Rating: 
Summary: balanced, non partisan?
Review: I find it funny that the Amazon "book description" calls this book balanced and non-partisan, and then goes on to to tell how one sided the book is. By the way, if Ritter is right, why does every Iraqui fox-hole have a gas mask, and every weapons cache our troops encounter contain chemical weapons suits and antidotes? Ritter's time was over a decade ago, and he should keep quiet about subjects he is no longer up-to-date on. He was obviously a fairly gullible inspector....why do so many people refuse to believe that saddam lies, and that it's easy to hide a needle in a hay stack?
Rating: 
Summary: Short but enough to go by
Review: I have just finished this book. Ive been following the current situation in Iraq for a very long time and im glad to say that this book is very up-to-date. However its a very very short and small book...74 pages long and almost literally a pocket book.Plenty of facts; the modern history of Iraq leading up to its current political situation. Just FYI the book wasnt actually written by Scott Ritter himself as he is only used as a source; a recent interview (Q&A session) with him covers 70% of the book. I would recommend this book to anyone who's been following current events and would like to get some background info on the Iraq Crisis. The book is very informative and does shed alot of light on the politics of the situation where the global media seems to be lacking. Well worth the [the price].
Rating:
Summary: Truth is coming out
Review: Well as of today it seems Iraq did have WMD in it's country. And acording to news they are ordered to use them. I am curiours how all people who praised this book feel about it now. Once agian a stupid poorly factual book is proven wrong by history unfolding.
Rating:
Summary: The Scott Ritter flip-flop
Review: Scott Ritter was the Chief Inspector for UNSCOM for seven years following the end of the Gulf War. After resigning in 1998, he wrote a bestseller, EndGame, which described his experiences in Iraq and in which he convincingly establishes the existence of the Iraqi Concealment Program designed to preserve Saddam's weapons capabilities. He describes numerous instances when inspection teams arrived at inspection sites moments after WMD evidence disappeared out the back door. He tells of dramatic face-offs by unarmed inspectors with hostile Iraqi guards and officials attempting to thwart their inspection activities. In short, he convinces the reader that Iraq never intended to disarm and did everything it could to deceive both the UN and the international community about its WMD program. So why the sudden reversal by Mr. Ritter in War on Iraq? Who knows. But one gets the impression he was far more principled then than he is now. Despite his current attempt to seemingly justify Saddam's invasion of Kuwait resulting from a post WWI carve-up of the Middle East and thus, a reasonable rationale for striking at this giant symbol of New World Order Western Imperialism, Ritter describes the same invasion in Endgame as a result of poor cashflow and a decimated economy following his war with Iran (during which Saddam borrowed $10 billion from Kuwait, which was then coming due). "His goal was the annexation of Kuwait so he could aquire that nation's great wealth as his own." His views on Iraqi "disarmament" are also unmistakable in Endgame: "On April 18, 1991, Iraq submitted its declaration to the United Nations, initiating the process of sham and deception that would never cease. From the outset he decided to outwit the disarmament provisions of the Security Council resolution. Broad guidelines were established from the start. Iraq would not declare any aspect of its nuclear weapons program, nor would it admit to any violation of the nonproliferation treaty. It would not declare any aspect of its biological weapons program. Iraq's most advanced chemical weapon, VX, was to be totally hidden from the inspection teams." The subsequent failings of the weapons inspectors to find anything of substance until the dramatic defection and revelations of Hussein Kamal is well documented and demonstrates the futility of inspections in the face of a regime intent on non-compliance. I'd rather not speculate as to why Ritter has suddenly reversed his stance on Iraq and now opposes the current war. But his position five years ago when he had direct access to information and a clear perspective on the matter seem to me to be more relevant and credible. Ritter's current opposition to war and his questionable motivations in War on Iraq are best refuted by these quotes from Endgame: "It has been said that UNSCOM destroyed more of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction than the entire aerial bombing campaign of Desert Storm. This is true, and it raises the question, therefore, about what remains. The simple truth is that no one really knows. But Iraq has an endgame strategy: get sanctions lifted, and keep its remaining weapons of mass destruction." "The first step in any military confrontation intended to remove Saddam from power and transform Iraq into an international law-abiding nation is to convince the American people that this is a morally just fight. Saddam has provided the world with a massive body of damning evidence from which to assemble such a case, some of which I've discussed in this book. There is certainly moral justification to take action to overthrow Saddam." "In the end, the hard reality always surfaces: to remove Saddam, we must employ the military forces of the United States. The time to solve this problem is now, when the cost in terms of lives and resources will be far less than it would be in the future. However, it is very difficult to mobilize support for war based upon a potential threat. It is easier to hope that containment through a combination of economic sanctions and limited military action will suffice. But the framework of containment is collapsing, and Iraq is on the verge of breaking out. And when it does--perhaps three to five years down the road--the world will face a serious confrontation. The only way to prevent Saddam from igniting conflict is to overthrow him through military action, that is what we must do."
