To repeat for the second time in recent days an important passage from the British reporter Michael Smith’s work on the criminal conspiracy between the Bush and Blair regimes, the explicit purpose of which was to engineer the U.S. and U.K. military seizure of Iraqi territory in the spring of 2003 (“The War Before the War,” New Statesman, May 30, 2005):

 

 

The record of the July [23, 2002] meeting in London…contains a revealing passage in which Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, tells his colleagues in plain terms that “the US had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime“.

 

What is meant by “spikes of activity” becomes clear becomes clear in the light of information elicited from the government by the Liberal Democrat Sir Menzies Campbell, who asked the Ministry of Defence about British and American air activity in 2002 in the southern no-fly zone of Iraq – the zone created to protect southern Shias after Saddam Hussein brutally suppressed their 1991 uprising against him.

The MoD response shows that in March 2002 no bombs were dropped, and in April only 0.3 tonnes of ordnance used. The figure rose to 7.3 tonnes in May, however, then to 10.4 in June, dipping to 9.5 in July before rising again to 14.1 in August.

 

Suddenly, in other words, US and British air forces were in action over Iraq. What was going on?

 

There were very strict rules of engagement in the no-fly zones. The allied pilots were authorised to fire missiles at any Iraqi air defence weapon or radar that fired at them or locked on to their aircraft. As was noted in Foreign Office legal advice appended to the July 2002 briefing paper, they were only “entitled to use force in self-defence where such a use of force is a necessary and proportionate response to actual or imminent attack from Iraqi ground systems”.

 

That May, however, Donald Rumsfeld had ordered a more aggressive approach, authorising allied aircraft to attack Iraqi command and control centres as well as actual air defences.

 

The US defence secretary later said this was simply to prevent the Iraqis attacking allied aircraft, but Hoon’s remark gives the game away. In reality, as he explained, the “spikes of activity” were designed “to put pressure on the regime”.

 

What happened next was dramatic. In September, the amount of ordnance used in the southern no-fly zone increased sharply to 54.6 tonnes. It declined in October to 17.7 tonnes before rising again to 33.6 tonnes in November and 53.2 tonnes in December. The spikes were getting taller and taller.

 

In fact, as it became clear that Saddam Hussein would not provide them with the justification they needed to launch the air war, we can see that the allies simply launched it anyway, beneath the cloak of the no-fly zone. In the early hours of 5 September, for example, more than a hundred allied aircraft attacked the H-3 airfield, the main air defence site in western Iraq. Located at the furthest extreme of the southern no-fly zone, far away from the areas that needed to be patrolled to prevent attacks on the Shias, it was destroyed not because it was a threat to the patrols, but to allow allied special forces operating from Jordan to enter Iraq undetected.

 

It would be another nine weeks before Blair and Bush went to the UN to try to persuade it to authorise military action, but the air war had begun anyway. The number of raids shot up, from four a month to 30, with allied aircraft repeatedly returning to sites they had already hit to finish them off. Senior British officials insist that no RAF aircraft opened fire until it was at least locked on to by an Iraqi radar, but it is difficult to see how the systematic targeting of Iraqi installations could have constituted “a necessary and proportionate response”.

 

The story of the secret air war dovetails neatly with the other evidence from the leaked documents, further demonstrating why, even after the general election [in 2005], Blair’s efforts to dispel the allegations about the background to war and get the country to “move on” seem doomed to fail.

 

 

Extracting the month-by-month tonnage of bombs reportedly dropped by the British Royal Air Force on targets in southern Iraq for ten months in 2002:   

 

 

Tonnage of Bombs

 

 

March 2002

      0

April 2002

      0.3

May 2002

      7.3

June 2002

    10.4

July 2002

      9.5

August 2002

    14.1

September 2002

    54.6

October 2002

    17.7

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