WASHINGTON — Senior Pentagon officials on Monday showed previously classified video footage of Iraq’s efforts to shoot down American and British warplanes patrolling Iraqi no-flight zones, in an apparent effort to build support for a tough new U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraqi weapons.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave reporters an unusually detailed briefing, using a slide show of footage from warplane gun cameras and unmanned Predator drones, to underscore that there has been a growing number of Iraqi firings on allied planes.
In the two weeks since Iraq said it would allow the unconditional return of U.N. inspectors, it fired on coalition aircraft 67 times — 28 times in northern Iraq and 39 times in the south — including 14 times this past weekend, Rumsfeld said.
“Here you have U.S. and British planes flying daily to enforce the U.N. resolutions, putting their lives at risk, these pilots and air crew, day after day after day for years, and the U.N. not enforcing its own resolutions,” Rumsfeld said. “With each missile launched at our air crews, Iraq expresses its contempt for the U.N. resolutions — a fact that must be kept in mind as their latest
inspection offers are evaluated.”
But in Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry suggested that the most recent allied raids on Iraqi air defense sites had been timed to influence talks opening in Vienna, Austria, on procedures for allowing U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq.
“Anglo-American bombing raids in ‘no-fly zones’ not only deepen the complicated atmosphere around Iraq but create obstacles in the search for a political-diplomatic settlement of the Iraq question,” the statement said.
Rumsfeld rejected the Russian criticism, saying it was “nonsensical” to blame the United States
and Britain for responding to increasing attempts by Iraq to shoot down allied warplanes patrolling
no-flight zones in northern and southern Iraq.