Rating: 
Summary: Just the facts, ma'am . . .
Review: Hello, Congress?! The press? Is ANYONE listening?WAR ON IRAQ is a voice of reason getting lost in the Washington clamor. Scott Ritter has taken a lot of negative flack in the press lately, which, to the detriment of our country, is overshadowing his message: Iraq does not--cannot--have the weapons capability that the Bush administration (and now Tony Blair) claims it has. What's more, even if they do have greater capability than Ritter argues, the most effective solution is the return of UN weapons inspectors, not the use of military force. A U.S. invasion of Iraq will only lead to more terrorism on our soil and further destabilization of the Middle East. Is Hussein bad? Of course, but as the book illustrates, removing him by force and installing a democratic government will only make things worse. Every citizen who can read, especially anyone with ties to the military or a draft-age male, should have a copy of this book. It's short, non-partisan, and to the point. Pitt gives a very balanced background of the situation, and Ritter (a Republican who voted for Bush) lays out a clear fact-based argument against the looming war. This is not propaganda or politics; this is the reality of the situation. I'm telling everyone I know to read the book and go to the website. America, educate yourself before it's too late.
Rating: 
Summary: Expert experience over rhetoric - valuable
Review: The book is quite short, less than 100 pages, but the contents of Ritter's interview should be read by any interested in facts rather than rhetoric. Ritter is specific in his straightforward responses to Pitt's questions. In addition to covering links to terrorism and other pertinent subjects, the WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) responses include Nuclear, Chemical (Sarin, Tabun, and VX), Biological (Anthrax, Botulinum toxin, Smallpox and Ebola), and Delivery Systems (Missiles and the Czechoslovakian L-29 single engine jets). It doesn't pay to ignore experts or those with relevant experience e.g., not listen to them and assess their input, regardless of ones own views. To ignore views of experts and those with first hand experience, whether or not those views are popular, is to risk being blind sided. Ritter's bottom line is that it is highly unlikely that Iraq has either effective (non-degraded) WPM's or any facilities to manufacture nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. I certainly recommend this small book to any who rank specifics above rhetoric and who may have an interest in Iraq's WPM capabilities, the reason for which we are to go to war.
Rating:
Summary: Good. Do not miss reading it.
Review: Much of this booklet is an interview conducted by William R. Pitt with Scott Ritter ,UN weapons inspector who worked in Iraq.The interview exposes mendacious, deceitful nature of Bush Jr administration.American people were prevented from knowing the truth about nature of war unleashed upon Iraq which they were called to support. Ritter says Iraq was virtually disarmed with much of its WMD capability way back in 1998.Shocking to know UN weapons inspection team called UNSCOM headed by an Australian diplomat Richard Butler were doing things which had nothing to do disarming Iraq.It was collecting intelligence about Saddam's whereabouts .Aim was to provokeIraqis.Inspection team would soon be expelled which then would serve as a cover to bomb that country. Further Ritter says that Saddam's regime ,though brutal ,was secular by nature.No evidence to show Baa'thists had links with Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.To the contrary Osama and his cohorts despised Baa'thist govt ,sought its ouster. So why did Anglo-Americans invade Iraq?Primarily because there was a veiled agenda of controlling Iraq's fabulous oil wealth.Also over the years ruling circles in US and UK developed a visceral hatred towards Saddam Hussein as media in both countries continued to demonise him.Despite Saddam repeatedly giving into American demands by opening more more sites for inspection ,he had to go.Revelations by former senior administrationofficials also point to this direction.Paul O'Neill once Treasury Sec in Bush Jr administration reveals in his memoirs 'The Price of Loyalty'few in Bush administration had contemplated attacking Iraq long before Sep 11 terrorist attacks in US.Also former head head of counter-terrorism branch of NSA Richard Clark makes the same point in his book 'Against All Enemies'This again calls into question the sincerity of this administration in fighting terrorism unleashed by Islamic fundamentalists. One is forced to conclude after reading this booklet American foreign policy is in tatters.This administration is amoral ,unethical, poltically and morally corrupt.
