"Downing Street" revelations.

The "Downing Street Memo," official minutes of a briefing given on July 23, 2002 by Richard Dearlove, then-director of Britain's MI-6 (the equivalent of the CIA), has been largely ignored by the mainstream U.S. press, and dismissed as both inconsequential and a "possible" hoax by Vice President Dick Cheney and the Bush administration's talk radio echo chamber.

Based on information gathered during a visit to Washington just prior to the briefing, Dearlove concluded that war with Saddam's regime would be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]." Furthermore, he observed, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," rather than policy being based on sound intelligence. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw agreed with that assessment: "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided." "But," he continued, "the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, and Iran."

The "Downing Street Memo" is actually just one of seven official documents describing the covert strategy employed by Washington and London to bring about a war in Iraq.

Michael Smith, the British reporter who broke the story of those critical documents, pointed out in a June 26 Los Angeles Times op-ed that the most critical revelation contained therein dealt with the Bush and Blair governments' two-track strategy to bring about a war. Plan "A" involved "wrong-footing" Saddam into providing a legal pretext for war. "British officials hoped the [disarmament] ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright," recalled Smith.

Plan "B" involved "U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone ... dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict," he continued. These attacks, described by British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as "spikes of activity," amounted to a "secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress."

The June 26 Times of London reported that confirmation of this account was provided during a July 17, 2003 briefing by General Michael Moseley, commander of the U.S. air campaign in Iraq, at Nebraska's Nellis air base. General Moseley told U.S. and British military leaders that "nine months of allied raids" over southern Iraq from mid-2002 to early 2003 "laid the foundation" for the quick conquest of Baghdad.

It should be remembered that this is hardly the only recent example of an Anglo-American campaign to provoke a war. In early 1999, during negotiations with the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic at Rambouillet, France, the Clinton administration (with London's support) presented the Serbs with an ultimatum, entitled "Appendix B," that would have permitted NATO troops to occupy Serbia in the supposed interest of ending ethnic conflict in Kosovo. The intent behind that ultimatum was to provoke Milosevic into giving NATO a pretext for war.