First a note. It took me a little while but I finally discovered where I'd read about William Arkin before. Hugh Hewitt wrote "Who is William Arkin?" for the Weekly Standrd:

SO WHO IS ARKIN? That has proven to be a difficult thing to determine, for while Arkin is a prolific writer, his biography is hard to assemble, and maybe intentionally so.

Arkin is a veteran of four years in the Army (he served from 1974 to 1978) and many of his bylines from the past two decades described him as a "military intelligence analyst" during his service (his rank and units are not readily apparent). He received his BS from the University of Maryland.

His employment

since leaving the service is easier to trace. Arkin cut his teeth with the lefty Institute for Policy Studies, and went from there to positions with Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Human Rights Watch. He has been a regular columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In recent years he has taken more mainstream work as a senior fellow at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (he appears to do most of his writing not from the SAIS campus, but from his home in Vermont).

He is also the regular military affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times (what a surprise that the Times employs a Greenpeace alum as its military guru) and a commentator for MSNBC.

This resume, by itself, doesn't disqualify Arkin as being credible, but it does suggest that there's reason to be skeptical about what he wrote:

Scott Ritter fills in a lot of detail I wasn't aware of as to how UNSCOM aided U.S. covert efforts, but his bombshell is about Israel. Starting in about 1994, Israel very quietly shared its own sensitive intelligence about Saddam's infrastructure and security apparatus with the United Nations, working with Ritter to develop a new approach to inspections, and identifying prospective "targets" for the U.N. team to inspect. What is most interesting about the Israeli assistance is how distant the sharing was from the United States: Israel assisted the U.N. on the basis of own interests -- weakening Iraq.

What the Israelis got in return, courtesy of Ritter's maneuvers, were U-2 reconnaissance images of Iraq taken by U.S. Air Force aircraft for UNSCOM, and later even raw intercept tapes that Israeli linguists and analysts were able to exploit. If there is anything that secret producers hate, it is losing control of their information. Though Ritter doesn't know why, clearly at some point Washington snapped and the U.S. government tried to stop, or at least control, the exchange. Ritter interprets the U.S. pressure as part of THE conspiracy.

Here is Scott Ritter: international inspector working for the United Nations, making repeated trips to Israel, going through contortions to hide Israeli assistance from even most of his inspector colleagues, conducting secret meetings, involved in intra-governmental intrigues, privy to compartmented operations, working with the CIA and "Delta force," using special code names.

First of all, Israel involvement in the inspections regime is not a bombshell as Arkin asserts. The Washington Post had reported on it back in 1998:

For more than four years, United Nations arms inspectors have obtained many of their best leads on forbidden Iraqi weapons through a secretive and diplomatically risky channel from the Israeli government, according to knowledgeable sources in the United States, Israel and the United Nations.

After a wary start born of Israel's long isolation at the world body, Israel began providing the U.N. Special Commission with increasingly detailed and sensitive intelligence on its Arab adversary, which launched 40 Scud missiles at Haifa and Tel Aviv during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Among its most important contributions, from the U.N. panel's point of view, were significant leads on the existence of a biological weapons program and the first concrete evidence that Iraq had a systematic campaign of deception to conceal weapons programs it was legally obliged to declare and dismantle.

The two-way exchange of information, which included meetings with the director and deputy director of Israeli military intelligence, eventually involved Israeli analysis of aerial photography taken by American U-2 surveillance planes, provision of raw reports from defectors and other human sources, and Israeli processing of other forms of information obtained by the special commission, known as UNSCOM.

According to three officials with direct knowledge of the relationship, Israel had become by July 1995 the most important single contributor among the dozens of U.N. member states that have supplied information to UNSCOM since its creation in April 1991. The United States, by all accounts, remained a major supplier of information, as well as UNSCOM's most important material and political backer. But the arrival of fresh Israeli intelligence after most U.S. tips were exploited made for what one official called "this great big candy store of nice goodies."

Unless I'm reading Arkin incorrectly he seems to be using the Israeli involvement as a way to discredit Ritter. But the Washington Post article suggests that the Israeli help was essential to UNSCOM's doing its job.

Again I'm assuming that Biur Chametz's concern is that Ritter's charge will be used to show that the United States was doing Israel's dirty work by going to war against Saddam. (If I'm wrong let me know.) And there's reason to fear that.

Baltimore's local Buchananite (my description that he undoubtedly takes as a compliment, though I don't mean it as one) talk show host, Ron Smith had Ritter on his show Friday, who wrote:

So, we think there may be a continuation of Fitzgerald’s work heading off in a different direction, perhaps trying to get to the bottom of the bigger story beneath the leak of Plame’s identity. That would be a much-needed examination of who lied us into the war on Iraq.

Speaking of which, Scott Ritter will be on the show this afternoon. You won’t want to miss my conversation with the former Marine officer turned UN weapons inspector. Ritter has a book out, “Iraq Confidential,” that purports to detail “the untold story of the intelligence conspiracy to undermine the UN and overthrow Saddam Hussein.”

This is not a mere attack on the Bush Administration. Ritter says the Clinton regime was just as culpable as its successor in “manipulating, suppressing and fatally undermining the inspections process in support of a different agenda – regime change.”

I did not hear the whole show, but presumably he means to say (as Biur Chametz fears) that Israel was, in part, leading the U.S. into its war.

Reading the older articles it doesn't just appear that Israel's role is perhaps less controversial that Arkin seems to assert but that the impretus for making war against Saddam was extremely strong in the Clinton administration - stronger in fact than Israel comfortable with, as Gellman reported:

The March exercise of Shake the Tree proved the richest haul yet of evidence on the manner in which Iraq moved its contraband, according to knowledgeable officials. Soon afterward, for reasons that remain hard to assess, the United States resumed its principal role in support of Shake the Tree and Israel and the United Kingdom withdrew.

Four people with knowledge of those events gave four different accounts of the reasons – attributing the change, variously, to Butler's anxieties about the previous arrangement, the unwillingness of London and Tel Aviv to continue, American wishes to remove the risk of an Israeli role, and mere substitution of a superior technical approach.

This, I suppose, doesn't prove it, but it suggests that Israel's role in the inspections was different from that of the United States and (here I'm stretching it) that the United States was trying a lot harder to find a pretext for war in 1998 - under Clinton - than Israel was.

There's also something from the Frontline series, for example here, that I find interesting. (I wish I could figure out when these interviews were from. Apparently 1999 or later but the dates aren't clear.) After Saddam's son-in-law defected UNSCOM realized or believed that it had a lot more to find. In part this was was due to Saddam's failure to document everything. There seems little doubt when this series was made that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that weren't accounted for. Maybe Saddam was misdirecting the world, but everyone seemed to think so. The Bush adminstration was clearly not alone in believing this. (Ironically, Gellman, I believe, was the first American reporter to realize that the inspectors weren't going to find any WMD's after the war. At the time of his Frontline interview, I get the impression he was pretty certain that such weapons existed and had not yet been found.)

For further reading on the topic here are 4 articles.
From the Washington Post:
Foiled by Saddam's Concealment Strategy
Arms Inspectors 'Shake the Tree'
From Frontline:
Interview with Barton Gellman
Interview with Scott Ritter
(And a link to the complete Frontline series on UNSCOM.)

Technorati Tags: Iraq, UNSCOM, Israel, Scott Ritter.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.