War on Iraq - What Team Bush doesn't want you to know

Scott Ritter and William Rivers Pitt, Profile Books, 78 pages, paperback, £4.99

The bulk of this very timely book consists of an interview with Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, assigned the task of destroying the country's weapons of mass destruction. And as Pitt says in his introduction, Ritter is "a card carrying member of the Republican Party who voted for Bush in the 2000 election."

But Ritter is no fall-guy for the president. In the interview, Ritter, on the question of whether Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction, says that "90%-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability has been verifiably eliminated".

Ritter dismisses as absurd the claims of links between Iraq and Osama bin Laden. According to Ritter, Saddam Hussein is a secular dictator who has spent 30 years "declaring war against Islamic fundamentalism".

Ritter is chilling on the cost of a war with Iraq. In the worst-case scenario, he believes that if "we have 70,000 American troops cut off in Iraq facing the prospect of annihilation, we'll 'nuke'."