From the New York Times, March 14, 2002:
President Bush said today that he ”wouldn’t put it past” President Saddam Hussein of Iraq to have secretly held an American pilot hostage for more than a decade.
Speaking at a news conference, Mr. Bush indicated that he did not know for certain the fate of Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher, a Navy fighter pilot who was shot down over Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
The Pentagon, which initially declared Commander Speicher killed in action, changed his status last year to ”missing in action” based on new evidence that he survived the crash of his F-18 jet.
Recent intelligence reports described to members of Congress have bolstered hopes that Commander Speicher might be alive.
”Let me just say this to you: I know that the man has had an M.I.A. status, and it reminds me once again about the nature of Saddam Hussein, if in fact he’s alive,” Mr. Bush said.
Mr. Bush said Iraq’s refusal to account for the pilot reinforced his view of Mr. Hussein. He professed disbelief ”that anybody would be so cold and heartless as to hold an American flier for all this period of time without notification to his family.” But, Mr. Bush said, he ”wouldn’t put it past him, given the fact that he gassed his own people.”
From the NYT, March 26, 2002:
The Bush administration voiced deep skepticism today over a reported offer from Iraq to discuss the status of an American pilot who was shot down there in 1991.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that Iraq’s supposed offer to discuss Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher had been reported only through news media outlets and not through formal channels between the countries.
”I don’t believe very much that the regime of Saddam Hussein puts out,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. ”They’re masters at propaganda.”
He added, ”We’re not aware of any offer by the Iraqi government.”
From the NYT, Dec. 14, 1995:
A Pentagon team is on a secret mission to Iraq, searching the desert for the remains of the first American pilot downed in the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
The mission, undertaken with the approval of President Saddam Hussein, represents a small but potentially significant step in Iraq’s attempts to end its deep isolation. Since the end of the gulf war, Iraq has been an international pariah, subjected to strict economic sanctions.
Though the mission is under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, it represents the first official visit of American military officers to Iraq since the war’s end. American military and diplomatic officials acknowledged that the Iraqi Government had made a humanitarian gesture by allowing 11 American military officers to join 4 Red Cross officials on the search. …
The Red Cross notified Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and on March 1 the Iraqi Government approved the request that a Red Cross team with Pentagon personnel be allowed to search the site. After months of haggling over details of the mission, final approval came last month. Defense Department officials said they believed the request was personally approved by President Hussein.
American officials offered a very slight tip of the hat to Iraq today.
A State Department official called Iraq’s decision “a positive humanitarian gesture.” But he added: “They did the right thing, but they did it for reasons of self-interest. If they think it’s the first building block in a grand edifice of better relations, they need to think again.“
Just as an aside, aren’t you glad the Clinton administration talked tough and kept this propaganda point alive?
From the NYT, today:
Navy officials announced early Sunday that Marines in Iraq’s western Anbar Province had found remains that have been positively identified as those of an American fighter pilot shot down in the opening hours of the first Gulf War in 1991.
The Navy pilot, Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, was the only American missing in action from that war. Efforts to determine what happened to him after his F/A-18 Hornet was shot down by an Iraqi warplane on Jan. 17, 1991, had continued despite false rumors and scant information.
Conflicting reports from Iraq had, over the years, fueled speculation that the pilot, promoted to captain in the years he was missing, might have been taken into captivity either after parachuting from his jet or after a crash landing.
But the evidence in Iraq suggests he did not survive and was buried by Bedouins shortly after he was shot down.
There's nothing more guaranteed to get the VFW crowd on board the war wagon than the old "they've got an American POW" line. Those brain-dead twits almost went apoplectic at the thought of Speicher being tortured at Abu Ghraib by Saddam's henchmen.
Agreed. So many Americans are so gullible. I'm not exactly sure why this is? Most Americans are unilingual, not well-travelled, have little or no historic sense and are (and as part of a wider society) very self-absorbed. Few Americans seem to realize how they are PERCEIVED by other peoples around the world.
