Scott Ritter and the Iran nuclear scare

The former chief UN inspector for Iraq, Scott Ritter, drew attention in the period leading up to the Iraq war for his forthright arguments that Iraq had no WMD. His latest book, Target Iran: The Truth about the White House's Plans for Regime Change, argues that the same is true with Iran - it does not have a nuclear weapons program.

The book is a detailed walk through the history of the Iran nuclear weapons scare. Helpfully explaining the rudiments of uranium enrichment and centrifuges, Ritter spends much of the book recounting each inspection tour, negotiation, and meeting between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran from 2001 through 2006. Uranium enrichment is required for both nuclear reactor fuel and nuclear weapons, but only low degree of enrichment is needed for reactor fuel, while high enrichment is needed for weapons. Picking apart the issues at each stage of the process, Ritter shows that the IAEA, the US, and Israel have never come up with any evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. He also suggests that Iran is still facing serious technical problems in its enrichment effort.

The Israeli/U.S. furor is based on a supposition that Iran would not need a peaceful nuclear energy program hence "must" be seeking nuclear weapons, and a drive for regime change based on strategic and political objectives. Iran has been put in the position of "proving a negative" - proving that it does not have a weapons program - which is against the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the U.S. has been able to manipulate the process, and successive Security Council resolutions since 2005 have demanded Iran halt enrichment activity based on no evidence.

An ex-Marine and a self-described conservative, Ritter argues that Israel is wrapped up in a konseptsia, or gut feeling that is not based on hard fact, that it faces a combination of many adversaries headed by Iran. In turn he believes Israel has kidnapped U.S. policy towards Iran and that the anti-Iran stance of the U.S. is not in U.S. interests. "Let there be no doubt: if there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else." In this belief that Israel drives the U.S.'s Mideast policy, Ritter agrees with Perry Anderson's view; my own is that the U.S. empire has sound geopolitical reasons for its strategy of Mideast domination, and that Israel is the U.S.'s tool in this game, not the other way around.

Ritter is critical of Europe, particularly the EU-3 (Britain, France, Germany) which have played a part ostensibly independent of the U.S., but which in fact have followed the U.S. line on the essentials. "Without a shred of evidence beyond the rhetoric of Washington, D.C., and the posturing of Tel Aviv, Europe has bought into the operating premise that Iran's nuclear ambitions are military in nature, and not civilian." Ritter similarly slams Russia and China, which knew the risks of letting the Iran matter be referred from the IAEA to the Security Council, but acquiesced for the sake of international unity.

The approach to the non-proliferation issue is narrow and legalistic. Ritter does not explain the issues surrounding the NPT, the way the U.S. has been able to use it to maintain its nuclear supermacy and particularly as a club to pummel its its chosen targets such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

The book is not footnoted, apparently because it includes information from people involved in intelligence and/or non-proliferation work.

Ritter's book, published by Nation Books and ignored by mainstream book reviewers, is a cry to prevent a U.S. war with Iran, which he assessed as almost inevitable in June 2007. The political situation has since changed with the publication of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate in December, whose statement that Iran stopped any nuclear weapons work in 2003 at least temporarily took the wind out of the sails of the U.S. war party.

Ritter's analysis skirts many questions which are neither identified nor addressed:

• Why does the U.S. want regime change in Iran so badly?
• Why is Israel subject to an irrational antagonism towards Iran instead of following a peaceful policy?
  
• Why is has Israel been able to hijack the U.S.'s Middle East policy (as he believes)?
  
• Why can Europe, Russia, and China not break from the U.S. war drive by developing a really independent Iran policy?
• What is the future of the NPT and the nuclear proliferation issue?
  

Ritter is an honest analyst who starts with what he knows best and keeps pulling on the string to unravel the knot. In doing so he has made a solid contribution to the analysis of the Iran war scare, and with his military background he brings different assumptions to the problem than do most anti-imperialists. But he needs to go much deeper into the political and social context to further unravel the forces at play. In a future post I'll discuss another of his recent books, in which he advises the U.S. peace movement on its strategy and organization.