WASHINGTON: Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq for seven years, said that if the American and British justification for the attack on Iraq turns out to be a fabrication, which he believes to be the case, the war will turn out to be a defeat for the United States and for the international rule of law.

Ritter, speaking to the Palestine Centre, a Washington think tank on the Middle East, said defeating the Iraqi military is not the test of whether the two allies achieve a final victory. The test is whether the operation brings democracy or something like it to the Iraqi people, he said.

And if it turns out the basis for the attack — Iraq’s alleged possession and development of weapons of mass destruction — was false, then the Iraq people would never accept an American presence in their country, Washington would have lost the war and US troops would be in Iraq for a long time, the former US Marine major said.

If the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction turns up nothing significant, Ritter added, it would demonstrate that the United Nations inspections had done their job in the past.

Ritter was part of the inspection team in 1995 when General Hussein Kamal, who had been in charge of the weapons of mass destruction programme in Iraq and then defected to Jordan, was interrogated by US intelligence agents and UN inspectors.

Ritter said US Secretary of State Colin Powell had misled the UN Security Council earlier this year when he claimed Iraq had purchased 100 tons of uranium ore from the African nation of Niger. Later, when the documents about the alleged purchase were shown to UN inspectors, it took 24 hours for them to determine that they were crude fabrications.—dpa