THE PERFECT STORM
AS EVERY SAVVY mass manipulator knows, it is the
propaganda that does not appear as such that
works the best. Too obvious a pitch can only fail.
Consider, for example, the GOP's recent show of
multicultural diversity -- "It Takes a Potemkin
Village." That burst of pseudoamity was such a
patent sell that it gave all the op-ed wits and cable
clowns an easy opening, which was then exploited
by the Democrats in their quadrennial miniseries.
The Bush convention was an "inclusion illusion," said
Jesse Jackson, and Joe Lieberman cracked wise
about Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, and a good time
was had by all.
But while it failed to make Bush/Cheney seem as
mellow as the Grateful Dead, the show succeeded
brilliantly at glorifying the main accomplishment of
Bush the Elder -- and at identifying his son with
that amazing tour de force. Dick Cheney's role as
ready understudy, the feisty testimonials of
Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf, and the many
blustering allusions to Saddam Hussein were broad
reminders of the momentary glory that was
Operation Desert Storm. At such belligerent
theatrics no one laughed -- no pundits or
comedians or Democrats -- because that
"operation" still exerts a certain magic. The GOP's
politically-correct charade no doubt distracted us
from thinking critically about the party's celebration
of that war.
By apt coincidence, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait took
place exactly ten years prior to the show in
Philadelphia, and a little over ten years prior to Al
Gore's choice to run with Senator Lieberman, who,
in concert with Dick Cheney, Norman Schwarzkopf,
Colin Powell, and George Bush, did his utmost to
arouse enthusiasm for the war. (Al Gore, too, was a
supporter.) In the anniversary spirit, then, we
should revisit the original Bush/Cheney production,
to get a sense of what a propaganda masterpiece it
really was.
IRAQGATE
Lest we forget, the invasion of Kuwait had been
tacitly green-lighted by April Glaspie, our
ambassador in Baghdad, who reassured Saddam
Hussein that "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab
conflicts, such as your disagreement with Kuwait."
Whether such encouragement was her mistake or
State Department policy is still an open question.
Iraq's dictator had enjoyed immense Republican
support. Under Presidents Reagan and Bush, the
U.S. government was most receptive to the
lobbying efforts of the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum --
a grand consortium of corporate powers established
in 1985, that wanted access to the Iraqi market.
The Forum lobbied heavily against congressional
sanctions on Iraq, despite her leader's grisly record.
The Forum (with the aid of Henry Kissinger) also
worked to help Iraq out with her debts -- and the
Reagan and Bush administrations pitched right in:
underwriting loans from Italy's infamous Banca
Nazionale del Lavoro, quietly facilitating aid through
the Department of Agriculture's Commodity Credit
Corporation, and pressing the Commerce
Department to allow Iraq to purchase various lethal
goods from U.S. companies.
Thus did the Bush team help to arm the tyrant
whom they would soon demonize to shattering
effect. Such facts were missing from the pro-war
propaganda churned out during the months of
Operation Desert Shield; and the issue vanished
after 1992, when a Justice Department inquiry went
nowhere.
THE BUILD UP
Inside the White House and the Pentagon, there
was no doubt that we would stomp Iraq, a
third-world country mangled by eight years of
inconclusive war against Iran, and -- unlike Vietnam
-- ruled by a gangster largely feared and hated by
his people. But despite their confidence, from early
August 1990 through the next five months, the
Bush team and the Pentagon expertly jolted the
American people, suggesting often that Iraq might
win. War always being "a terrible thing with
unpredictable consequences" (as General Powell put
it scarily), we might be facing an ordeal in which
(as another, unnamed general put it) "many, many
people are going to die. And it's important for
people to understand that it's not inconceivable we
could lose." Far from helping to expose this
systematic lie, the antiwar protesters (insofar as
you could hear them) merely reconfirmed it, by
insisting hotly that this conflict would turn out to
be "another Vietnam."
Meanwhile, in the Gulf, our toughest troops could
see what they were really facing. One ex-Ranger
told me, with a chuckle, of the weak Iraqi force in
Kuwait City. (Against strict orders, he and a few
buddies had stolen over there to take a look.) He
also noted his amazement at the tearful panic of his
folks back home, when he called them via satellite
from the desert. Like the rest of us, his family had
been spooked for weeks by the official buzz about
"the elite Republican Guard," the quarter-million
soldiers on the Saudi border (of whose existence
there is still no public evidence), the moats of
flaming oil, and on and on.
