US sliding into war with Iraq?

US officials say that in the last three years – since Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein declared open season on US and British aircraft in Iraqi airspace – allied planes have been fired upon 1,000 times by Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries, by 600 rockets, and by some 60 surface-to-air missiles.

That rate of Iraqi targeting began to multiply in mid-September, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week, immediately after Iraq promised to allow United Nations weapons inspectors "unfettered" access.

In response, analysts say, US retaliatory strikes have become more damaging and concerted.

Though the UN Security Council has never explicitly authorized the no-fly zones, the Bush administration portrays these air operations as actions to enforce UN resolutions. By extension, US officials claim, Iraq's targeting of US pilots flying over Iraqi airspace is a violation of UN rules.

But Iraq, along with Russia and others, consider the no-fly zones to be illegitimate, referring to elements of the same UN resolutions that codify Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Regardless of the legal wrangle, the current tempo of and rhetoric surrounding US strikes shouldn't be confused with the actual start of hostilities, says Chris Hellman, a military expert at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.

"Clearly, if you are hitting any of the air defense net, it's going to degrade it," Mr. Hellman says. "But when we decide to degrade [Iraq's] air defense, we won't do it by one strike every three weeks. We'll do it by 1,500 strikes in three hours."

The no-fly zones were imposed on Iraq shortly after the Gulf War in 1991, when Iraqi forces had shown that their ability to continue flying helicopters enabled them to quell uprisings by ethnic Kurds in the north, and Shiite Muslims in the south. Some 1.5 million Kurds fled into Turkey and Iran, in the face of Mr. Hussein's advancing forces. The Shiite opposition was decimated.

The northern no-fly zone was established by the US to help enforce UN Security Council resolutions 678 and 688, which call for restoring order and for protecting ethnic groups in Iraq. Under that umbrella, Kurds have since built a nascent state, free of Baghdad's control.

Mr. Rumsfeld said last week that it "bothers the dickens out of me that American and British air crews are getting fired at day after day after day with impunity." He cast allied pilots in the role of UN peacekeepers – an image rejected at UN headquarters. "With each missile launched at our air crews," Rumsfeld said, "Iraq expresses its contempt for the UN resolutions."

"There's been a lot of rhetoric on this issue," says a UN official in New York. Those pilots "don't belong to any UN operation – that much is clear. They belong to a nation acting on its own authority, and that nation cites the broader mandate given by UN resolutions to justify its actions."

Today, the no-fly zones extend north of the 36th parallel, and south of the 33rd parallel, essentially boxing in the Hussein regime. More than a quarter million sorties have been flown by allied planes in more than a decade. After the US launched a four-day bombing campaign in December 1998, Mr. Hussein vowed to take on allied patrols.

Since then, US and British planes flying from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait have been shot at, on average, two out of every three days. Hussein is reported to have offered a reward to any Iraqi soldier who can bring down an allied plane.

Those risks may be worth taking to patrol the no-fly zones, in the US military's view. In 1994, US pilots detected the build-up of a potential Iraqi invasion force toward Kuwait, prompting a swift US response that forced Iraq to back down.

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