Coming Soon: Gulf War III

By September 2002 every would-be mover and shaker in our nation's capital knew that Gulf War II would begin shortly after President Bush could claim, however implausibly, that international "diplomacy" had failed to get Saddam Hussein to give up his pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Many of them knew that Saddam had given up his pursuit of nukes a decade earlier.

Worse, many of them knew that Gulf War II had already secretly begun, months before, with Operation Southern Focus, a massive preemptive, "suppressive" air assault against more than 400 "key" targets in Iraq, some of them military.

That massive air assault – a war crime, if unauthorized – began before Bush even sought the "fig leaf" protection of a congressional or Security Council authorization to use U.S. armed forces if necessary to "disarm" Saddam.