He [Speicher] may still be alive in Iraq, rumored to have been kept as a personal torture toy for Saddam’s older son.

How must Speicher’s widow and two children have felt when hearing such rumors, which were cynically manufactured by the likes of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Babbin to sell their war?

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.

Turns out, it appears in the Massachusetts statute defining disorderly conduct. The cop goaded the agitated Gates into stepping outside of his house (he made sure to give a reason for this in the report – poor acoustics in Gates’ kitchen!) to create the grounds for an arrest.  The cop already knew the specific – though vague and debatable – adjective he should use in his report to make the charge sound incontestable to the lawnorder crowd.

The proliferation of new laws in the wake of 9/11, all full of vague and debatable terms, has given the authorities infinite points of entry into all of our lives. They truly can arrest first and read the statutes later; you’re sure to have done something wrong. Even if they eventually drop the charges or fail to convict you, don’t count on getting any compensation for your anxiety, lost time, injuries, or legal fees.

An analogous situation prevails in international affairs, where the global police churn out endless legal pretexts for subjecting whole countries to full body-cavity searches, house arrest, assault, and capital punishment, and we’re watching it play out yet again in the case of Iran. But that’s a post for another day.

There is obviously an agenda , and that agenda is to let the Iraqis have their holiday over our supposed departure on June 30. As I have written, and as Erik Leaver and Daniel Atzmon suggest today, there are a lot of smoke and mirrors engaged here and no one really knows how many U.S troops and private contractors will remain in trouble spots like Baghdad and Mosul after the end of the month.

But this is just one thread of the agenda. The integrity of the Surge Narrative is vital, and any sense that the stability gained in the last year is beginning to dissolve will put a lot of assumptions about the so-called “population-centric” Petraeus Doctrine (”clear, hold and build”) into serious question. That is probably why speakers at the big Center for A New American Security confab were pretty adamant that the recent violence is the mark of al Qaeda “remnants,” and definitely not a reanimated Sunni insurgency. No surprise that retired Gen. Jack Keane, known as the “godfather of the surge” for his work in writing the “plan for success” with Frederick Kagan at AEI and the “new” counterinsurgency manual with Petraeus in 2006, was on hand to suggest we don’t “overreact” to the recent bombings in Iraq.

“The security situation in Iraq is truly a good one,” Keane asserted from the dais of the Willard Continental Hotel ballroom on June 11, a day after a car bomb ripped through a market, killing 30 people in Nasiriyah. Sure there were spates of violence, but “that doesn’t justify the troop presence we have.”

Maybe not. A lot of us don’t think a six-year occupation was justified in the first place. But that seems to be beside the point right now. People like Keane and the aforementioned administration officials are bent on playing down the heartbreaking,  relentless fragility of a people we deemed necessary to liberate and manipulate to our own geopolitical ends. But yet everyday the violence gets worse and the civil and political situation remains well, a basket case. Rather than suggest, perhaps, the Surge fell short of its exalted goals and gloried, storied distinctions, they will ignore what is right in front of their faces. Political expediency still reigns. If anyone thinks it will be any different for the people of Afghanistan (our other war) a year from now, I have a market to sell them in Adhamiyah.

He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.

So he was waging this terrorist war on the United States. In Beirut. Beirut, Lebanon. And what were these Americans doing? Oh, just minding their own business:

[W]hy were American and French troops in Beirut in 1983, the mid-point of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war (1975-1990)?

Israel’s 1982 Invasion of Lebanon

On June 6, 1982, Israel, led by gen. Ariel Sharon, invaded Lebanon. The goal was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization’s operation in Lebanon, where it had established itself as a full-fledged state-within-a-state: The PLO controlled most of West Beirut and most of South Lebanon.

Israel’s invasion was brutally, tactically efficient but strategically disastrous. In 18 weeks, according to the Red Cross, some 17,000 people, most of them Lebanese civilians, were killed in the invasion. The PLO was routed. But Israel created a power vacuum in its place. That vacuum was immediately filled by a new Shiite militia in South Lebanon receiving weapons and money from Syria and Iran, a group that called itself the Party of God, or Hezbollah.

