Former arms inspector calls for 'regime change' in US

A former UN weapons inspector has released a new book in which he accuses President Bush of illegally invading Iraq and calls for “regime change” in the United States at the next election.

Scott Ritter said Bush lied to the American people and Congress about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. He said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan lacked courage, and that former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix was “a moral and intellectual coward”.

Ritter, a former US marine, was a weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He has been a vocal critic of Washington’s policy on Iraq.

He said he wrote Frontier Justice, Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwacking of America to educate people.

The paperback, published by Context Books, has on its cover a picture of Bush in jeans and a cowboy hat, behind the wheel of a truck.

In the book, Ritter notes that the Bush administration’s stated reason for launching the war was to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

The book argues that there is no evidence Iraq possesses, produces or concealed nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Therefore, Ritter argues that “the United States carried out an illegal war of aggression.”

Bush, responding yesterday to similar charges about the lack of evidence of illegal Iraqi weapons, insisted: “When it is all said and done, the people of the United States and the world will realise that Saddam Hussein had a weapons programme.”

Ritter said Bush’s real goal was to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“What is needed in America is regime change,” he wrote. “Anything but Bush and (Vice President Dick) Cheney.”

He also accused France and Germany of failing to get a UN Security Council or General Assembly resolution calling the war illegal and demanding a US withdrawal.

Ritter called former Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, now on Iraq’s newly appointed governing council, and the opposition Iraqi National Congress “the greatest single source of fabricated, exaggerated so-called intelligence that you can imagine”.

But he had kind words for Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

He said ElBaradei was “much more honest” than Blix about appraising Iraq’s nuclear weapons and the threat they posed.