Rating:
Summary: Fabricated and Dangerous Justifications for Invading Iraq
Review: "War on Iraq" is a Republican military expert's analysis and rejection of the American government's current justification for invading Iraq. All Americans, especially politicians, should pay close attention to this book for two reasons. First, the arguments contained in this book were made by the person who knows the status of Iraq's weapons program and the potential threat posed by Iraq better than anyone else. Scott Ritter is a former intelligence officer and Marine veteran of the Gulf War. When the war ended, Ritter played a critical and highly effective role in inspecting and destroying the Iraqi weapons program. Second, Ritter is a Republican who voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, and who clearly harbors no liberal agenda. If this guy is telling us that the coming war with Iraq is unwarranted and extremely dangerous, we had better take him seriously. Ritter's arguments are summed up below. IRAQ HAS NO SERIOUS WEAPONS CAPABLITY
Ritter demonstrates that Iraq's chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons were thoroughly dismantled. Rebuilding these programs is easily detectable, and if some chemical or biological agents evaded detection, they have probably exceeded their shelf life. IRAQ DOES NOT HAVE A FUNDAMENTALIST GOVERNMENT
As evil and nasty as Saddam Hussein might be, he is a secular ruler who has gone to great and brutal lengths to repress religious fundamentalism in Iraq. He has no interest in perpetuating Islamic fundamentalism of the sort that Bin Laden espouses. SADAM HUSSEIN AND BIN LADEN ARE ENEMIES
Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are enemies. Saddam Hussein outlawed Wahabbism the fundamentalist sect of Islam to which Bin Laden belongs, and Bin Laden declared Saddam Hussein an apostate who should be killed. Even if these two were sympathetic to each other, Ritter proves that there isn't a shred of evidence of a cooperation between Iraq and Al Quaeda. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BIN LADEN WANTS
An American invasion of Iraq has an excellent chance of infuriating other Islamic nations and creating a West vs. Islam polarization. MORE TERRORISM PLEASE
Even if America has a speedy victory in Iraq (Ritter, a twelve year Marine veteran and former intelligence officer states that this is highly unlikely this time around), extremism and resentment against the U.S. will only increase in the Middle East. More likely, this war will generate tremendous civilian casualties in Iraq and hundreds or thousands of U.S. casualties. If, in a worse case scenario, America resorts to tactical nuclear weapons to help it's pinned down military forces-something Bush has publicly stated as a possibility. Ritter argues that if this happens he can guarantee that Iran and Pakistan will hand over nuclear devices to terrorists and we will experience a nuclear bomb detonation in America within decades. DEMOCRACY IS IMPOSSIBLE IN IRAQ
Iraq contains a Shiite majority, which shares powerful fundamentalist beliefs with Iran, and which the U.S. definitely does not want to come to power. The U.S. can't put the Kurdish minority in power because Turkey, which has its own issues with the Kurds, would never allow it, which just leaves the Sunni minority from whose ranks Saddam rose to power. The only realistic result, according to Ritter, is another Sunni dictator who is as repressive as Saddam. IRAQIS WON'T RISE UP AGAINST SADAM
Even if Iraqi civilians ignore the fact that the U.S. bombed, starved and killed many of them during the past ten years, the state apparatus that Saddam built has had more than twenty years to seep into their lives and is too well entrenched. WHAT ABOUT SADDAM'S BOMB MAKER
Ritter quickly proves that Saddam's alleged bomb maker Khidre Hamza is a fake who never headed Iraq's nuclear program (Jafar al Jafar did) and who did not possess adequate knowledge to develop nuclear weapons. When Hamza first defected in 1994, his intelligence was rejected by the CIA and the intelligence community at large. HITLER DID IT
Ritter correctly points out that while the justification for a first strike may resonate with many Americans still wounded by the memory of 9/11, it is the same excuse Hitler used for attacking Poland. The world may well see an American "first strike" in the same light. HOW DO YOU SPELL "NEO-CONSERVATIVE"
According to Ritter, you spell it, "Rumsfeld", "Wolfowitz", and "Perle". Donald Rumsfeld, is of course the Bush Administration's Secretary of Defense, while Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle are part of a conservative think tank that is convinced that Iraq is a threat to both Israel and the United States and that is ideologically committed to toppling Saddam Hussein regardless of the potential consequences. These ideologues, according to Ritter, are the key decision makers with respect to Gulf War II, The Vengeance and they have effectively terminated all government debate on the subject. Ritter, who is also a Republican, astutely argues that extremism is the most dangerous way to approach an already volatile Middle East. FACTS ARE A STUBBORN THING
Unlike any of his critics including the Richard Butler, the careerist who ineptly headed UNSCOM after the Gulf War, Ritter can and does document every argument he makes. Journalists have never found a single error in any of Ritter's claims and his critics are unwilling to debate him in public. Ritter's stance on this issue made him the subject of at least one intense FBI investigation in which he was cleared. Ritter sums up his approach with John Adams's famous statement that "facts are a stubborn thing."
