MR. HERSH: The other element in all of this, of course, is that, as Scott writes in his book, there were things going on inside his own organization that he didn't know about, operations being run by the CIA. One of the things that was going on is, as we provoked Saddam and demanded to get into the palaces, their concern was, of course, that the real meaning of the effort was to assassinate him, and, lo and behold----

MR. RITTER: Well, that's exactly what happened. I mean, look, the American policy was regime change. At first they wanted to be passive, we're just going to contain Saddam through economic sanctions, and he's going to collapse of his own volition in six months. That failed. We're going to put pressure on the Iraqis, and we're going to get some Sunni general to apply the 75-cent solution--the cost of a 9 mm bullet put in the back of Saddam's head--and the Sunni general will take over. If you want proof positive about the corrupt nature of our regime-change policy, understand this, it wasn't about changing the regime. It wasn't about getting rid of the Baathist party or transforming Iraq into a modern democracy back in the early 1990s. It was about getting rid of one man, Saddam Hussein. And if he was replaced by a Sunni general who governed Iraq in the exact same fashion, that was okay. And that shows the utter hypocrisy of everything we did.

But the CIA was having a difficult time getting near Saddam because he has a very effective security apparatus. By 1995, Saddam's survival becomes a political liability to Bill Clinton, and he was coming up for reelection in '96, and he turned to the CIA and said get rid of Saddam by the summer of 1996: I need that man gone. And the CIA worked with British intelligence, they brought in somebody named Ayad Allawi. It might be a name familiar to people--he was for a period of time the interim Prime Minister of Iraq after the American occupation. Before he was interim Prime Minister, however, he was a paid agent of British intelligence and the CIA, and he worked with them to orchestrate this coup d'état that required them to recruit people on the inside of Iraq to be ready to take out Saddam. But you needed a trigger, and the trigger was a UN weapons inspection that I helped organize.

We thought we were going after the concealment mechanism, but it turned out that the CIA was setting us up so that we would go to facilities that housed Saddam's security. It was anticipated they would block us, and then when we withdrew, there would be a military strike that would decapitate the security of Saddam.

The one place that we wanted to go to, the Third Battalion, we weren't allowed to. The CIA said don't worry about that, we know those guys, they're not bad. And they were supposed to rise up and take Saddam out. Well, the Iraqi intelligence service was very effective at infiltrating this coup, they wrapped it up, and nothing happened in terms of getting rid of Saddam. Except one thing, the Iraqis were fully aware of the role played by the CIA in infiltrating UNSCOM and using UNSCOM for devices. And the ultimate tragedy of this is that from that point on, every time a UN weapons inspector went into Iraq--somebody with a blue hat--they weren't viewed by the Iraqis as somebody who was trying to disarm Iraq, they were viewed by the Iraqis as somebody trying to kill their President, and they were right.

MR. HERSH: When did you learn about this?

MR. RITTER: We always knew about regime change. I mean, when I first came in, we knew about regime change. In terms of the infiltration, you know, some people say it's my fault because I'm the guy who brought in the character I call Modaz and the special activities staff, the covert operators of the CIA. We used them in 1992, we used them in 1993 because it's tough to do inspections in Iraq. You know, they're not necessarily the friendliest people in the world when you're trying to go to a site that they don't want you to get in. And you can't have a bunch of thin-necked, geeky scientists trying to do this job. You need guys with thick necks and thick arms, and the CIA had plenty of these guys who could do logistics, they could do planning, they could do communications in austere environments. So we used these guys, and we used them in June.

The problem came afterwards when we started doing up follow-up inspections. First of all, the Iraqis would come to me, and they would say, "Mr. Ritter, what are you doing? You know, you're supposed to be an inspector, and yet you're doing all this bad stuff. We know about the CIA's coup attempts.... We know what happened in June."

Well, what happened in June? And suddenly we started inspecting cites, and I see documents that start sending off signals in my head about, oh, my gosh, the unit the CIA didn't want us to go to was the unit that was liquidated by Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the failed coup because that was the unit that was trying to take out Saddam. It's silly, the light goes off, and you're sitting there going we've had the wool pulled over our eyes, we've been used. We were used by the United States, though, and they're the most powerful nation on the Security Council that we as inspectors worked for.

So how do you turn to your boss and say, Hey, you've used us? We won't tolerate that. Well, you can't do that. What you have to do is continue to plod forward and just redouble your efforts to maintain the integrity of a process that tragically had been terminally corrupted by that point.

MR. HERSH: The question is, if Clinton wasn't so good, where are we now?

