In Shifting Sands: the Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq
Written and directed by Scott Ritter
Now showing at: the Valhalla, Sydney (phone 9552 2456 for session details); the Nova, Melbourne (9347 2573); and the Schonell Twin, Brisbane (3377 2229)
REVIEW BY NICK EVERETT
In Shifting Sands is a powerful documentary that reveals how the US government has manipulated successive weapons inspections in Iraq to build a case for war.
Scott Ritter, the film's producer, is an unlikely ally of the anti-war movement. Ritter is a ballistic technology expert and former military intelligence officer, whose 12-year career in the US armed forces included assignments in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. During the 1991 Gulf War he worked under the command of General Norman Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and was responsible for tracking Iraq's Scud missiles.
In the first part of the film, entitled "Trust", Ritter describes the context in which he joined the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspection agency, created by the UN Security Council. He defends the US-led attack on Iraq in 1991 (Operation Desert Storm) as a legitimate response to Iraq's August 1991 invasion of Kuwait. "Never before in the history of the United Nations had one country attempted to subsume another", he argues, seemingly unaware of Indonesia's brutal 1975 invasion and 24-year-long annexation of East Timor.
Between 1991 and 1998, Ritter took part in more than 30 inspection missions in Iraq, 14 as chief weapons inspector. By 1995, according to Ritter, UNSCOM had "fundamentally disarmed" Iraq, destroying 90-95% of the country's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs ("weapons of mass destruction" or WMD) and capability. In August 1995, the head of Iraq's weapons program, Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamal al Majid, defected to Jordan. Majid told UNSCOM head Rolf Ekeus that all of Iraq's banned weapons had been destroyed, providing UNSCOM with substantial documentary evidence.
Yet the United States continued to insist that WMD remained, seeking to justify its hostile policy towards the regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Washington's goal was to ultimately overthrow the Iraqi regime.
In 1998, Australian diplomat Richard Butler was appointed head of UNSCOM. According to Ritter, Butler's role was to provoke confrontations with Iraq in order to provide a trigger for renewed US bombing. Butler authorised the use of spying equipment by UNSCOM to monitor communications between Iraqi officials. Iraq responded by accusing the US of using UNSCOM for intelligence purposes and declared key state buildings be off-limits to weapons inspectors.
In early 1998, Ritter and Butler attended a meeting with the US ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, just before Ritter was due to return to Iraq. In a damning indictment of Butler's role, Ritter describes how Butler drew a line on a blackboard and told him he had to provoke a confrontation "by this date so that the US can start bombing by this date". This bombing was to be completed prior to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The bombing did not take place until later that year, when a confrontation over inspections was used by the administration of US President Bill Clinton to justify a renewed US-British bombing campaign (Operation Desert Fox).
Butler's tactics were the final straw for Ritter, who resigned from his position in August that year. Butler has denied Ritter's claims of collusion with Washington, but refused to be interviewed for the film.
The film features footage of inspectors working in Iraq and contains interviews with Australian and British weapons inspectors, who lend credibility to his argument. The film also features interviews with Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz and Amer Rashid, who headed Iraq's WMD program. Both of these men in 1998 accused Ritter of being a US spy.
It is a credit to Ritter that he has pursued his case in the face of such a hostile smear campaign by the present Bush administration and its allies. A Washington Post editorial last September, entitled "The bizarre odyssey of Scott Ritter", argued that the film was funded with Iraqi government money and that his assertions are "a sad turn of events for a once admirable Marine".
A few days before this scathing editorial, Ritter travelled to Iraq to address the Arab and Foreign Relations Committee of Iraq's National Assembly to urge that Iraq adopt a "more welcoming posture" to the return of UN weapons inspectors as the best way to counter the Bush administrations attempts to launch a war using "the rhetoric of fear and ignorance".
On September 30, Ritter addressed a 400,000-strong "Don't attack Iraq" rally in Hyde Park, London, and asserted that Iraq could pose no threat to the US or Britain.
In Shifting Sands, not surprisingly, has been unable to gain mainstream film theatre screenings, being shown instead at independent cinemas and film festivals.
The film's message and facts will not be new to Green Left Weekly readers. It provides a damning record of the US government's manipulation of the weapons inspection process to justify its colonisation and plunder of Iraq.
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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