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How
George Bush, Sr. Sold
the 1991 Bombing of Iraq to America
From,
READ MY APOCALYPSE: The Role of the 1991 Gulf War
in the Emergence of George Bush's New World
Order
by
Mitchel Cohen
"The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say
goes." - President George Bush, NBC Nightly
News, Feb. 2, 1991
In
October, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl,
identified only as Nayirah, appeared in Washington
before the House of Representatives' Human Rights
Caucus. She testified that Iraqi soldiers who had
invaded Kuwait on August 2nd tore hundreds of
babies from hospital incubators and killed
them.
Television
flashed her testimony around the world. It
electrified opposition to Iraq's president, Saddam
Hussein, who was now portrayed by U.S. president
George Bush not only as "the Butcher of Baghdad"
but -- so much for old friends -- "a tyrant worse
than Hitler."
Bush
quoted Nayirah at every opportunity. Six times in
one month he referred to "312 premature babies at
Kuwait City's maternity hospital who died after
Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators and left the
infants on the floor,"(1)
and of "babies pulled from incubators and scattered
like firewood across the floor." Bush used
Nayirah's testimony to lambaste Senate Democrats
still supporting "only" sanctions against Iraq --
the blockade of trade which alone would cause
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die of hunger
and disease -- but who waffled on endorsing the
policy Bush wanted to implement: outright
bombardment. Republicans and pro-war Democrats used
Nayirah's tale to hammer their fellow politicians
into line behind Bush's war in the Persian
Gulf.(2)
Nayirah,
though, was no impartial eyewitness, a fact
carefully concealed by her handlers. She was the
daughter of one Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwait's
ambassador to the United States. A few key
Congressional leaders and reporters knew who
Nayirah was, but none of them thought of sharing
that minor detail with Congress, let alone the
American people.
Everything
Nayirah said, as it turned out, was a lie. There
were, in actuality, only a handful of incubators in
all of Kuwait, certainly not the "hundreds" she
claimed. According to Dr. Mohammed Matar, director
of Kuwait's primary care system, and his wife, Dr.
Fayeza Youssef, who ran the obstetrics unit at the
maternity hospital, there were few if any babies in
the incubators at the time of the Iraqi invasion.
Nayirah's charges, they said, were totally false.
"I think it was just something for propaganda," Dr.
Matar said. In an ABC-TV News account after the
war, John Martin reported that although "patients,
including premature babies, did die," this occurred
"when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors stopped
working or fled the country" -- a far cry from
Bush's original assertion that hundreds of babies
were murdered by Iraqi
troops.(3)
Subsequent investigations, including one by Amnesty
International, found no evidence for the incubator
claims.
It is
likely that Nayirah was not even in Kuwait, let
alone at the hospital, at that time; the Kuwaiti
aristocracy and their families had fled the country
weeks before the anticipated invasion. Some
defended their country at the gaming tables in
Monte Carlo, where at least one member of the
ruling family was reported to have gambled away
more than $10 million as his fellow rulers called
for economic and military assistance from
abroad.
As
invasions go, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was
relatively -- I stress the word "relatively" --
bloodless. Despite the heart-rending testimonies TV
viewers in the U.S. were subjected to night after
night, fewer than 200 Kuwaitis were killed. Compare
that to such "peaceful" ventures as the U.S.
invasion of Panama the year before, which killed an
estimated 7,500 Panamanians; or, a year after the
Gulf war, the 10,000 Somalis killed by U.S./U.N.
troops in what was portrayed as a "peace mission"
to bring food aid to the allegedly starving
region.(4)
How did
Nayirah first come to the attention of the
Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which put her
before the world's cameras? It was arranged by Hill
& Knowlton, a public relations firm hired to
rally the U.S. populace behind Bush's policy of
going to war. And it worked!
Hill
& Knowlton's yellow ribbon campaign to whip up
support for "our" troops, which followed their
orchestration of Nayirah's phony "incubator"
testimony, was a public relations masterpiece. The
claim that satellite photos revealed that Iraq had
troops poised to strike Saudi Arabia was also
fabricated by the PR firm. Hill & Knowlton was
paid between $12 million (as reported two years
later on "60 Minutes") and $20 million (as reported
on "20/20") for "services rendered." The group
fronting the money? Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a
phony "human rights agency" set up and funded
entirely by Kuwait's emirocracy to promote its
interests in the U.S.
"When
Hill & Knowlton masterminded the Kuwaiti
campaign to sell the Gulf War to the American
public, the owners of this highly effective
propaganda machine were residing in another
country" -- the United Kingdom -- writes Sharon
Beder and Richard Gosden in PR Watch. "Should this
give pause for thought? Does it demonstrate a
certain potential for the future exercise of global
political power -- the power to manipulate
democratic political processes through managing
public opinion," which Hill and Knowlton
demonstrated 10 years
ago?(5)
All of
this is concealed in a new HBO "behind-the-scenes
true story" of the Gulf War, which is being
released at this crucial political moment. As
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting writes, "HBO's
version of history never makes clear that the
incubator story was fraudulent, and in fact had
been managed by an American PR firm, not Iraq.
Curiously, however, the truth seems to have been
clear to Robert Wiener, the former CNN producer who
co-wrote 'Live from Baghdad.'As he explained to
CNN's Wolf Blitzer (11/21/02), 'that story turned
out to be false because those accusations were made
by the daughter of the Kuwaiti minister of
information and were never proven.' Unfortunately,
HBO viewers won't know that when they see the
film."(6)
In 1998,
Hill and Knowlton found a new client -- President
Clinton -- who hired them to advise him and to
polish his image. The last time they were involved,
by the time their lies were exposed TV newscasters
were waxing ecstatic over the rockets' red glare,
computerized "smart-bombs" bursting in air, and
250,000 people were dead.
NOTES
1.
Doug Ireland, Village Voice, March 26, 1991.
2. The use of the Big Lie to manipulate public
opinion and neutralize opposition to a particular
war was not invented by Bush. See, for instance,
James Laxer, "Iraq: US has match, seeks kindle:
American leaders have often falsified reasons to
attack other countries," (ActionGreens, Mar. 31,
2001). Laxer is a Political Science Professor at
York University, Toronto.
3. ABC World News Tonight, 3/15/91.
4. In actuality, people in only certain areas of
Somalia were starving -- those that had been
subjected to IMF structural adjustment programs.
See, Mitchel Cohen, "Somalia & the Cynical
Manipulation of Hunger," Red Balloon Collective,
1994.
5. Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden, "PR Watch,"
Volume 8, No. 2, 2nd Quarter 2001. The PR firm has
since been working at the behest of the
pharmaceutical industry to ban over-the-counter
vitamin and nutritional supplement sales in
Europe.
6. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, "HBO
Recycling Gulf War Hoax?" December 4,
2002.
Mitchel
Cohen is the co-editor of Green Politix, the
national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA.
www.greenparty.org
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