Rating:
Summary: The Truth Is Out There.
Review: William Rivers Pitt concisely lays out the facts about Iraq. He offers a brief history of Iraq in the 20th century, showing how the US has played an enormous part in creating the problems in the Middle East that we now face. He interviews former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter who discusses the weapons situation in Iraq as it is, not as it is imagined by people who fabricate stories for war-mongering. This book has come out at a vital time and must be circulated among the American people and Congress. Look, we want a safe, secure country and a peaceful world. This book lays out why an invasion of Iraq will only increase the United States risk of terrorist attacks and will destabilize the middle east making threat of nuclear war an awful possibility. A safer, more peaceful world-- a world we can love to live in will never come about so long as people believe the solution lies in weaponry and bombs. Get the UN inspectors back in there and engage Iraq diplomatically. Create people to people ties. Please read this book and then pass it on.
Rating:
Summary: Proving Bush's incompetance retroactively
Review: This book presents the most coherent, grounded, and chemically balanced viewpoint on the issue of WMD's in Iraq, quite unlike the previous reviewer. As any true expert in weapons of mass destruction would know (assuming they had passed the third grade), an incorrectly placed hyphen would be an example of bad punctuation, not grammar. But this is beyond the intelligence, or mental stability, of the average Neocon. If they were on their meds, they would realize that in this book, Ritter explains that Iraq had complied with UNSC res 687 to a 95% level of disarmament. While 5% remained unaccounted for, this simply did not rise to the necessity of war, nor did it constitute a threat to the US; therefore there was no practical justification for war. As Ritter reveals, most of the remaining weapons, such as the two recently found, were hopelessly past their shelf lives, as they were manufactured prior to Gulf War I. Since Iraq's biochem stocks had shelf lives of no more than 3-5 years, these rusting relics were little more than inert museum pieces. Hardly representative of a supposed stockpile containing hundreds of tons of lethal gasses, they are a sad excuse for 800+ Americans to die. The most compelling validation of Ritter and this book has come from Bush's own point man in Iraq, David Kay, who has unequivically stated that in fact Iraq had no current stockpiles or active programs, and had not since the end of Gulf War I. The screaming from those who have objected to this book stems from their guilt that the blood of American troops has been spilt in vain, and they are to blame. While this book could have avoided the tragedy, the treasonously naive hawks instead chose to be duped by Iran's intelligence service. Unwittingly doing the bidding of an axis of evil only shows them to be weak, paranoid, and stupid. Now we know they are also illiterate.
