Houston Democrats

Exactly how does that prove we were "lied into war"? On the whole, there was more tonnage dropped on Iraq in Clinton's last year in office than in the year leading up to the latest war. Furthermore, nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing - in this news story details the assertion made in the paragraph you excerpt.

Bombing raids carried out with the sole intention of provoking war, (which was not Clinton's intent when he bombed) further proves that the justification for war was manufactured to fit the desire to go to war. It's like the schoolyard bully who hits someone so he can provoke a fight, except countless lives are lost.

The article might not state that "Bush lied us into war", however, it certainly states that the frequency of bombs being dropped onto Iraq increased in the run up to the so called war.

I think the increased bombing of Iraq PLUS the contents of the Downing Street Memo should be enough to start impeachment proceedings against Bush.

Here's a copy of the entire article:

The Sunday Times - Britain

May 29, 2005

RAF bombing raids tried to goad Saddam into war
Michael Smith

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.

During 2000, RAF aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone over Iraq dropped 20.5 tons of bombs from a total of 155 tons dropped by the coalition, a mere 13%. During 2001 that figure rose slightly to 25 tons out of 107, or 23%.

However, between May 2002 and the second week in November, when the UN Security Council passed resolution 1441, which Goldsmith said made the war legal, British aircraft dropped 46 tons of bombs a month out of a total of 126.1 tons, or 36%.

By October, with the UN vote still two weeks away, RAF aircraft were dropping 64% of bombs falling on the southern no-fly zone.

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.

The Ministry of Defence figures, provided in response to a question from Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, show that despite the lack of an Iraqi reaction, the air war began anyway in September with a 100-plane raid.

The systematic targeting of Iraqi air defences appears to contradict Foreign Office legal guidance appended to the leaked briefing paper which said that the allied aircraft 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."

Oh, I seem to recall that Saddam Hussein WAS cooperating with U.S. weapons inspectors. I also seem to recall the Chimp pulling out the weapons inspectors before they had finished their job so he could bomb the hell out of Iraq and send in U.S. ground troops.

The increased 2002 bombing "run up" to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is prima facie evidence of lies that led the US to war. Before UN resolution 1441 in November 2002 there should have been NO bombing except in either enforcement of the "no fly zone" being imposed on Iraqi aircraft or in retaliation against Iraqi anti-aircraft ground fire. If tons of bombs were being dropped on strategic Iraqi targets such as command and communication centers, roads and bridges, and mobile armored units, those actions would have to be considered as a preparation for invasion long before the US Congress (the American people) or the United Nations were included or advised. That is illegal and an impeachable offense.

That the U.S. and the RAF dropped twice as many bombs in the second half of 2002 as they did in the entire year of 2001 seems a strong indication of intent to provoke a war.

This is the text of an LTE I sent today to the NY Times and, in modified form, to other media outlets about the lack of media coverage of all this:

Sadly, Mr. Rich is on target in "Ground Zero Is So Over," when he states that the nation has turned its back on the Iraq War. How much of this apathy, however, is due to the short attention span of the American public, and how much is due to the media's abdication of their responsibility to cover war-related issues in an honest and engaging manner?

Here are just three recently-revealed topics which would wake Americans from their stupor if investigated and covered with depth, competence, and dramatic flair (a la "Runaway Bride"):

1. The Downing Street Minutes, which reveal that the Bush Administration "fixed" intelligence to fit its pre-ordained plans to invade Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11

2. The new revelations in the British press of the secret air war waged by the U.S. and the RAF in 2002 in order to provoke an Iraqi response, a response that would provide a legal excuse for invasion

3. Yesterday's vote by the Republicans in the House of Representatives to kill two measures which would have provided healthcare and other assistance to veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, especially to the over-extended National Guard and Reserve forces - - This is the same Republican Congress and Administration that finds untold billions of dollars for tax cuts for the wealthy and subsidies for huge corporations, even expending tax dollars to put the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board on public television.

This is the same Republican Congress and Administration, peopled with war hawks who never saw a day of combat (Bush, Cheney, DeLay et al), that shamelessly trumpet this war for political gain. This is the same Republican Congress and Administration that cynically and secretly planned this war yet failed to perform such basic pre-war preparations as armoring the soldiers' humvees. Although the media may be numb to such blatant hypocrisy, the American public should be informed about it.

If journalism is indeed the first draft of history, then the deadline for that first draft is fast approaching. The consequences of missing it will be dire for America's future.

We do realize that we had other commitments in 2001, right? Besides, comparing two years while ignoring the third (and fourth, and fifth, and ...) is ridiculously selective and proof of nothing. Having read the Downing Street memos, I'm even more convinced that all the talk of "Let's impeach Bush over this" is just going to further marginalize war critics to the point where there's no way to be taken seriously having pushed this.

