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Published on Thursday, June 2, 2005 by The Nation

The Smoking Bullet in the Smoking Gun
How Bush Began the Iraq Invasion Before
He Went to Congress or the UN
by Jeremy Scahill

It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes
flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of
aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15
Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes.
They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's
major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for
Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan.
Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command
and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary
Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense
systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's
ability to resist. This was war.

But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least
not officially. This was September 2002--a month before
Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority
he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations
brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before
"shock and awe" officially began.

At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down
the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States
was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new
information that has come out in response to the Downing
Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already
a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the
undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence
showing that "The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at
which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt
to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse
for war." The paper cites newly released statistics from the
British Defense Ministry showing that "the Allies dropped
twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as
they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air
offensive" was under way months before the invasion had
officially begun.

The implications of this information for US lawmakers are
profound. It was already well known in Washington and
international diplomatic circles that the real aim of the
US attacks in the no-fly zones was not to protect Shiites
and Kurds. But the new disclosures prove that while Congress
debated whether to grant Bush the authority to go to war,
while Hans Blix had his UN weapons-inspection teams scrutinizing
Iraq and while international diplomats scurried to broker
an eleventh-hour peace deal, the Bush Administration was
already in full combat mode--not just building the dossier
of manipulated intelligence, as the Downing Street memo
demonstrated, but acting on it by beginning the war itself.
And according to the Sunday Times article, the Administration
even hoped the attacks would push Saddam into a response
that could be used to justify a war the Administration was
struggling to sell.

On the eve of the official invasion, on March 8, 2003,
Bush said in his national radio address: "We are doing
everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein
does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force."
Bush said this after nearly a year of systematic, aggressive
bombings of Iraq, during which Iraq was already being disarmed
by force, in preparation for the invasion to come. By the
Pentagon's own admission, it carried out seventy-eight
individual, offensive airstrikes against Iraq in 2002 alone.

"It reminded me of a boxing match in which one of the boxers
is told not to move while the other is allowed to punch and
only stop when he is convinced that he has weakened his opponent
to the point where he is defeated before the fight begins,"
says former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Von Sponeck,
a thirty-year career diplomat who was the top UN official
in Iraq from 1998 to 2000. During both the Clinton and Bush
administrations, Washington has consistently and falsely
claimed these attacks were mandated by UN Resolution 688,
passed after the Gulf War, which called for an end to the
Iraqi government's repression in the Kurdish north and the
Shiite south. Von Sponeck dismissed this justification as
a "total misnomer." In an interview with The Nation, Von Sponeck
said that the new information "belatedly confirms" what he has
long argued: "The no-fly zones had little to do with protecting
ethnic and religious groups from Saddam Hussein's brutality"
but were in fact an "illegal establishment...for bilateral
interests of the US and the UK."

These attacks were barely covered in the press and Von Sponeck
says that as far back as 1999, the United States and Britain
pressured the UN not to call attention to them. During his time
in Iraq, Von Sponeck began documenting each of the airstrikes,
showing "regular attacks on civilian installations including
food warehouses, residences, mosques, roads and people."
These reports, he said, were "welcomed" by Secretary General
Kofi Annan, but "the US and UK governments strongly objected
to this reporting." Von Sponeck says that he was pressured
to end the practice, with a senior British diplomat telling him,
"All you are doing is putting a UN stamp of approval on Iraqi
propaganda." But Von Sponeck continued documenting the damage
and visited many attack sites. In 1999 alone, he confirmed
the death of 144 civilians and more than 400 wounded by the
US/UK bombings.

After September 11, there was a major change in attitude
within the Bush Administration toward the attacks. Gone was
any pretext that they were about protecting Shiites and
Kurds--this was a plan to systematically degrade Iraq's
ability to defend itself from a foreign attack: bombing
Iraq's air defenses, striking command facilities, destroying
communication and radar infrastructure. As an Associated
Press report noted in November 2002, "Those costly,
hard-to-repair facilities are essential to Iraq's air
defense."

Rear Admiral David Gove, former deputy director of global
operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on November
20, 2002, that US and British pilots were "essentially
flying combat missions." On October 3, 2002, the New York
Times reported that US pilots were using southern Iraq
for "practice runs, mock strikes and real attacks" against
a variety of targets. But the full significance of this
dramatic change in policy toward Iraq only became clear
last month, with the release of the Downing Street memo.
In it, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon is reported
to have said in 2002, after meeting with US officials,
that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity'
to put pressure on the regime," a reference to the
stepped-up airstrikes. Now the Sunday Times of London
has revealed that these spikes "had become a full
air offensive"--in other words, a war.

Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers has
called the latest revelations about these attacks
"the smoking bullet in the smoking gun," irrefutable
proof that President Bush misled Congress before the
vote on Iraq. When Bush asked Congress to authorize
the use of force in Iraq, he also said he would use it
only as a last resort, after all other avenues had been
exhausted. But the Downing Street memo reveals that
the Administration had already decided to topple Saddam
by force and was manipulating intelligence to justify
the decision. That information puts the increase
in unprovoked air attacks in the year prior to the war
in an entirely new light: The Bush Administration was
not only determined to wage war on Iraq, regardless
of the evidence; it had already started that war months
before it was put to a vote in Congress.

It only takes one member of Congress to begin an impeachment
process, and Conyers is said to be considering the option.
The process would certainly be revealing. Congress could
subpoena Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Gen. Richard
Myers, Gen.Tommy Franks and all of the military commanders
and pilots involved with the no-fly zone bombings going
back into the late 1990s. What were their orders, both
given and received? In those answers might lie a case
for impeachment.

But another question looms, particularly for Democrats
who voted for the war and now say they were misled:
Why weren't these unprovoked and unauthorized attacks
investigated when they were happening, when it might
have had a real impact on the Administration's drive to war?
Perhaps that's why the growing grassroots campaign to
use the Downing Street memo to impeach Bush can't get
a hearing on Capitol Hill. A real probing of this
"smoking gun" would not be uncomfortable only for
Republicans. The truth is that Bush, like President
Bill Clinton before him, oversaw the longest sustained
bombing campaign since Vietnam against a sovereign
country with no international or US mandate. That gun
is probably too hot for either party to touch.

Jeremy Scahill is a journalist with the national radio
and TV program Democracy Now!. He can be reached at
jeremy@democracynow.org

© 2005 The Nation

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