Rating: 
Summary: Too short & small for the price yet too important not to own
Review: "Right now the Bush administration is pushing something called 'The Right of Pre-Emptory Self Defense.'... According to this logic, the Allies could have pre-emptively attacked Germany [toward the beginning of World War Two], and perhaps saved millions of lives...Of course, THIS IS PRECISELY THE EXCUSE THAT GERMANY ALSO USED TO ATTACK POLAND AND MANY OTHER COUNTRIES (emphasis mine)... "... We can't give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can't close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously we can't reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capability worthy of war..." Scott Ritter
WAR ON IRAQ Facts ARE stubborn things. Of the many stubborn facts Pitt and Rivers re-bring to light in this succinct and important mini-book are the following: =Saddam Hussein was an ALLY of the United States during the Reagan Administration for reasons that make it clear that our invasion of Iraq could not possibly have anything to do with the establishment of democracy in the region. Iraq has a more than 60% Shi'ite Muslim population, corresponding to the more than 80% Shi'ite population of the presently hated Iran. A parliamentary, majority-rule democracy in Iraq would make both a Shi'ite alliance with neighboring Iran and a Muslim nationalist restructuring of the oil distribution of both countries a foregone conclusion. The price of gasoline would probably leap to *seven* dollars a gallon in the US instead of the rapid climb to two dollars we are currently experiencing over merely the threat of war, in the event of an Iraqi democracy being born and the subsequent Muslim Alliance domino effect spreading like wildfire across the Middle East; a domino effect which could easily become the first step in the (inevitable) reincarnation of the Ottoman Empire that Dr. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski warned the Pentagon against in THE GRAND CHESSBOARD. The Reagan Administration, with a younger and even bolder Rumsfeld, allied itself with Saddam's secular (repeat, secular) and oppressive 17% Sunni Muslim regime specifically to prevent this. We not only looked the other way as he used the very chemical weapons we are going to war with him now about on the Iranian people (and his Kurdish enemies within the country), but, via the surplus of chemicals from US firms, *we helped supply him with them* to prevent this very post-Iraqi democracy Shi'ite alliance of Iran and Iraq from ever happening in 1982. It was only after the subsequent seven year war of Iraq with neighboring Iran where, with our help, Hussein began to save his regime FROM democracy while bankrupting the country, did he begin to look to an invasion of oil rich Kuwait in 1990. The only thing that could possibly be palatable in the eyes of American Foreign Policy, given these facts of political life, is not a democratic Iraq but an equally oppressive regime run by a castrated, easily controlled version of Saddam, completely reflecting the current set-up but in a newly democratic disguise. And thousands of innocent people will die for this. =Saddam, despite his dirty political motivations, nonetheless had a rational basis for believing that Kuwait was merely a province of Iraq and not its own in 1990. The British Empire, after it carved up the Middle East with the French right after World War I (totally disregarding the preexisting tribal, cultural and economic differences of the people in the entire region), carved off the most strategically important piece of its new colony Iraq and made it into Kuwait (to avoid Iraq from having any future control or influence in the Persian Gulf if it were ever to become independent) in 1921. Kuwait can be argued to be less of its own country and more of a giant symbol of New World Order Western Imperialism in the Middle East...which puts a whole new spin on why the Western world reacted the way it did to its invasion. Hussein's invasion of is therefore definitively and inextricably tied to the imperialism of the European/American West and its corresponding destabilization of both democracy and nationalism in the Middle East by the CIA and US Military Industrial Complex over the last seventy years. Hussein struck at the racial and socio-economic psyche of the West in a way that could seemingly best be compared to Hitler's invasion of Poland, but actually has a lot more in common with Nasser, Egypt and the Suez Canal.
