In 2008, on this day tensions between the United States and the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe escalated when two Air Force of Zimbabwe (AFZ) fighter jets fired on a flight of F/A-18 Hornets on a routine patrol off the USS Ronald Reagan; the Hornets promptly returned fire, downing one of the AFZ jets.

Bibi Letter leads to war Part #1The state-controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation denounced the U.S. pilots' actions as "unprovoked aggression" and accused the Bush Administration of wantonly bombing civilian neighborhoods in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare. (In reality, the Hornets had only been equipped with air-to-air missiles).

A new article from Bibi LetterIncredibly, despite abundant evidence the Mugabe regime had instigated the incident, the AFZ chief of staff claimed the U.S. jets had fired first; in a similar vein, Zimbabwean army commander-in-chief General Constantine Chiwenga accused the United States of plotting to mount a surprise invasion of Zimbabwe just as it had launched a pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq five years earlier. While the White House did have a contingent of Marines in the region to expedite the evacuation of American citizens from Zimbabwe, there were no plans at that time for U.S. involvement in a ground war in that country-- which surprised foreign policy analysts who had considered such a conflict not only possible but maybe even inevitable.