Rating: 
Summary: To all the liberals here: FUKK YOU and may you burn in hell
Review: A reader from Portland Or. Is THE DUMBASS of Cretinism Everyone, look at this hopeless retard from Portland Or.. He actually has the audacious gall, like all the liberal psychopathic menaces to society do, of slandering the previous reviewer with dishonest claims of being "grammatically challenged"--yet this mentally retarded MIDGET committed the very epitome of grammatically flawed ignorance in the same sentence he slurred someone else. If you, reading this, are yourself grammatically idiotic and unschooled, let me educate you. That terminal dumbass from Portland errantly included a hyphen in between grammatically challenged--which is a NO-NO! You see, the rules say that one does NOT need a hyphen in between an adverb and the adjective it's modifying, because the word being modified is already CLEAR! Geez, liberals like that dumbassed retard out of Portland are also guilty of utter stupidity. Oh, wait a second; since this is a "political" book, I might as well get my two cents in, right after I corrected that mental midget retard from Portland Or.. Well, that son of a bittch from Portland is also irreparably insane or just shamelessly dishonest, because America just found mustard gas AND sarin gas LAST WEEK, you infernally undereducated liberal nutcases who believe otherwise. A$$holes like all the liberals who've been awarding five stars to this garbage book, like the illiterately stupid mental midget from Portland, are doing the work of Al-Qaeda and they are demoralizing the troops who are doing the serious fighting by libeling the purity of their mission. They are also doing a favor for Osama Bin Laden by emboldening terrorists like him to misbelieve that America isn't united in wartime--which clearly the liberal devils like that mental midget charlatan from Portland are jealously doing all they can towards. All the liberals who've written positive reviews for this contraband book are psychologically ill and NEED mental exams, because they're ruining the fabric of America with their treasonous backstabbing and hatred for war and the military!!!!!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: The True Asessment of Iraq
Review: Since this book deserves a review that isn't rambling, incoherent, grammatically-challenged, and written by a mental inmate (like the previous review), I thought I'd step in and pronounce that if more people had read this book in the run-up to Iraq, America would not be stuck in a vain, unjustifiable quagmire right now. Mr. Ritter made the startling claim in this book that WMD's would not likely be found in Iraq--and surprise--he was entirely right. He details the numerous ways UN inspections systematically destroyed Iraq's capability to manufacture WMDs in the 90's, the poor quality and limited shelf-lives of Iraq's WMD's, and the impossiblity that Iraq could reconstitute its programs without obvious detection from satellite and other means. In short, this book correctly refuted all of Bush's claims, correctly predicted there would be no WMD's left in Iraq, and exposed the war-supporters and Neocons as moronic, uneducated fanatics. The traitors and enemies of American values who supported this war against all the evidence have been revealed as uninformed fools and naive dreamers who were shamefully wrong about nearly every aspect of Iraq. They have the blood of our American servicemen on their hands.
Rating:
Summary: Yeeeaaahhh, Here Comes The Liar...Awwwwwww Yeeeaaahhh!!!!!!!
Review: Books like this, which are more reasons to reinitiate book burning, are obscene. Scott Ritter is a dirty rotten liar----though this is a cliché----it's provable when you look at his notorious history. A few years ago he did all but condemn Iraq and Hussein of being 100% damned in having such a nuclear program with another book that he authored-------and now he ineptly tries to conceal this double-standard turnaround of his by "writing" a "book" so conflicting, just a couple of years later. Because of this clash of schools of thought, Ritter is obviously guilty for trying to withdraw strong convictions that he already asserted earlier, when he had more licit and firsthand access to knowledge concerning WMD. Another distressingly disturbing side effect of profane literature like this, which is glaringly and only targeted at the rabid conspiracy theory crowd, is it lewdly encourages every incoherent extremist to stumble out of the woodwork. This is where they would normally be ostracized to discuss such insubstantially outrageous thoughts, along with other raging liberals of their ilk, namely out-of-work actors, struggling musicians, and publishers of conspiracy theory newsletters to the harsh underground. What really turns my stomach unhealthily is how the anti-government, anti-globalization, and anti-capitalization wackos verminously leap to their ferociously radical conclusions based on what's really the worst, lowest, most unverifiable opinion of some isolated person with no authority to make judgments based on his ghoulishly limited exposure to the subject at hand, because for years, he hasn't been privy to the intelligence. Take the Swede who immediately