Meanwhile the PLO agreed in August 1982 to exit Lebanon. To ensure a safe exit, the United States, France and Italy sent a multinational force to Beirut. By August 30, Yaser Arafat and the PLO were out of Beirut. Some 6,000 PLO fighters were evacuated, mostly to Tunisia. The Multinational force was gone by Sept. 10. Four days later, the U.S. and Israeli-backed Christian Phalangist leader and Lebanese President-Elect Bashir Gemayel is assassinated at his headquarters in East Beirut.

From Blunder to Massacre

On Sept. 15, Israeli troops invaded West Beirut, the first time an Israeli force enters an Arab capital, supposedly to maintain the peace. The invasion did the opposite. Israel bused dozens of Christian militiamen to the southern suburbs of West Beirut then unleashed the militiamen—many of them from villages that, several years earlier, had been the scene of massacres by Palestinians—into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The militiamen’s orders were to find remaining Palestinian militants hiding in the camps.

But there were no such laggards. Israel knew that the Christian militiamen would attack civilians. Which they did, for two days and nights, under Israeli supervision. To enable the killings at night, Israeli forces launched flares into the night sky.

The Multinational Force Is Asked to Return

In the wake of the massacre, the Lebanese government of Amin Gemayel, brother of Bashir, asks the multinational force to return to help ensure peace. The Marines, the French paratroopers and the Italians land in Beirut again on September 24.

At first the American forces acted as objective peacekeepers. But gradually, the Reagan administration gave in to pressure by the Gemayel government to take its side against Druze and Shiite Muslims in central and southern Lebanon. American troops, welcomed with rice and roses in the Shiite slums of Beirut, slowly became pariahs in Shiites’ eyes. Mistrust turned to outright belligerence once American forces used their firepower to shell Druze and Shiite positions in the mountains surrounding Beirut.

On April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber drove his car into the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans—and most of the CIA’s Middle East operatives, who were meeting that day at the embassy. That loss of human intelligence would cost the United States dearly in the months and years ahead.

The Barracks Attack

The United States did not change tactics in Lebanon. Instead, it amplified its ties to the Gemayel government, which had little legitimacy among most Lebanese, and escalated its attacks on Druze and Shiite positions.

On October 23, 1983, the suicide bombers attacked the American and French barracks.

The U.S.S. New Jersey, a World War II battleship with 16-inch guns and shells the size of Volkswagens, taken out of mothballs to support American troops in Vietnam, is called to duty in Beirut in December 1983, to shell Druze, Shiite and Syrian positions.

Lessons Not Learned

The American press characterized the attack as a cold-blooded act of “terrorism.” It wasn’t terrorism: an attack on military forces is, by definition, not terrorism but an act of war. The emotional response to the attack, while warranted, masked a more sober analysis that the likes of Thomas Friedman, The New York Times Beirut correspondent at the time, captured: “While the Marines were victims of their own innocence, they were even more the victims of the ignorance and arrogance of the weak, cynical, and in some cases venal Reagan administration officials who put them in such an impossible situation,” he wrote.

Friedman went on: “By blindly supporting Amin Gemayel, by allowing Israel a virtually free hand to invade Lebanon with American arms and by not curtailing Israel’s demands for a peace treaty with Beirut, the Reagan administration had tipped the scales in favor of one Lebanese tribe—the Maronites—and against many others, primarily Muslims. Washington was helping to inflict real pain on many people, and there was going to be a price to pay for that.”

