Foreign Affairs:Former UN weapons inspector, US Marine, and self-described conservative Scott Ritter first made headlines with his high-profile challenge to the false claims by the Bush administration of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the lead-up to the war on Iraq in 2003.
Now, with Target Iran, Ritter is back with a similarly compelling assault on the build-up to another possible war in the Middle East where, per Ritter, the US is once again using "trumped-up charges" of an unsubstantiated WMD threat as a smokescreen to mask its true goal of regime change, this time in Iran.
Not surprisingly for a former evidence-based weapons inspector, Ritter refuses to speculate as to whether Teheran is actually pursuing a secret nuclear weapons project along with its declared nuclear energy programme. Instead he carefully charts the cat-and-mouse game between his former employers, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iran, which began with the discovery (thanks to Israeli intelligence) of undeclared Iranian nuclear projects at Natanz and Arak in 2002, yet which to date has not turned up any evidence of nuclear materials being diverted to any nuclear weapons programme, although the IAEA cannot yet vouch that Iran's nuclear programme is entirely for peaceful purposes. In short, despite US and Israeli claims to the contrary, we once again cannot be certain that an illegal WMD programme in fact exists.
Ritter also details a second game of cat and mouse that has been going on since 2002 - this time between the Bush administration on one side, and the EU, Russia and China on the other - in which the US consistently sought, and eventually succeeded, in February 2006, to have oversight of Iran's nuclear energy programme taken away from IAEA inspectors and referred instead to the UN Security Council so that, Ritter says, it can once again undertake unilateral military action against another allegedly nuclear-armed state after the UN once again fails to act decisively. However, what distinguishes the march to war on Iran from the similarly manufactured case against Iraq, according to Ritter, is the critical role played by Israel, whose disproportionate influence on US foreign policy, via the powerful American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, has effectively hijacked American Middle Eastern policy on behalf of Tel Aviv. Such claims, Ritter asserts, will be immediately labelled as anti-Semitic, although he himself takes pains to acknowledge both the impact of the Holocaust in shaping Israel's national psyche, and the very real present-day threats to Israeli security. However, Ritter insists, Israel does not face any direct military threat from Iran, especially a nuclear one, that warrants any pre-emptive military action.
Per Ritter, the circle that cannot be squared- and which in turn drives both the current diplomatic stand-off at the UN and the increasing fear of a unilateral military strike by either the US or Israel on Iran - is Teheran's insistence, as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), on its sovereign right under Article IV of the treaty to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and Israel's determination, itself a non-signatory to the NPF with an undeclared nuclear arsenal of at least 200 nuclear weapons, to deny Iran outright any capacity whatsoever to enrich uranium, for fear it could lead to manufacture of nuclear weapons.
Ritter is also good on the many complex, and often competing, strands of national interest also at play here - whether the EU's status as Iran's major trading partner, Russia's future role as supplier of nuclear fuel for an Iranian reactor under construction at Bushehr, or China's sudden emergence in 2004 as Iran's largest LPG and oil customer, which by extension makes any military action against Iran a direct blow also at China's economic interests.
Nevertheless, what fuels the crisis, according to Ritter, is Israel's stated intention to take pre-emptive action, if the US and its allies won't, against what both it and the US flatly declare is a secret Iranian WMD programme, despite the absence of any hard evidence whatsoever. However, unlike the Israeli air strike that destroyed Iran's sole nuclear reactor in 1981, there is no guarantee this time that similar strikes will successfully disable Iran's widely scattered and deep-bunker nuclear facilities. Worse yet is the likelihood that such air strikes will ignite a far wider conflict across the already besieged Middle East, in which Iran might attempt to interdict the global oil supply by cutting off the Strait of Hormuz, or launch proxy missile attacks on Israel by Hizbullah from southern Lebanon, along with proxy attacks by Shiite militia on US forces in Iraq.
Ritter acknowledges the challenge of undertaking a topical book where daily events can rewrite any analysis or argument, and the past few months have seen various developments - from the recent nuclear accord with North Korea to the Democratic capture of the US congress last November - that might yet undercut his thesis of an impending attack on Iran. But the deployment of two US aircraft carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf earlier this year, along with recent US claims that Iran is supplying roadside bombs and other weaponry to Shiite militia in Iraq, plus the recent shipment of Patriot air-defence missile systems to US Gulf State allies Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, suggest that what Ritter says has been the US endgame all along is still very much in play.
While the US neo-cons clearly have had Iran on their dance card ever since it debuted alongside Iraq and North Korea in the so-called Axis of Evil in 2002, any military strike against Teheran serves, as Ritter cogently and convincingly argues, neither US nor Israel's interests, never mind the wider international community. Whether it will come to pass is still anybody's guess, although the signs are arguably grim - everywhere, that is, except in the mainstream American media, where far more coverage is given to a spat between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama or the death of Anna Nicole Smith, leaving it to the likes of the Sunday Times to report that senior serving US military commanders are prepared to resign if Bush goes to war on Iran.
Scott Ritter told the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh last December that he believes it's a go. Here's hoping the man who was squarely on the money vis-à-vis Iraq in 2003 is dead wrong this time.
Anthony Glavin is a Boston-born novelist
Target Iran: The Truth About the US Government's Plans for Regime Change By Scott Ritter Politico's/Methuen, 228pp. £16.99