Witness the breakdown of tonnage dropped, year by year:
Total ...
2000 - 155 tons
2001 - 107 tons
2002 - 126 tons

RAF ...
2000 - 20.5 tons
2001 - 25 tons
2002 - 46 tons

This means that if we look at EVERYONE ELSE dropping bombs, and for the sake of argument assume 100% of this is the US, we get this ...

2000 - 134.5 tons
2001 - 82 tons
2002 - 80 tons

BEHOLD! This is what you want to impeach George W. Bush over? A DECREASE in bombing in Iraq??? Simple math here, folks.

Secondly, are we reading Tommy Franks' statement that bombing was conducted to degrade Iraqi defenses as "trying to provoke them?" Because nowhere in the memo does it state, by name, how we try to "provoke" them. Secondly, it's very common in times of war to conduct such manuevers - EVEN BILL CLINTON DID THIS. There's nothing provocative about bombing the airfields of a known enemy (whether you thought he was a threat or not at the time) when you know you've got your hands full trying to win a war against militant Islam.

I guarantee you that between 1998 (when Bill Clinton made regime change the official US policy) and 2000, there were bombs dropped in Iraq in very much the same manner as they were detailed in the Downing Street memos. They don't just drop bombs in the middle of nowhere for sporting fun, ya know.

The British have pretty much looked at this memo and collectively shrugged, so why are any good American Democrats bothering with it? All it shows is a difference of opinion among British pols and absolutely nothing about Bush. The critique based on it is just ludicrous and misguided.

'Nuther thing ... if the memos are actually read, one thing that really stands out is the fact that the RAF bombing was done in the Southern no-fly zone.

If I'm trying to provoke a war with Saddam Hussein, circa 1998-2002, wouldn't it have been a wiser course of action to bomb Baghdad or, at least, his hometown of Tikrit?

The following is speculation since I have no personal military experience. One of the main fronts of the "coalition" troops was in Southern Iraq, primarily from the port city of Basra. I know, at least according to news reports, that for American and British troops (possible others too), Basra served as one of the most important supply lines, another was from Kuwait, on the southwestern border of Iraq.

Assuming one is going to invade Iraq from the South, which did in fact occur, it would seem to make sense to "soften" up the opposition's defenses first. One objective of repeatedly bombing an area may have been to demoralize the local inhabitants and to dissuade those who might resist the coalition troops, not just to hit significant military targets. This could provide a possible explanation for an increase in bombings made by RAF forces.

That being said, it's possible that another byproduct of these pre-invasion bombings could have been to "provoke" Iraq into doing something upon which to justify an invasion. If this was the case, I'm pretty certain it would be hush-hush. While military leaders were saying it was to squash the opposition's defense, some evidence of retaliation by Iraq through the use of chemical weapons and/or weapons of mass destruction would provide proof of the US's claims that Iraq posed a military threat, at least in the eyes of Pentagon and Administration leaders. Again this is only speculation, but I am very skeptical when it comes to the Pentagon and the Administration. Just because they say one thing, often doesn't preclude them from doing or hoping for another outcome.

I do believe the memo is important in showing the link between US and British strategy planning, and could be a part of some future impeachment proceeding. However, using the link between an increase in bombings in Iraq by British forces and Bush is still very speculative and circumstantial at this point, at least given the current available evidence. Additionally, it would be extremely helpful if other evidence were to be discovered, so that a pattern of coordination could be shown to exist. I'm not saying there isn't a connection, but what we know right now wouldn't hold up in court.

On somewhat of a tangent, would having Dick Cheney as president be much of an improvement? I guess the case can be made that Bush really isn't running the country and that it's actually Cheney, Rove et al. that are pulling the strings.

One possibility to consider is that if Bush is impeached and Cheney becomes president, would Cheney be under enough pressure from Republicans to seek the presidential nomination in 2008? I know he has refused to run now, but I could see an elevation to the presidency as an influential factor.

"I do believe the memo is important in showing the link between US and British strategy planning, and could be a part of some future impeachment proceeding. However, using the link between an increase in bombings in Iraq by British forces and Bush is still very speculative and circumstantial at this point, at least given the current available evidence. Additionally, it would be extremely helpful if other evidence were to be discovered, so that a pattern of coordination could be shown to exist."

Marc,

Basically what you're saying here is "We should impeach Bush ... if only some evidence would turn up." To this end, I would agree. IF evidence turns up of treasonous or high-crime matters that point to Bush, then yes - by all means - impeach away. But since that clearly isn't at hand, let's stick to more pressing concerns before delving into the la-la land of speculating about Cheney taking over because a memo points to the RAF conducting more bombing in Iraq.

I agree Greg.