In addition to having a better temperament, Mousavi hasn’t yet been fitted for his custom-made caricature. If he miraculously ends up becoming Iran’s president, it will take America’s Mideast hegemonists a few months to affix the Haji Hitler mask to Mousavi’s unfamiliar visage, which may be enough time to head off new sanctions or an Israeli air strike. Moreover, it will be difficult, though hardly impossible, for all the establishment commentators who have made a secular Bodhisattva of Mousavi to take it all back when he, unsurprisingly, protests the U.S. encirclement of his country and insists on Iran’s rights to nuclear energy. In fact, if the mullahs were crafty chess masters, they would invalidate the election results – regardless of who actually won – and install Mousavi immediately. This would be an enormous boost to their domestic credibility (they could blame all the fraud on Ahmadinejad), and it would leave their international critics speechless – again, at least for a while.

But, sadly, that probably won’t happen, so it’s best for those who want peace to emphasize the primacy of negotiations with the Iranian government over the proper composition of that government. And to those who suddenly know, know, KNOW everything about Iranian politics and society: please acquire some self-awareness and humility. A lot of you guys knew, knew, KNEW everything about Iraq seven years ago, and we see the glorious dividends of your omniscience today. If you sincerely want to help your newfound friends in Iran, your first priority should be making sure that our own government (or the one in Jerusalem that it funds and backs to the hilt) doesn’t out-murder the Basij a thousand times over with bombs and missiles.

A surprise reconciliation between the leaders of Hizbullah and the Progressive Socialist Party was followed on Friday by Walid Jumblatt’s re-directing his rhetoric south, to Palestine, and warning of the “absolute extremism” of the Israeli government. “I call on all of our people in Palestine to reject sectarian and non-sectarian violence and cling to their Arabism and Palestinian national project, to confront Zionist projects that promise to be more dangerous and fiercer in the coming phase,” Jumblatt said in a statement.

The PSP leader said the Israeli government had no interest in a peace settlement and “insisted on absolute extremism” in its current policies.

I suspect we won’t be seeing any more sympathetic profiles of this “insightful interpreter of the fluctuations in Middle Eastern politics” any time soon.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this conference report on the War Supplemental Appropriations. I wonder what happened to all of my colleagues who said they were opposed to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder what happened to my colleagues who voted with me as I opposed every war supplemental request under the previous administration. It seems, with very few exceptions, they have changed their position on the war now that the White House has changed hands. I find this troubling. As I have said while opposing previous war funding requests, a vote to fund the war is a vote in favor of the war. Congress exercises its constitutional prerogatives through the power of the purse.

This conference report, being a Washington-style compromise, reflects one thing Congress agrees on: spending money we do not have. So this “compromise” bill spends 15 percent more than the president requested, which is $9 billion more than in the original House bill and $14.6 billion more than the original Senate version. Included in this final version — in addition to the $106 billion to continue the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — is a $108 billion loan guarantee to the International Monetary Fund, allowing that destructive organization to continue spending taxpayer money to prop up corrupt elites and promote harmful economic policies overseas.

As Americans struggle through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, this emergency supplemental appropriations bill sends billions of dollars overseas as foreign aid. Included in this appropriation is $660 million for Gaza, $555 million for Israel, $310 million for Egypt, $300 million for Jordan, and $420 million for Mexico. Some $889 million will be sent to the United Nations for “peacekeeping” missions. Almost one billion dollars will be sent overseas to address the global financial crisis outside our borders and nearly $8 billion will be spent to address a “potential pandemic flu.”

Mr. Speaker, I continue to believe that the best way to support our troops is to bring them home from Iraq and Afghanistan. If one looks at the original authorization for the use of force in Afghanistan, it is clear that the ongoing and expanding nation-building mission there has nothing to do with our goal of capturing and bringing to justice those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. Our continued presence in Iraq and Afghanistan does not make us safer at home, but in fact it undermines our national security. I urge my colleagues to defeat this reckless conference report.

Sure, sure, he also links to a Pat Buchanan piece advocating nonintervention, saying he agrees “for now,” but that’s typical of Sullivan’s fluttering, erratic style of punditry, which never pauses long enough to consider its own contradictions. But read his blog for a few hours, and you’ll get the general thrust, whether Sullivan is aware of it or not in his green delirium: something must be done!