Target Iran: The truth about the US Government's plans for regime change.

• Jurisdiction: New Zealand
• Author: Harding, Bruce
• Date: 01 March 2007

TARGET IRAN: The truth about the US Government's plans for regime change

Author: Scott Ritter Published by: Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest NSW, 2006, 228pp, $35.

This sobering book bears the clear impress of urgency as its experienced author (one of UN Special Commission's weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998--[involved with 52 inspections]--and a former US Marine and ballistic missile advisor to General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in the Gulf War) has sought to generate an intra-American debate about another rush towards regime change in the Middle East.

Ritter is well known and well regarded for his lucid book Endgame: Solving the Iraq Crisis (1999), which detailed Saddam's malfeasance against the UN inspectors allied with serious errors in US policy, and for succeeding books (War on Iraq and Iraq Confidential) which bear the fruit of his extensive, and informed, personal sources. Where Ritter exposed Saddam Hussein's strategic deceptions during the Bush I-Clinton era, Target Iran is in many ways the photographic double of Endgame, for in February 2003 Ritter went public to challenge and contest 'W' Bush and Colin Powell's rush to war, insisting on their use of flawed, circumstantial intelligence and warning that an invasion of Iraq would constitute a 'long and horrific' invitation to terrorism. Ritter's cry then was that Powell's UN filibuster would 'destroy international trust and confidence in weapons inspections; which do work 'if given a chance'. Ritter insisted that Iraq in 2003 was a 'defanged tiger' with 95 per cent of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction having been destroyed by November 1998 when UN inspectors were ejected. The idiocy of ignoring his warning has been usefully examined by Ivo Dalder and James Lindsay in their book America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (2003), and the folly of the 'neocons' thus analysed forms the...