MR. RITTER: Well, I mean, I'll start off, and I want to highlight that point that Clinton wasn't so good. You know, there's a lot of talk today in the Democratically controlled judiciary committee about going after the Bush Administration for crimes, for lying to Congress, and etc. And I'm all in favor of that, bring on the indictments, but don't stop at the Bush Administration. If you want to have a truly bipartisan indictment, you indict Madeleine Albright, you indict Sandy Berger, you indict every person on the Clinton Administration that committed the exact same crime that the Bush Administration has committed today. Lying during the course of your official duty: That's a felony, that's a high crime and misdemeanor. That's language in the Constitution that triggers certain events like impeachment. So let's not just simply turn this into a Bush-bashing event. This is about a failure of not only the Bush Administration but of the United States of America, and we have to look in the mirror and recognize that, well, all the Bush Administration did is take advantage of a systemic failure on the part of the United States as a whole, a failure that not only involves the executive, but it involves the legislative branch, Congress.

Congress has abrogated its responsibilities under the Constitution, and they've abrogated it for years. Then there's the media, and, yes, we can turn this into a media-bashing event. But you know what? The media only feeds the American people the poison they're willing to swallow. And we the people of the United States of America seem to want our news in no more than three-minute chunks with sound bites of thirty seconds or less, and it can't be too complicated. So what we did is allowed ourselves during the decade of the 1990s to be pre-programmed into accepting at face value without question anything that was negative about Saddam Hussein's regime, and this made selling the war on Iraq on the basis of a lie the easiest task ever faced by the Bush Administration.

MR. HERSH: There's always the argument that one virtue of what we did, no matter how bad it is, we've got rid of a very bad dictator. What's your answer to that one?

MR. RITTER: That invokes the notion of the ends justify the means. I mean, that's basically what we're saying here is that who cares about the lie, who cares about the WMD. You know, we got rid of a bad guy. The ends justify the means. And I have to be frank. If there's anybody here who calls themselves a citizen of the United States of America and you endorse the notion of the ends justify the means, submit your passport for destruction and get the hell out of my country. Because this is a country that is founded on the rule of law as set forth by the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution that the men and women who serve us swore an oath of allegiance to, the Constitution that our government, every government official swears an oath of allegiance to, and it's about due process. Democracy is ugly. Sometimes it doesn't work as smoothly as we want it to. But if you're sitting here and saying that when it comes to Saddam, that the ends justify the means, where do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line?

And you can't tell me that it's only going to stop here. It's about the rule of law, it's about the Constitution. And if we wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, then we should have had a debate, discussion, and dialogue about the real reasons and not make up some artificial WMD.

MR. HERSH: But let me ask you this, as somebody who knows the military pretty well, what about the failure of the military to speak out?

MR. RITTER: Well, I'm not saying that they shouldn't speak out. I mean, it would be wonderful if soldiers came back from Iraq and said this is a war that's not only unwinnable, but this is a war that's morally unacceptable, and I can no longer participate in this conflict. But it's a very difficult thing to ask a soldier to do what the average American citizen won't.

I mean, why do we put the burden on the soldier to speak out instead of putting the burden on the American public to become more empowered, to become enraged about what's happening? We've got an election coming up in 2006. Rather than waiting for soldiers to resign, why don't we vote out of Congress everybody who voted in favor of this war?

MR. HERSH: Do you have any optimism at this point?

MR. RITTER: No. I wish I did.

I mean, the sad fact is, one of the reasons why I was arguing against this war was not just that it was based on a lie, but it's a reflection of the reality that was recognized in 1991: If you remove Saddam and you don't have a clue what's going to replace Saddam, you're going to get chaos and anarchy. People continue to say they want the elegant solution in Iraq. I mean, that's the problem, everybody's like, well, we can't withdraw because we got to solve all the problems.

Ladies and gentlemen, there's not going to be an elegant solution in Iraq. There's no magic wand that can be waved to solve this problem. If we get out and we have a plan, you know, it's still going to cost 30,000 Iraqi lives. Let's understand that, there's going to be blood shed in Iraq. They're going to kill each other, and we're not going to stop it.

If we continue to stay the course, however, that 30,000 number may become 60,000 or 90,000. At the end of the day, we've created a nightmare scenario in Iraq, and the best we can do is mitigate failure. And that's what I'm talking, and, unfortunately, that's a politically unacceptable answer. People say, no, we have to win, we have to persevere, there has to be victory. There's not going to be victory.

MR. HERSH: What about the chances of expanding the war? What about the chances of expanding the war into Syria or even into Iran?

MR. RITTER: Well, the sad thing right now is that we have a Bush Administration that's populated by people who don't understand war. They've never been in the military, they've never served in combat, and they don't know what it means to have a son die or to have a friend die or have a brother die or have a comrade die.

And so that's why you have a Secretary of State like Condoleezza Rice who has the gall to stand before the American people and say that war is the only guarantor of peace and security. And now she testified before the US Congress today, and she said that not only is Iraq probably going to be another ten-year investment of time, blood, and national treasure for the American public, but that Syria and Iran may very well be the next targets of the Bush Administration. So this Administration has learned nothing, but what's worse is that Congress has learned nothing.

There were no tough questions to Condoleezza Rice. And now we have the American people. What lessons have we learned, what actions are we going to take?

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