New revelations about the degree to which the decision to go to war was pre-empted by actions of the US and UK governments is given in today's
Sunday Times. Credit must go to the Liberal Democrats for eliciting the information from the Defence Department.
The need to diary this on DKos is to make sure that the information is available to Congressman John Conyers and those that are magnificently taking this issue forward in the United States.
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, new evidence has shown.
The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.
The details follow the leak to The Sunday Times of minutes of a key meeting in July 2002 at which Blair and his war cabinet discussed how to make "regime change" in Iraq legal.
Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, told the meeting that "the US had already begun `spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime".
The new information, obtained by the Liberal Democrats, shows 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 the RAF increased their attacks even more quickly than the Americans did.
These attacks upon Iraq went far beyond the securing of the no-fly zones that were the intention behind the USAF and RAF operations in the Gulf. It was war by any other name and a war not authorised by Congress or by Parliament. It was duplicitous to those with whom we pretended to be in negotiations and duplicitous to the people of those countries in whose name this was being done.
Tommy Franks, the allied commander, has since admitted this operation was designed to "degrade" Iraqi air defences in the same way as the air attacks that began the 1991 Gulf war.
It was not until November 8 that the UN security council passed resolution 1441, which threatened Iraq with "serious consequences" for failing to co-operate with the weapons inspectors.
The briefing paper prepared for the July meeting -- the same document that revealed the prime minister's agreement during a summit with President George W Bush in April 2002 to back military action to bring about regime change -- laid out the American war plans.
They opted on August 5 for a "hybrid plan" in which a continuous air offensive and special forces operations would begin while the main ground force built up in Kuwait ready for a full-scale invasion.
As I write diaries on these events, on the leaked documents, on the prisoner abuse, on the convoys of death and on the dying of a population trapped in the middle of these politics of fear and greed, I begin to feel the weariness of my age and tiredness from too many years of seeing these things and finding that our fellow citizens ignore or explain them away with a shrug. I need to see the fire and the willingness to put himself on line of John Conyers to instil in me a determination not to give up. I hope, in turn, Kossacks will not give up on this man and what he is doing and will give him the support that I, from across the Pond, am unable to provide. He is an American hero and both our countries are short of such heroes.
At some stage, liberal progressives must bring these matters to a catharsis, to a point where they loudly voice the cry of "No More!". Never forget that the world is watching not just the American government but also the American people, just as they are watching my own country and my own people.
So how will we show our dissent? The call for a 100,000 signatures by John Conyers is a start.