=Iraq's illegal weapons program has been so well dismantled since the end of the Gulf War via the inspections process that it would be all but impossible for our intelligence community to not see and surgically abort any attempt of restarting it YEARS before any weapons program he attempted to reconstruct--biological, chemical, or nuclear--could become even remotely functional. Sanctions and inspections, simply put, are working; maybe not as well as France wants to believe, but better than our administration actually wants, let alone wants to admit. =Lest we forget: there are more than 250 billion barrels of oil under Iraqi soil. 'Nuff said. And perhaps most importantly: =All of the comparisons of today's Baghdad to yesterday's Berlin for the benefit of making the war seem all the more justified is quietly forgetting the fact that, as this war will demand an American presence in the region for several years, *Baghdad could just as easily become the new Laos*. America can win the battle with Saddam's army in a matter of hours...AND LOSE A BITTER, ESCALATING GUERILLA WAR WITH THE ENTIRE ARAB WORLD A FEW YEARS LATER. This book WAR ON IRAQ is small, overpriced, and seemingly one-sided, despite the not so ironic republicanism of Ritter complementing the expected left-leanings of Pitt. Buy it anyway. It's that important. I would suggest triangulating WAR ON IRAQ with THE WAR ON FREEDOM by Mosaddeq Ahmed and UP FROM CONSERVATISM by Michael Lind, to fully reveal the shadow side of our country's national character and enable one the achievement of moral clarity in these morally schizophrenic times.
Rating: 
Summary: Glorified magazine article
Review: This 'book' is essentially a magazine length interview with Scott Ritter. Scott is intelligent and experienced, but he also displays moments of illogic and his own version of spin doctoring. Save your money, most of this book could probably be found on the internet in interviews with Ritter.
Rating:
Summary: Big meaning in small package
Review: I found this book to be very informative and moving. Although the book is only about 80 pages, it opened my eyes to a new perspective on this war on Iraq. For anyone that may have doubts on what this war is really about reading this book will help you. In fact, I felt compelled to research and read the references from the book to learn even more on the same theories as the author. Now, I believe it takes reading different ideas on the process of the war on Iraq and not only what I hear from the Government on television.
Rating:
Summary: Another snake oil salesman
Review: Mr Pitt also believes President Bush planned the 9/11 Terrorist attacks. On the online forum he frequents he and his political paisans are currently discussing the likelihood of whether or not President Bush caused the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy. A few months ago it was President Bush caused Senator Wellstone's plane to crash. You start to see a pattern? If you enjoyed the French Book- "The Forbidden Truth"- which "demonstrated" that there was no commercial passenger plane that struck the Pentagon and if you like "Moon landings were a hoax" conspiracies- if you enjoy these things then buy this book, it'll fit right in with the other inhabitants of your bookshelf. It's a pity for Mr Pitt he chose Scott Ritter as a "co-author" given the current public scandal Ritter finds himself in. Then again, perhaps it's fitting. I bought this book and kicked myself later for being so silly with my money. That's the danger of buying online- everybody looks legitimate. There ought to be a disclaimer on the product informing the public that the author is a nut. Well- fool me once shame on me...
Rating:
Summary: Inconsistent with the facts
Review: When Scott Ritter resigned from his job with UNSCOM he complained that the limitations forced on his team by US and UN politicians undermined the task of disarming Saddam Hussein. At that time he said: "The illusion of arms control is more dangerous than no arms control at all." In have heard it said that Ritter also took money from the Iraqi regime. This calls the credibility of the things in this book into serious question.
Rating:
Summary: What you won't hear from main stream media
Review: Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector who spent years in Iraq tells all. This book, at less than 100 pages, can be easily read in one sitting and effectively dispels claims by the Bush administration that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction or that it poses any realistic threat to its neighbors, the United States or it's allies. This book is a must read for individuals desiring to know more about Iraq and George W. Bush's push for war.
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