In 2000, Scott Ritter, who was a senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, appears to have had an epiphany. In an amazingly short period of time, his position on the political spectrum underwent a wholesale reversal. For lack of better terminology, he moved from the Right to the Left.

The latest evidence of his political transformation was reported this past Friday in The Forward. Reporter Nathan Guttman spoke with Ritter and published quotations from his latest book (“Target Iran”).

These excerpts from Ritter’s book indicate he has joined the Walt/Mearsheimer camp in arguing that American foreign policy has succumbed to the influence of Israel and the Jewish lobby in the U.S.:

The Bush administration, with the able help of the Israeli government and the pro-Israel Lobby, has succeeded in exploiting the ignorance of the American people about nuclear technology and nuclear weapons so as to engender enough fear that the American public has more or less been pre-programmed to accept the notion of the need to militarily confront a nuclear armed Iran.

Later in his book, Ritter says “Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else.”

This isn’t what I’d expect to hear from a weapons inspector who was expelled from Iraq in August 1998 and who, later that month, said:

I think the danger right now is that without effective inspections, without effective monitoring, Iraq can in a very short period of time measured in months, reconstitute chemical and biological weapons, long-range ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and even certain aspects of their nuclear weaponization program.

By the end of August 1998, Ritter had resigned from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). His resignation followed the failure of the U.S. and the UN Security Council to take action against Iraq for its refusal to cooperate fully with inspectors, as mandated by Security Council Resolution 1154.

In 1999, Ritter wrote “Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem – Once and For All.” In it, he again claimed that Iraq had obstructed the work of inspectors and attempted to hide and preserve essential elements for restarting WMD programs at a later date and criticized the U.S. containment policy as inadequate to prevent Iraq’s re-acquisition of WMD’s in the absence of inspections. However, he rejected the idea of regime change, which was then gaining currency in Washington.

In late 2000, a documentary on UNSCOM he wrote and directed was released. The New York Times reviewed his “In Shifting Sands”:

At the time of his resignation [from UNSCOM], he contended that Iraq remained a danger, insufficiently disarmed and ready to restart its nuclear and biological weapons programs as soon as the United Nations turned its back.

He has since reversed his position, as this film relentlessly demonstrates. Interviewing himself on camera, Mr. Ritter now says: ‘’Iraq is a defanged tiger. There’s much better things we could be doing with our money and our time besides pursuing a brutal dictator to the point of debasing our own moral and intellectual battles.’’

‘’In Shifting Sands,’’ which opens today in Manhattan, exclusively reflects that point of view. Using what seems to be home video of the inspection team at work—and there is some very dramatic material here in the tense confrontations between inspectors and Iraqi guards—Mr. Ritter builds his case that every nook and cranny of the country has been checked.

In a twist reminiscent of Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch, the archive of Mr. Hussein’s nuclear and biological weapons program is found stashed in a shed at a pig farm. Mr. Ritter says he believes that these documents prove his contention that Unscom found most everything worth finding: every project referred to in the archive has been accounted for by the inspectors and neutralized, he says.

The Times then exploded a bombshell:

A wealthy Iraqi-American businessman, Shakir al-Khafaji, contributed $400,000 toward the making of ‘’In Shifting Sands.’’ According to a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Ritter has said that he thoroughly checked out Mr. al-Khafaji—‘’I called a reporter who has sources in the C.I.A.’’—and was confident he was not getting any quid pro quo from the Iraqi government. ‘’Shakir said he didn’t,’’ the article quotes Mr. Ritter as saying.

The Times review concluded by saying that “Such trustfulness would be an admirable quality in many walks of life. But in a United Nations weapons inspector, it seems out of place.”