Americans are gullible on account of the one-sided propaganda that they slurp up every day. Add to that the pathetic excuse of an education most of them receive, along with the ignorance of other peoples and places and the historical illiteracy and that's pretty much an unbeatable combination for being as clueless as can be. On top of that, Americans have also distinguished themselves more and more by their obnoxiousness, arrogance and complete lack of any restraining instinct. Living close to the Beltway, I have ample opportunity to observe the self-anointed in action. It's not pretty; in fact, it's pretty ugly. Anyone who has come to hate Americans, as far as I am concerned, has a good reason to do so.
The term, docile Americans, better explains it :^/
I think it is our education system, which teaches we are always right, the others always wrong, our governmant always tells the truth, the others always lies, we are the force of positive change, the others…. Compared to our school system the Islamic Madrassa system looks like a bastion of liberal thought.
So that’s one nugget removed from the mountain of propaganda that you dutifully add to everyday.
What difference does it make to debunk a very minor strain of prewar nonsense while the site continues to be a devout propagator of Pentagon approved postwar nonsense?
So that’s one nugget removed from the mountain of propaganda that you dutifully add to everyday.
What difference does it make to debunk a very minor strain of prewar nonsense while the site continues to be a devout propagator of Pentagon approved postwar nonsense?
So that’s one nugget removed from the mountain of propaganda that you dutifully add to everyday.
What difference does it make to debunk a very minor strain of prewar nonsense while the site continues to be a devout propagator of Pentagon approved postwar nonsense?
My Pentagon paymasters let me criticize them occasionally in order to maintain my cover.
Calling for the ethnic cleansing of millions of people in Iraq (i.e. partition) and more troops for Afghanistan is rather unseemly for a site that is trying to appear antiwar.
If you’re still in the mood to celebrate the debunking of old war propaganda, here’s the Washington Post admitting that the “Zarqawi campaign” was created by the occupation:
It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.
The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.
One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
Calling for the ethnic cleansing of millions of people in Iraq (i.e. partition) and more troops for Afghanistan is rather unseemly for a site that is trying to appear antiwar.
If you’re still in the mood to celebrate the debunking of old war propaganda, here’s the Washington Post admitting that the “Zarqawi campaign” was created by the occupation:
It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.
The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.
One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
Hey, couscous, could you give me your e-mail address? I'd like to run every news article and opinion piece by you before we post it. Why take a chance that we might run something you disagree with?
By the way, I know we've committed the sin of allowing multiple views on whether Iraqis should partition themselves, but when the heck did we ever call for more troops in Afghanistan?
The Iraqis aren’t partitioning themselves, the occupation is forcefully partitioning them in an attempt to stop the guerrilla war. It’s also odd that the Kurdish population isn’t being forcibly segregated into open air prisons like the Arab Iraqis, or those other uppity Arabs in Palestine. It’s almost as if they’re being punished for something!
"They [death squads] evicted many of our good Sunni neighbors and killed many others," Abu Riyad of the predominantly Shia Shula area told IPS. "We protected them for a while, but then we could not face the militias with all the support they had from the Iraqi government and the Americans. It is a terrible shame that we have to live with, but what can we do?"
On the other hand, many Sunni Iraqis seemed unwilling to evict their Shia countrymen – for a while. But people in one mixed area of Baghdad described strange developments.
"It is true that our neighbors did not evict us, but then the Americans swept the area and local fighters had to disappear from the streets," Hussein Allawi, a Shia who lived in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood told IPS. "A group of masked strangers then entered the town right under American soldiers' eyes. Only then did we realize that we must leave, and that our good neighbors could not help us any more."
Many such stories are told around Baghdad.
Afghanistan: It was in a Doug Bandow column. He was howling about the Europeans “subsidizing inefficient welfare states” despite “the growing need for troops in Afghanistan”.
I think you misunderstood my comment about “partitioning themselves.” I thought you were referring to an Ivan Eland column in which he suggested letting Iraq devolve into separate states.
As for the Bandow column, are you really that obtuse? The column was about NATO, and Bandow was making the point that NATO is a failure even on its own terms, since the U.S. contributes almost all the troops to every mission.
That’s a good link, couscous. Thanks.
And thanks to the Antiwar folks who work so hard to bring us the other side of the story every day.
