Iraq Confidential; The untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein by Ritter, Scott - 2005

New York: Nation Books, 2005. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxiii, [1], 312 pages. Glossary. Maps. Notes. Index. Foreword by Seymour Hersh. Inscribed by author on title-page. DJ has slight wear and soiling. William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) was a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and later a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration's contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction." He received harsh criticism from the political establishment but became a popular antiwar figure and occasional talk show commentator as a result of his stance, later proven to be correct. In 2001 Ritter on two occasions was detained and later arrested on charges of soliciting minors for sex on the Internet that were both dismissed. He was arrested on similar charges in 2010 that led to a conviction and sentence of one and a half to five and a half years. In February 2005, writing on Al Jazeera's website, Ritter wrote that the "Iraqi resistance" is a "genuine grassroots national liberation movement," and "History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilize and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government." On December 20, 2005, in a debate with Christopher Hitchens at the Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, NY, Ritter said that he would "prefer to be an Iraqi under Saddam than an Iraqi under a brutal American occupation." Scott Ritter is the straight-talking former marine officer who the CIA wants to silence. After the 1991 Gulf War, Ritter helped lead the UN weapons inspections of Iraq, and found himself at the center of a dangerous game between the Iraqi and United States regimes. As Ritter reveals in this explosive book, Washington was only interested in disarmament as a tool for its own agenda. Operating in a fog of espionage and counter-espionage, Ritter and his team were determined to find out the truth about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The CIA was equally determined to stop them. For the truth, we now know, is that Iraq was playing a deadly bluffing game, and actually had no WMD. But to have revealed this would have derailed America's drive for regime change. Iraq Confidential charts the disillusionment of a staunch patriot who came to realize that his own government sought to undermine effective arms control in the Middle East. Ritter shows us a world of deceit and betrayal, in which nothing is as it seems. A host of characters from Mossad, MI6 and the CIA pepper this powerful narrative, which contains revelations that will permanently affect the ongoing debates about Iraq.