The American and British attack on Iraq has already begun, even without the declaration of war. Wile the British Blair government continues to claim in Parliament that "no final decision has been taken" the Royal Air Force and US fighter bombers have secretly changed tactics and escalated their "patrols" over Iraq to an all-out assault on both military and civilian targets.

American and British bombing of Iraq has increased by 300 per cent. Between March and November of 2002, according to the British Ministry of Defense replies to MPs, the Royal Air Force has dropped more than 124 tones of bombs on Iraq.

From August to December of 2003, there were 62 attacks by American F-16 aircraft and RAF Tornadoes – an average of bombing raid every two days. These raids, are said to have been aimed only at Iraqi "air defenses", but many have fallen on mostly populated areas, where civilian deaths are unavoidable.

Under the United Nations Charter and the conventions of war and international law, these attacks amount to acts of piracy: no different in principle, from the German fascist Luftwaffe’s bombing in Spain in 1930s as precursor to its invasion of all of Europe.

This bombing of Iraq is a "secret war" that has seldom been news. Since 1991, and especially in the last four years, it has been unrelenting and is now deemed the longest Anglo- American campaign of aerial bombardment since the Second World War.

The US and also British governments justify it by claiming they have a UN Security Council resolution. To be sure about this, I asked Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was Secretary General of the United Nations in 1992 when the Resolution 688 was passed. "The issue of no fly zones was not raised and therefore not debated: not a word," he said. "They offer no legitimacy to countries sending their aircraft to attack Iraq."

In 1999, Tony Blair claimed the no fly zones allowed the US and Britain to perform "a vital humanitarian task" in protecting the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the ethnic Marsh Arabs in the south. In fact, British and American aircraft have actually provided cover for neighbouring Turkey’s repeated invasions of northern Kurdish Iraq.

Turkey is critical to the American "new world order". Overseeing the oilfields of the Middle East and Central Asia, it is a member of NATO and the recipient of billion of dollars’ worth of American weapons and military equipment. Turkey is where the British and American bombers are based.

A long-running insurrection by Turkey’s Kurdish population is regarded by Washington as a threat to the "stability" of Turkey’s "democracy" that is a front for its military, which is among the world’s worst violators of human rights. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish Kurds have been displaced and an estimated 30,000 killed. Turkey, unlike Iraq, is "our friend."

In 1995 and 1997, as many as 50,000 Turkish troops, backed by tanks and fighter aircraft, occupied what the West called "Kurdish safe havens."

They terrorized Kurdish villages and murdered civilians. In December of 2000 they were back, committing the atrocities that the Turkish military commits with immunity against its own Kurdish population.

For joining the US "coalition" against Iraq, the Turkish regime is to be rewarded with a bribe worth $5 billion. Turkey’s invasions are rarely reported in Britain. So great is the collusion of the Blair government that, virtually unknown to the British Parliament and the British public, the RAF and the Americans have, from time to time, deliberately suspended their "humanitarian" patrols in order to allow the Turks to get on with killing of the Kurds in Iraq.

In March of 2001, the RAF pilots patrolling the "no fly zones" in Kurdish Iraq publicly protested for the first time about their enforced duplicity in the Turkish campaign. The pilots complained that they were frequently ordered to return to their base in Turkey in order to allow the Turkish air force to bomb the very people they were meant to be "protecting".

American pilots, who fly in tandem with the British, are also ordered to turn their planes around and turn back to Turkey in order to allow the Turks to devastate the Kurdish "safe havens".

The Turks do no more than the American and British aircraft in their humanitarian guise. The sheer scale of the Anglo-American bombing is astonishing, with Britain as a junior partner. During the 18 months to January 1999, American aircraft flew 36,000 sorties over Iraq, including 24,000 combat missions.

The term "combat" is highly deceptive. Iraq has virtually no air force and no modern defenses. Thus, "combat" means dropping bombs or firing missiles at the infrastructure that has been laid waste by a 12-year old embargo.

The US Wall Street Journal, the authentic voice of the American establishment, described this eloquently when it reported that the US faced "a genuine dilemma" in Iraq. After eight years of enforcing the no fly zone in the north and in the south of Iraq, few targets remain. "We’re down to the last outhouse," one US official protested.

I have seen the results of these attacks. When I drove from the northern city of Mosul three years ago, I saw the remains of an agricultural water tanker and truck, riddled with bullet holes, shrapnel from a missile, a shoe and the wool and skeletons of about 150 sheep.

A family of six, a shepherd, his father and his wife and four children, were blown to pieces here. The landscape here was treeless, open country: a sheer moonscape. The shepherd, his family and his sheep would have been clearly visible from the air by the pilots.

It was not known as to who, was it British or American planes that produced this carnage. When the details of the attack were put to the British Ministry of defense in London, the official reply was: " We reserve the right to take robust action when threatened." This attack was significant, because it was clearly investigated and verified by senior United Nations official in Iraq, at that time, Hans Von Sponeck, who drove there especially to investigate.

He confirmed that there were no installations of any kind, not alone military.

Mr. Sponeck recorded his findings in a confidential memo to the UN Security Section. He also confirmed dozens of such attacks. So regular were such attacks that Von Sponeck ordered UN relief convoys suspended that very afternoon.

For this, Von Sponeck, a senior and well-respected UN civil servant, made extremely powerful enemies in Washington and London.

The Americans demanded that Mr. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General fire him and were surprised when Annan stood by his chief representative in Iraq. However, within a few months, Von Sponeck felt that he could no longer run the humanitarian program under such heavy pressure from US and Britain, her resigned in protest, just as his successor Dennis Halliday, a Deputy Under Secretary of the UN, had done. Halliday called the US and British-driven embargo against Iraq "genocide".

US and Britain are preparing to use cluster bombs, deep penetration "bunker" bombs and also depleted uranium will almost certainly be used. Depleted uranium is a weapon of mass destruction. Coated on missiles, and tank shells, its explosive force spreads radiation over a wide area, especially in the desert dust.

The most devastating weapon of mass destruction was briefly in the news when UNICEF, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, released its annual State of the World’s Children report.

The human cost of the American-driven embargo of Iraq is spelled out in statistics that require no comment.

* Iraq’s child mortality rate has nearly tripled since 1990 to levels in some of the world’s most underdeveloped countries.

* The country’s regression over the past decade is by far the most severe of the 193 countries that were surveyed. UNICEF said that more than a quarter of Iraqi babies were now underweight and that more than one fifth were stunted from severe malnutrition.

Under the US inspired rules of the embargo, Iraqis are allowed less than $100 per person to sustain life fore an entire year.

To date, the cost of the current "secret" and illegal British bombing of Iraq is over a billion English pounds.

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