- WASHINGTON (dpa) -- Scott
Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq for seven years, said that if the
American and British justification for the attack on Iraq turns out to
be a fabrication , which he believes to be the case, the war will turn
out to be a defeat for the United States and for the international rule
of law.
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- Ritter, speaking to the Palestine Centre, a Washington
think tank on the Middle East, said defeating the Iraqi military is not
the test of whether the two allies achieve a final victory. The test is
whether the operation brings democracy or something like it to the Iraqi
people, he said.
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- And if it turns out the basis for the attack - Iraq's
alleged possession and development of weapons of mass destruction - was
false, then the Iraq people would never accept an American presence in
their country, Washington would have lost the war and US troops would be
in Iraq for a long time, the former US Marine major said.
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- If the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction turns
up nothing significant, Ritter added, it would demonstrate that the United
Nations inspections had done their job in the past.
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- Ritter was part of the inspection team in 1995 when General
Hussein Kamal, who had been in charge of the weapons of mass destruction
programme in Iraq and then defected to Jordan, was interrogated by US intelligence
agents and UN inspectors.
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- Ritter said US Secretary of State Colin Powell had misled
the UN Security Council earlier this year when he claimed Iraq had purchased
100 tons of uranium ore from the African nation of Niger. Later, when the
documents about the alleged purchase were shown to UN inspectors, it took
24 hours for them to determine that they were crude fabrications.
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- http://www.dawn.com/2003/04/27/int16.htm
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