“If Saddam doesn’t manage to shoot down one of our planes, our planes will fly lower and lower”

MIAMI, November 25 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – A former defense analyst who gave the world the Pentagon’s secret history of the Vietnam War, sees parallels to the upcoming war on Iraq, a U.S. newspaper reported Monday, November 25.

Speaking to the Miami Herald before his appearance at the Miami Book Fair International, Daniel Ellsberg said that he expects the war on Iraq to start even before the U.N. inspectors get started on their hunt for nuclear and chemical weapons.

He said that he expects to hear at any moment what he heard in the Pentagon in 1964, when the U.S. administration said it “had incontrovertible evidence of an unprovoked attack upon our forces”, the paper reported, adding that it happened at the time when the U.S. was setting up the escalation of the war.

Ellsberg’s new book is called Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and in it he describes the “gradual efforts by U.S. forces to provoke an attack by North Vietnam, followed by the supposed torpedo attack on two American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf”, the Herald reported.

One of the similarities between the Vietnam war and the current situation is the current U.S. planes patrolling over Iraq putting itself at a potential risk to being hit by a missile or anti-aircraft fire. “So far Iraq has not yet hit one of our planes. Is that what it will take to start a war?” the paper quoted him saying.

“If Saddam doesn’t manage to shoot down one of our planes, our planes will fly lower and lower,” Ellsberg told Reuters news agency. “We’re going to be at war with Iraq well before Christmas.”

Ellsberg also said that he “would give anything that is mine to give to avert this war, anything truthful and nonviolent to avert this war, which I think will be a catastrophe, and it will usher in an age of catastrophes.”

He also said that if Al-Qaeda launches a spectacular terrorist attack on the U.S. as the FBI warned, this would mean that the U.S. will invade Iraq even if it had nothing to do with it.

According to Reuters, the former Marine and ex-Pentagon official was part of a defense think tank that wrote a secret study of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

“The 7,000-page study, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, revealed that four presidents had steadily lied to the public and Congress about the U.S. war in southeast Asia.

“Disillusioned, Ellsberg leaked it to newspapers in 1971, setting off a furor that helped pave the way for the U.S. pull-out from Vietnam.

“Ellsberg was imprisoned on espionage charges that were thrown out in 1973 and says he regrets only that he did not blow the whistle sooner,” the agency said.

In another development, a U.K. newspaper News of the World reported Monday that all the signs point to a December 16 start of the war.

It said that the cool clear weather and long winter nights would be ideally suited for a hi-tech bombing campaign.

“Planes and troops could move under the cover of darkness, minimizing the risk of casualties,” the paper reported. 

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