The United States on Tuesday suspended U-2 surveillance flights over Iraq after Iraq forced two of the American planes to return to base, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday. The official stopped short of saying the Iraqis threatened to shoot down the aircraft.
Perhaps a US CAP is in order.
Multiple flights are permitted under a U.N. Security Council resolution approved last November, and the Bush administration is seeking clarification from U.N. inspectors. UNMOVIC, The U.N. weapons inspection agency, had given advance notice to Iraq of the flights. The Iraqi threat is fresh evidence of Baghdad's unwillingness to cooperate with U.N. inspectors, another U.S. official said.
Any chance we could send up an unmanned U2 Plane and let the Iraqis shoot it down ?
Two American U-2 planes were already in the air. They were the seventh and eighth sent on a surveillance assigment since the Security Council approved the resolution unanimously, and that the flights had been coordinated with the U.N. inspection agency. But Iraq "raised a fuss," this official said, and the two flights were recalled. American diplomats are checking with the U.N. agency before resuming U-2 flights.
| Raised a fuss, did they? Think they might have had something to hide? |
The dispute punctuated a behind-the-scenes effort by the United States and Britain to win support for a new resolution designed to back the use of force as a last resort to disarm Iraq. U-2 flights are conducted as part of an elaborate useless inspection arrangement designed to determine whether Saddam Hussein has secretly stored chemical and biological weapons in defiance of U.N. resolutions. |