The neo logic of self defense

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Fri Aug 10 10:31:42 PDT 2001


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.



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