Prelude To Invasion
It’s sad that so many otherwise intelligent, concerned people spend so long analyzing the irreconcilable and confused public utterances of King Bush as to whether or not Iraq was an “imminent threat”.Actions speak louder than words. I noted back in February that the Pentagon had been preparing for this invasion for a long time. They used their unlilateral aerial interdiction “no fly zones” (nominally an aid for Kurdish seperatists) as an excuse to degrade Iraq’s air defences for almost a year before the positional phase of the invasion.
The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq. But Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government. Indeed, one reason it was possible for the allies to begin the ground campaign to topple Mr. Hussein without preceding it with an extensive array of airstrikes was that 606 bombs had been dropped on 391 carefully selected targets under the plan … From June 2002 until the beginning of the Iraq war, the allies flew 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq and attacked 349 targets … During that period before the war, American officials said the strikes were necessary because the Iraqis were shooting more often at allied air patrols. In total, the Iraqis fired on allied aircraft 651 times during the operation. But General Moseley said it was possible that the Iraqi attacks increased because allied planes had stepped up their patrols over Iraq. “We became a little more aggressive based on them shooting more at us, which allowed us to respond more”.
Earlier here.