From the New York Times today. I find it interesting how "self-defense" is brought in as a justification for unilateral bombing...in the absence of any actual attack. The mere imagination of a threat suffices. There's no actual ethics involved here...just the logic of what one can get away with.
Joanna Bujes ________________________________
U.S. and British Warplanes Attack Air
Defense Targets in Iraq
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:26 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Dozens
of U.S. and British warplanes using guided
missiles and bombs attacked three air
defense sites in southern Iraq on Friday in a
raid targeting Baghdad's increasingly
sophisticated air defense network, the
Pentagon said.
``About 50 coalition warplanes, 20 of which
were strike aircraft, hit three targets. All
aircraft returned safely to bases,'' Pentagon
spokesman Bryan Whitman told Reuters.
The jets struck an air defense control center
that uses fiber-optic communications cables to integrate Iraq's air defenses, an
anti-aircraft missile site and a long-range radar station, all located southeast of
Baghdad in a southern ``no-fly'' zone.
Whitman and officials at the British Defense Ministry in London said the strike
occurred at 5:30 a.m. Washington time (0930 GMT) and about midday Iraqi
time. A British official said the targets were hit and that exact damage was
being assessed.
The attack, similar to a major raid against the same defenses in February,
followed stepped-up efforts by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's military this
year to shoot down U.S. and British warplanes that have been policing no-fly
zones in northern and southern Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War.
No western warplanes have been shot down over the years. But Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a recent news conference that Iraq was
improving its air defenses ``both quantitatively and qualitatively'' with
fiber-optic communications cabling.
``SELF-DEFENSE'' STRIKE
``The main aim of the strike was to protect our aircraft and our pilots - and
obviously the way you do that is to degrade his (Saddam's) ability to target and
hit us. Our focus and our reason for the strike was a self-defense measure,''
said Army Col. Rick Thomas, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in
Tampa, Florida.
Asked whether the weapons had hit their targets, he said that ``battle damage
assessment'' had not been completed.
Defense officials said the fiber-optic air defense control center is located near
an-Numaniyah, southeast of Baghdad. The radar and anti-aircraft missile
bases are farther southeast of Iraq's capital, near an-Nasiriyah.
It was the second time this week that allied planes struck Iraqi targets in the
no-fly zones, although the earlier and smaller raid in the northern zone on
Sunday was simply to hit back directly at anti-aircraft weapons that had fired
on the planes.
Whitman told Reuters that the fiber-optic center struck on Friday was also
bombed in February.
He said precision-guided munitions were used. Such weapons include missiles
and bombs, which are guided to precise aiming points using satellites.
The United States had on Wednesday quickly rejected a warning from
Saddam in a major speech to stop sending U.S. planes over the no-fly zones.
U.S. officials said pilots would continue attacking Iraqi air defenses in
response to attempts to shoot down their planes.
INCREASING ATTEMPTS BY IRAQ
At the same time, President George W. Bush said while on vacation in Texas
that Saddam continued to be ``a menace'' to his neighbors and to stability in the
region.
Pentagon officials said last month that the Iraqi military came close to hitting a
high-altitude U.S. U-2 spy plane with a missile on July 24.
The United States also accused Iraq of apparently firing anti-aircraft missiles
into both Kuwaiti and Saudi airspace on two recent occasions.
Rumsfeld said last month that Iraq had made major improvements in its air
defenses since the February raid on the southern air defense network. Both
Friday's raid and the February strike were much bigger in scope than dozens
of tit-for-tat retaliatory air strikes against smaller Iraqi air defense targets over
the past decade.
The United States said in February that Chinese technicians were helping Iraq
lay fiber-optic cables to integrate its air defenses.
U.S. and British warplanes have patrolled no-fly zones over northern and
southern Iraq since the Gulf War, when Iraqi troops were ousted from Kuwait
by a U.S.-led coalition.
Iraq was banned from using all aircraft in the zones set up by Western powers
to protect minority Kurds and Shiites from attack by Saddam's forces.