenditure of U.S. taxpayer money by the Bush administration for military operations against Iran without the express permission of Congress. Reinstate Congress’s Constitutional mandate of declaring war and having war powers authority. The genuine power to constrain the president is in the House of Representatives.