September 25, 2002: Book Strongly Argues against US Invading Iraq

War on Iraq book cover. [Source: Public domain]The book War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know is published. It is written by William Rivers Pitt, a journalist, and Scott Ritter, a former US Marine and UN inspector in Iraq. In it, they write: “The case for war against Iraq has not been made. This is a fact. It is doubtful in the extreme that Saddam Hussein has retained any functional aspect of the chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons programs so thoroughly dismantled by the United Nations weapons inspectors who worked tirelessly in Iraq for seven years. This is also a fact. The idea that Hussein has connections to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists is laughable—he is a secular leader who has worked for years to crush fundamentalist Islam within Iraq, and if he were to give weapons of any kind to al-Qaeda, they would use those weapons on him first.… If Bush decides unilaterally to attack, he will be in violation of international law. If Bush does attack Iraq, he will precipitate the exact conflict of cultures between the West and Islam that Osama bin Laden was hoping for when his agents flew three planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. An attack on Iraq could bring about a wider world war America cannot afford, and that a vast majority of Americans do not desire.… The economic sanctions have rendered [Hussein’s] conventional weaponry impotent by denying him access to the spare parts that are essential to any functioning mechanized military. The UNSCOM inspectors destroyed, right to the ground, any and all capabilities he possessed to create weapons of mass destruction. He has no connections whatsoever to the terrorists who struck America on September 11th. Saddam Hussein is not capable of acting upon any of his desires, real or imagined. He does not have the horses.” [Pitt and Ritter, 2002, pp. 9-10]