preceded my review, for instance. Instead of discussing the acerbically many holes of the book which don't hold water, he fiercely dilapidates his comments to the present Iraq situation, which, since they have nothing to do with the reason of his review, is just another scapegoat excuse to further the illogical fanatics' agendas. Look at how he admits to the inconvenient FACT that this sensationalism in this children's book is solely based on anti-American, anti-government, direct leaping fabrications from 2 people. Does this stop the reviewer from unjustly and angrily conniving with the authors and himself outrightly dictating that "Iraq has no WMD"? Miserably, the reviewer has as deathly little restraint in libeling facts as do the perpetrators of this dirty publication. Moreover, the link between Hussein and Al-Qaeda's been confirmed (contrary to the willfully murderous forgeries of some people) in N Iraq, even though it's Kurdish controlled, because of ties of Ansar al-Islam (yet another terror group) to Al-Qaeda, through the planting of an agent there by the now-terminated Iraqi intelligence operatives. Add to this the ruthless funding of Hussein-Iraq towards Palestinian terrorist groups to mercilessly try to disrupt initiations of peace from the ever-willing and much more reasonable Israeli side, and the fact that US officials affirm that a captured, former high-ranking Iraqi diplomat admitted already to either himself or Hussein meeting face-to-face with Bin Laden in the mid-90s, and you've got a relentless impertinence and diabolicalness from past reviewers who're willfully polluting the true facts to conceal America's consistently impeccable intelligence, which has of late been the victim of slander and nothing material. Moreover, what's even incrementally further outraging is the Swede's furiously disdainful intolerance of "if you don't believe America was in it for the oil, you're naive and gullible". He dishonestly refuses to mention Iraq's horribly poor oil quality, the fact that only 5% of America's oil comes from there, and the continuous fact that the only relationship America has with Iraqi oil is restarting it to pay for reconstruction and Iraqi civil servants' salaries, which have ALL been deliberately unrighteously covered up by the additionally wrathful Swede reviewer. As for the WMD, not nearly enough time's been allowed to, rationally, find them in a time corresponding to Iraq's weighty size. Confound that with the burden that, of maybe 1000 or more target sites, a coarsely ineffective minority of maybe upwards of 200 to 300 have been examined at this time. Another deathblow to the shamelessly defiant, past 2 reviewers is the fact that when Colin Powell----at the UN----asserted to having proof about locations of the WMD labs, it was the chronically inefficient, anti-war, anarchistic left that arduously stalled the start of the war----allowing the Iraqis to hide them even more deviously. It's self-explanatory that, had the obstinate monstrosity of people in 3rd world or, countries which are increasingly threatened by American power due to their own deteriorating economic strength and status, not rebelled so infernally long to keep their work contracts with the Iraqis and falsify forged Arab delusions about mistrusting America's motives----we'd have found those craftily disguised factories promptly. These cornering impediments in hazardously extremist liberals' thinking are precisely what reduce their repetitively intolerant attacks of absolutely oppressing that "there are no WMD", to that of a scornful laughingstock. Also remember, anti-Bush mujahedeen like the Swede and the reviewer from Connecticut, that the UN who, because of their dependence on American money to continue existing, was one of the guiltiest arch-fiends of progress and international security, even themselves acknowledged in inordinately many reports from 1990 to 2002 that Iraq had nuclear and biochemical weapons, harmfully further weakening your shabby claims. I'll close by addressing France, one member of the axis of weasels. For France, INSEE forecasted a catastrophically enormous rise in French unemployment to 9.6% by year's end, when ours is likely bottoming at 6.4%. As a matter of fact, it's gotten so gloomy in France that their government is resorting to "helped employment", where the government themselves pay to create jobs in their doomed "economy". Additionally, France's GDP is warning to be crushed even lower to an unquestionably terrifying .8% of illegitimate "growth". By comparison, ours is forecasted by some economists to ascend to 3.5% by year's end, although the present expectation of 1.4% is enough to best France already. I know this is a tad gratuitous, but I felt I had to write it, for posterity's sake!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Throw mud if you want but Ritter was right
Review: How amusing to read the rants of the pro-war crowd against this book. Sorry guys but you can't put the kitty back in the bag. The very existence of this book leaves the Bush team fully exposed. Their deceptions are impeachable offenses and we're just one "Linda Tripp" away from having sufficient evidence.
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