What we did

As Scott Ritter points out in a piece on al-Jazeera.net on June 23,

Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ... but also about the very process that led to war.

On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary."

We know now that this statement was itself a lie....

How do we know? There are of course the Downing Street Memos, with their declaration that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" because "[m]ilitary action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action," as a result of which "[t]he US Government's military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace," including "spikes of activity."

More recently, Michael Smith, the man who broke the Downing Street Memo story, reported in the Sunday Time for June 26 that in a briefing on July 17, 2003, Lieutenant-General Michael Moseley,

[t]he American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war[,] appears to have admitted ... to American and British officers that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began. ...

The nine months of allied raids "laid the foundations" for the allied victory, Moseley said. They ensured that allied forces did not have to start the war with a protracted bombardment of Iraqi positions.

If those raids exceeded the need to maintain security in the no-fly zones of southern and northern Iraq, they would leave President George W Bush and Tony Blair vulnerable to allegations that they had acted illegally.

Of course, as everybody keeps mentioning and everybody then forgets in the next breath, the "no-fly" zones were established by the US and the UK and were in no way authorized by any UN resolution. But even leaving that aside,

Moseley told the briefing ... that the raids took place under cover of patrols of the southern no-fly zone; their purpose was ostensibly to protect the ethnic minorities.

That is, they were not part of enforcing the "no-fly" zones, that was just a cover for starting an air war against Iraq. It was, that is, the result of the US having

quietly shifted policy towards Iraq to allow for surgical, pre-emptive airstrikes months before any attempt to seek UN or Congressional approval for the use of force[, Raw Story reported on Thursday].

The change meant that the U.S. began systematically bombing air defense systems and other buildings, even beyond the No-Fly Zones established in the wake of the Gulf War.

It also meant the strikes were no longer justified even by the argument they were in response to attacks but instead allowed for

pre-emptive attacks on sites they felt could threaten their forces in the future after an apparent decision to go to war.

Exact figures on just how much US strikes intensified in that time are apparently hard to come by, but some idea can be gained from the accompanying increase in RAF activity over Iraq during that time. British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon

said that between 1998 and 2000, the British Royal Air Force dropped 156,000 pounds of bombs. By contrast, in eight months in 2002, British forces dropped more than 252,000 pounds.

Footnote: Raw Story has a good timeline of events leading up to the declaration of war. In March, BBC's investigative program Panorama ran a detailed and highly-critical examination of how the government of Tony Blair ignored its own intelligence services in order to justify his alliance with Bush; a transcript of the program is available at this link.