Scott Ritter was the UN’s top weapons inspector in Iraq until he resigned in 1998, claiming that the failure of the UN Security Council to back weapons inspectors in the face of ongoing Iraqi obstruction, combined with the manipulation of the inspection process by the Clinton administration, had made it impossible for him to complete his disarmament mission.

For the past eighteen months, both prior to and during the Second Gulf War, he has been saying that while Iraq has not yet been found to be in compliance with its disarmament obligation, there was no evidence that Iraq continued to possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or was seeking to reconstitute any of its past WMD programmes, and that inspections were an effective means of dealing with Iraq’s WMD. .

Mr. Ritter was one of the most aggressive inspectors and was the Chief Inspector for most of the major confrontational inspections in Iraq during the 1990’s, earning the ire of the Iraqi government.

© Crown Copyright 2003. Source: MoD.

In recent times, however, Mr. Ritter has been the most outspoken critic of US policy in Baghdad and has published many articles in the US and UK media saying that the inspection team was used by the US and UK intelligence services for purposes other than mandated by the Security Council, thus compromising his mission, and that the Iraqis had been fundamentally disarmed for nearly a decade prior to the March 2003 invasion.