casus belli

The Downing Street memo revealed that in order to generate a pretext to invade Iraq, George W. Bush advanced a scheme to paint a U2 spy plane in United Nations colors, goading Saddam into shooting it down.

Tonight, Jon Stewart asked Hugh Shelton about his book, Without Hesitation, where he describes a meeting during the Clinton administration when someone suggested a familiar sounding scheme:

Jon: Your time as the Joint Chiefs, I was surprised when I read the book at how candid— I’ve grown accustomed to people, uh, lying…

Hugh: Haven’t we all?

Jon: …in their memoirs. But you describe, when Clinton was a commander‐in‐chief, being in a meeting, where there was a suggestion from someone, offhandedly, that we get Saddam to shoot down one of our planes.

Hugh: To fly one our U2s low enough so that Saddam could actually shoot it down, therefore giving us a precipitous event that would allow us, then, to attack and take Saddam out. He was shooting at us every day. It was getting very frustrating that we weren’t able to do that, and so that was a suggestion made, and of course, my fists clenched, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I gritted my teeth and I said, “I’ll be willing to do that as soon as I can get your ass qualified to fly.”

Later, Bush proposed this same subterfuge to Tony Blair. So did this same schemer keep their job and propose their plot to our next administration? Do our Pentagon spooks always maintain a prefab scenario for trumping up casus belli by getting a spy plane shot down?

[Ed. You can now watch Hugh Shelton’s interview on The Daily Show online.]