I think the Democratic Party would likely stand a much better chance to improve its position by hammering away at the Republican ethics problems and corporate interests, while working to define its issues. If there is reasonable and substantial evidence (in addition to this memo) to conduct an impeachment trial, then I believe there should be one. The danger with pushing for an impeachement based on limited information will only make it look like Democrats are out to depose Bush just for partisan gain, like the Republicans tried to do with Clinton and failed. While I didn't and still don't agree with what Clinton did in the Oval Office, it certainly appeared to me that Republicans were just out to take down the top Democrat, especially since a couple of them had to later resign for similar goings on.

Interesting article on impeachment at www.commondreams.org.

Published on Tuesday, May 31, 2005 by the Boston Globe

The 'I' Word: Impeachment
by Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese

The impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, should be part of mainstream political discourse.

Minutes from a summer 2002 meeting involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair reveal that the Bush administration was ''fixing" the intelligence to justify invading Iraq. US intelligence used to justify the war demonstrates repeatedly the truth of the meeting minutes -- evidence was thin and needed fixing.

President Clinton was impeached for perjury about his sexual relationships. Comparing Clinton's misbehavior to a destructive and costly war occupation launched in March 2003 under false pretenses in violation of domestic and international law certainly merits introduction of an impeachment resolution.

Eighty-nine members of Congress have asked the president whether intelligence was manipulated to lead the United States to war. The letter points to British meeting minutes that raise ''troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war." Those minutes describe the case for war as ''thin" and Saddam as ''nonthreatening to his neighbors," and ''Britain and America had to create conditions to justify a war." Finally, military action was ''seen as inevitable . . . But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Indeed, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, nor any imminent threat to the United States:

The International Atomic Energy Agency Iraq inspection team reported in 1998, ''there were no indications of Iraq having achieved its program goals of producing a nuclear weapon; nor were there any indications that there remained in Iraq any physical capability for production of amounts of weapon-usable material." A 2003 update by the IAEA reached the same conclusions.

The CIA told the White House in February 2001: ''We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has . . . reconstitute[d] its weapons of mass destruction programs."

Colin Powell said in February 2001 that Saddam Hussein ''has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

The CIA told the White House in two Fall 2002 memos not to make claims of Iraq uranium purchases. CIA Director George Tenet personally called top national security officials imploring them not to use that claim as proof of an Iraq nuclear threat.

Regarding unmanned bombers highlighted by Bush, the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center concluded they could not carry weapons spray devices. The Defense Intelligence Agency told the president in June 2002 that the unmanned aerial bombers were unproven. Further, there was no reliable information showing Iraq was producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether it had established chemical agent production facilities.

When discussing WMD the CIA used words like ''might" and ''could." The case was always circumstantial with equivocations, unlike the president and vice president, e.g., Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002: ''Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

The State Department in 2003 said: ''The activities we have detected do not . . . add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing . . . an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."

The National Intelligence Estimate issued in October 2002 said ''We have no specific intelligence information that Saddam's regime has directed attacks against US territory."

The UN, IAEA, the State and Energy departments, the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center, US inspectors, and even the CIA concluded there was no basis for the Bush-Cheney public assertions. Yet, President Bush told the public in September 2002 that Iraq ''could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given." And, just before the invasion, President Bush said: ''Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

The president and vice president have artfully dodged the central question: ''Did the administration mislead us into war by manipulating and misstating intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to Al Qaeda, suppressing contrary intelligence, and deliberately exaggerating the danger a contained, weakened Iraq posed to the United States and its neighbors?"

If this is answered affirmatively Bush and Cheney have committed ''high crimes and misdemeanors." It is time for Congress to investigate the illegal Iraq war as we move toward the third year of the endless quagmire that many security experts believe jeopardizes US safety by recruiting and training more terrorists. A Resolution of Impeachment would be a first step. Based on the mountains of fabrications, deceptions, and lies, it is time to debate the ''I" word.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate. Kevin Zeese is director of DemocracyRising.US.

Impeachment proceedings should start immediately against Bush and Cheney. I don't see how anyone on this blog can debate this issue. Clinton was impeached based upon lying about a blow job for Christ's sake! Bush and Cheney's lies have cost thousands of lives and millions of taxpayer dollars not to mention the fact they have endangered all of us by igniting a powder keg of religious fervor and anger toward Americans.

What more proof do you people need to support efforts to begin impeachment proceedings?!

"by Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese"

Speaking of people that nobody takes seriously ...

What's your problem, Greg? I think the article makes a lot of sense. Get the burr out from under your saddle. Impeachment proceedings should start immediately against Bush and Cheney, and the rest of this crooked administration should be investigated for war crimes.

It doesn't bother me in the slightest that Nader and Zeese wrote the article. What is important is the substance of the article.

Grow up, Greg, and don't waste my time with your asinine comments.

Greg, here is another "take" on the grounds for impeachment. Greg, your reticence to face the reality that the assault on the people of Iraq in order to...what, liberate them???? Sadly, the DLC and Clintonistas are knee deep in the effort to stake out territory in Iraq. stan

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

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