The Bush team further heightened the suspense by
feigning high hopes for diplomacy -- meanwhile
subverting every diplomatic possibility and making
"offers" that could only pique Iraq's defiance. The
cruelest such maneuver was the much-hyped
meeting, just five days before the deadline,
between Secretary of State James Baker and Iraqi
Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. Americans -- especially
those with loved ones in the Gulf -- were eager for
a breakthrough, and suffered when the talks broke
off. The Bush team, however, saw the meeting only
as a way to goose up the dramatic tension. As Dan
Quayle noted in his diary that day: "Baker/Aziz
meeting.Went as planned. Baker failed."
OPENING NIGHT
And then the deadline finally came -- and went.
Thus Desert Storm, when it began the following
night (at 7:00 P.M., EST), started at the point of
greatest mass anxiety. Such timing was essential to
the impact of the war's first night, which smartly
followed up our months of dread with joyous word
of many unexpected victories. Watching CNN, you
were convinced that the Iraqi air force had been
devastated in an hour or two, that the nuclear,
chemical, and biological (NBC) facilities had been
destroyed, that the scuds wiped out, and more --
all without a single Allied casualty!
The attentive viewer eventually discovered that
those euphoric bulletins were, by and large, as
bogus as the previous alarms. The NBC facilities
were untouched (and would be until the UN started
looking for them), the scuds were good to go (and
would land here and there throughout the war, the
Allied planes unable to take out a single mobile
launcher). And that night there was a U.S.
casualty: Lt. Commander Scott Speicher, his
F/A-18C vaporized by an Iraqi MiG (although the
Pentagon, once it did reveal his death, suppressed
its cause).
After all the months of dread, such wondrous
tidings had the psychological effect of an
unexpected pardon granted just before an
execution. And so the president's approval ratings,
and the ratings for the war itself, spiked predictably
that very evening. (Until that heady moment, U.S.
mass opinion on the war was evenly divided.)
BREAKDOWN
Throughout the war (and after), the Bush/Cheney
team repeatedly extolled our high-tech weaponry:
the F-117A Stealth fighter, the "smart bombs," and
the Patriot missile.
None worked as advertised. Of the 88,000 tons of
bombs dropped on Iraq, only 7% were "smart," and
of those, only 60% were said to hit their targets.
(Of all those dumb bombs, less than 25% hit home.)
The Patriot -- not built for such a job -- created
lethal downpours of debris, and seems itself to have
posed considerable danger. And the Stealth fighter
wasn't very stealthy. Three British destroyers
stationed in the Gulf had easily tracked the planes
on their own radar.
We knew none of this, because the Pentagon
showed us only bull's-eyes. The Bush/Cheney team
compounded the illusion with exuberant speeches
(as when the president saluted Raytheon for giving
us the Patriot), thereby presenting U.S. weapons
manufacturers with a propaganda windfall.
CASUALTIES
We'll never know how many of Iraq's civilians died in
Desert Storm, because Saddam Hussein has kept
the number secret. It was (and is) not in his
interests even to acknowledge such great losses,
much less inflate them, because, like any tyrant, he
lives in terror of a coup. Too blunt a revelation of
the war's civilian toll might have struck his enemies,
or henchmen, as a tempting sign of weakness, and
so the state stopped posting any figures on
mortality after just a few days' bombing.
That Saddam Hussein played down his people's
suffering disproves the charge, carried nationwide
throughout the war, that he was craftily hyping the
destruction (and using CNN's Peter Arnett as "his
Goebbels"), so as to weaken world resolve against
him. On the contrary: His policy on publicizing the
Iraqi deaths was not much different from Dick
Cheney's, which likewise masked the horrors on the
ground with euphemisms like "collateral damage,"
and by urging, or forcing, all journalists to stay far
away from what was really going on.
Nevertheless, the war's proponents dismissed as
"Iraqi propaganda" any evidence that we were
blowing up civilians. For example, on February 20,
at Senate hearings on the Pentagon's press policy,
Senator Lieberman said that "journalists are shown
what Iraq claims is damage to civilian homes and
businesses in Iraq , but they're not shown the
horrendous damage that Iraq did to Kuwait. We see
Iraqi babies being pulled from the wreckage of a
military target in Baghdad, but we never saw
Kuwaiti babies being tossed out of incubators in
Kuwait."