Gullible? To paraphrase – “None are so gullible as those who wish to believe”. Americans want deeply to believe that they are not selfish monsters using their superior military to impose their will upon the world. They can’t face the truth, so they willingly embrace any bs that makes them feel good about themselves. They are almost as bad about this as the Israelis who have reached the point of insanity.
Lettingforcing Iraqis to devolve into separate states isn’t something they’ve shown much interest in, though the Americans sure are interested in it! From the same article I linked to: Many Iraqis are now beginning to see the rising sectarian violence as part of a larger plan to partition the country."Americans want to alter the shape of our cities, dividing Iraqis into ethnic and sectarian groups living separately from each other," Khali Sadiq, a researcher in statistics at Baghdad University, told IPS.
Here in the reality based community: Iraqis are intermarried, Iraq has never had a civil war and has no history of religious violence (hint: Muslims don’t hate mosques). The violence in Iraq stems from the guerrilla war against the occupation and the vicious attacks on the civilian population are widely blamed on the occupation.
In the Pentagon/Antiwar.com bizarro-world: Iraq was plagued by ‘constant ethno-sectarian strife’ that was only kept in check by Saddam and his people shredder. Muslims hate mosques and blow them up constantly and all the Arabs really want to live in homogeneous open-air prisons with limited access to food, water, and electricity. Kurdish Muslims are exempt from this because they
support the occupation…well I’m sure there must be a reason! All the violence is “terrorism” and if the occupation were to end it would get much worse.The Bandow article is complaining that Europe isn’t doing enough to help America. A stronger Europe and U.S. could then join in military action elsewhere when their interests coincide. That’s clearly devoted to the cause of non-interventionism!
Eland was saying that the U.S. should not forcibly keep Iraq together, but if you insist on distorting his point, go ahead. Bandow was analyzing U.S.-European military alliances from a utilitarian, realist perspective — the perspective NATO proponents claim to adhere to — but if you insist on distorting his point, go ahead. If you want to continue to troll here, shrieking that Antiwar.com is a subsidiary of the Pentagon, go ahead. But you've proven yourself unworthy of serious rebuttal, so I'm done with you.
America isn’t forcibly keeping Iraq together. The “sectarianism” only began when the capture of Saddam meant a new excuse was needed to hide the guerrilla war: The myth of sectarianism – The policy is divide to rule. It may be worthwhile to consider that prior to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq there had never been open warfare between the two groups and certainly not a civil war. In terms of organization and convention, Iraqis are a tribal society and some of the largest tribes in the country comprise Sunni and Shia. Intermarriages between the two sects are not uncommon either.
Soon after arriving in Iraq in November 2003, I learned that it was considered rude and socially graceless to enquire after an individual’s sect. If in ignorance or under compulsion I did pose the question the most common answer I would receive was, "I am Muslim, and I am Iraqi." On occasion there were more telling responses like the one I received from an older woman, "My mother is a Shia and my father a Sunni, so can you tell which half of me is which?" The accompanying smile said it all.
Large mixed neighborhoods were the norm in Baghdad. Sunni and Shia prayed in one another’s mosques. As the rest of the article makes clear, the reason it has changed is because the “Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes”.
America isn’t forcibly keeping Iraq together. The “sectarianism” only began when the capture of Saddam meant a new excuse was needed to hide the guerrilla war: The myth of sectarianism – The policy is divide to rule. It may be worthwhile to consider that prior to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq there had never been open warfare between the two groups and certainly not a civil war. In terms of organization and convention, Iraqis are a tribal society and some of the largest tribes in the country comprise Sunni and Shia. Intermarriages between the two sects are not uncommon either.
Soon after arriving in Iraq in November 2003, I learned that it was considered rude and socially graceless to enquire after an individual’s sect. If in ignorance or under compulsion I did pose the question the most common answer I would receive was, "I am Muslim, and I am Iraqi." On occasion there were more telling responses like the one I received from an older woman, "My mother is a Shia and my father a Sunni, so can you tell which half of me is which?" The accompanying smile said it all.
Large mixed neighborhoods were the norm in Baghdad. Sunni and Shia prayed in one another’s mosques. As the rest of the article makes clear, the reason it has changed is because the “Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes”.