The unofficial war: U.S., Britain led massive secret bombing campaign before Iraq war

So. They were doing that for years every time they were shot at in the no-fly zone. It's no big deal.

 

From the article:

"Iraqi forces threatened Operation Northern Watch (ONW) coalition aircraft today. Iraqi forces fired anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) from a site in the vicinity of Saddam Dam while ONW aircraft conducted routine enforcement of the Northern No-Fly Zone.

Coalition aircraft responded to the Iraqi attack by delivering precision ordnance on elements of the Iraqi integrated air defense system."

and

"According to the report, Iraq made 130 attempts to shoot down coalition aircraft in 2002."

Personally, I'm glad we fired back. Thanks for letting us know, poncho, that we weren't letting the Iraqis get away with firing at our planes.

There is nothing in this "report" that I have a problem with.

 

It's a conspiracy by the United States to defend itself from attacks on our planes...

Joseph Botwinick

 

Me, neither.

 

The early bird gets the worm.

 

So, poncho, you would rather what? That we hadn't sought to degrade Iraqi air defenses? That reduced the likelihood of Americans being shot down. Something their parents, and I, are glad of.

 

I thought that we had UN permission to establish a no-fly zone and defend ourselves?

 

Another Conspiracy Theory!

 

SOURCE </font>[/QUOTE]Here we go again with another allegation of a major conspiracy by the "global elite"!

But wait, there's really nothing new here. Sure, poncho, we were bombing targets in Iraq before the "official" war started. We had been conducting operations Southern Watch and Northern Watch for several years and had picked up the pace just before the war. Sure, the details of any pre invasion and the invasion itself, were secret. That's how you keep the enemy from knowing exactly what, when, and where you're going to attack. Sure, we were preparing for war with Iraq before the ground war "officially" started. We built up our forces in the area - strengthening our order of battle - in preparation for the war before we made the final attack.

So what, poncho? If we had not, then the "bleeding heart liberals" and conspiracy theorists would be saying we went to war completely unprepared and purposefully "endangered" our troops. If we had not, then our ground war would not have been concluded as quickly as it was. Hats off to our civilian and military leadership for good planning and execution.

These "bleeding heart liberals", poncho, would have demanded our D-Day invasion plans be made public months before hand to give the German Army a "fair" chance to defend or counterattack. I'm sure glad they're not in charge!

Now we're engaged in the difficult business of helping Iraq build up its ability to counter the actions of the remaining terrorists. That's where we need to be focused. Let's not distract ourselves from that critical work with a bunch more self flagellation over nothing such as the liberals seem to love so much.

The business at hand is finding, fixing, and killing as many terrorists as we can until they stop doing what they're doing or they're wiped from the face of the earth. Let's focus 100% of getting that done.

Poncho, we need your help in supporting the cause and not your hindrance working against it and thereby helping our enemies.

 

Secret?

 

poncho,

What Iraqi air defenses would that be FTR, would they be the ones the Iraqi's re-built while we flew over with planes and satellites watching their every move between the time we first utterly destroyed them and the time we were dropping bombs in hopes Saddam would retaliate so we wouldn't have to use the bogus evidence we did to start another war and hand our pals huge paychecks at our (citizens) expense and take the risk of getting caught lying *again* to the public?

Yeah, those.

 

Lieutenant-General Michael Moseley divulged in a little-noticed quote in the New York Times that US/British aircraft flew 21,736 sorties between June 2002 and March 2003.


This bold face deceptions of bush's "war is a last resort" gets more and more disingenuous.

snip
One U.S. Air Force vet told a hearing in Istanbul this weekend, “I saw bombing intensify. All the documents coming out now, the Downing Street memo and others, confirm what I had witnessed in Iraq. The war had already begun while our leaders were telling us that they were going to try all diplomatic options first.”


bump the raw story
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/The_unofficial_war_U.S._and_Britain_led_massive_air_campaign_before_Iraq_war_be_0627.html

 

It was common knowledge that missions over the no-fly zone increased in the weeks before the war, primarily as a result of provocations by Iraq.

 

Here we go again


"Poncho, we need your help in supporting the cause and not your hindrance working against it and thereby helping our enemies."




Yeah lets just all just come on over to the
dark side ..when the point of debate/discussion
is to shine some light on things and not for
confirmation.

Come on! Dragoon show some resolve in keeping this
board interesting!

Do you have a counterpoint to the facts that
we increased our bombing before the war and that
the Brits let the cat out of the bag and thought
it was illegal what we were doing?

 

The counterpoint has already been clearly made by several persons but you were too busy finding cute Star Wars images to post.

Show resolve - Support the cause!