Here was topsy-turvy propaganda at its dizziest:
Those "homes and businesses" in Baghdad were
destroyed by American bombs, as was the crowded
Amerrhiya shelter (which was not "a military
target"). On the other hand, the primary reason
why "we never saw Kuwaiti babies being tossed out
of incubators" is that it never happened -- like
other nightmarish atrocities ascribed to the Iraqi
army by our propagandists (who, meanwhile,
ignored the many crimes that the Iraqis did commit
against Kuwaitis). So perfect a misstatement of the
case is something other than a lie: an outburst of
impassioned wishful thinking, based on the
intoxicating mix of falsehoods, half-truths, and
delusions that the White House and Pentagon were
spreading everywhere. The senator spoke thus, in
other words, because he wanted to believe what he
was saying; and, of course, his audience -- loath to
think that "we" would ever hurt civilians -- wanted
to believe it too.
We were also kept in grinning ignorance of what
was happening on the battlefield, where untold
thousands of Iraqi soldiers were incinerated, buried
alive, or (as Seymour Hersh has recently reported)
shot down while retreating -- soldiers who, in many
instances, were forced into the fight by Ba'athist
goons. Such atrocious practice was enabled by our
overwhelming technological advantage, which made
the "operation" not a "war" such as, say, Clausewitz
would have recognized, but an old-fashioned
imperialist massacre, recalling, say, the British use
of Maxim guns to mow down countless Zulus.
Our own troops also suffered in the overflow of
such abundant firepower. While it belabored as
"miraculous" the modest toll of U.S. soldiers killed in
battle (148 we were told often), the propaganda
made no mention of the total incidence of "friendly
fire," which officially accounts for 35 of those
fatalities, and may account for many more -- easily
the highest proportion in any modern war. Eager to
idealize high-tech warfare, the Pentagon not only
downplayed such unheroic accidents, but hid our
wounded from the public. Disfigured troops allege
that they were not allowed to join the postwar
victory parades in Washington and New York City.
THE END (THAT WASN'T)
All such manipulation and suppression could,
perhaps, be justified, or at least defended, if Iraq's
dictator was as dangerous as U.S. propaganda
claimed -- and if he and his regime had been
replaced, as in post-war Germany.
But George Bush cut the operation short, leaving a
tyrant "worse than Hitler" (as the president had put
it) in command, and free again to maul his people
and conspire to build forbidden weapons. Because
of him, the U.S. is still a major presence in the Gulf,
with 24,000 soldiers on active duty, at a cost of
roughly $2 billion per annum.
Since 1991, moreover, the U.S. has enforced a
range of sanctions meant to force the starved Iraqi
population into somehow rising up against the
well-fed and (still) well-armed Saddam Hussein:
"Iraqis will pay the price" for their oppressor's power
over them, Robert M. Gates, the president's deputy
national security adviser, announced after the war.
This has meant continued U.S. bombings, "which
have become almost daily occurrences," according
to Christopher Hellman of the Center for Defense
Information. Meanwhile, the sanctions, which by
now have killed and injured many thousands of
Iraqis, have hurt the hated Saddam not at all. "You
are hurting the people, not the regime, and Saddam
Hussein can keep blaming their inhuman plight on
the U.S.," Tunisia's president, Zine Abidine Ben, said
recently.
AND YET THE SANCTIONS' FAILURE has not led the
Bush team to denounce them (or Bill Clinton to
abandon them, or either Democratic candidate to
question them). Certainly there were no mentions of
Iraqi suffering in the recent testimonials to Desert
Storm.
This brings us back to the Republican convention --
whose major oratorical motif did not meet with a
tidal wave of ridicule, although it was no less
preposterous than all the tolerationist theatrics.
Speech after speech extolled the candidates'
"integrity" and "honesty," and their scorn for "polls"
and "focus groups." Governor Bush was cast as "a
man without pretense, without cynicism," and the
stolid Cheney lauded as a paragon of "substance"
over "flash." (Similarly, Jerry Falwell later praised
the "credibility...which Mr. Lieberman brings to
anything he touches.")
Now we have the Bush team back again -- and
promising always to tell the truth. We should
therefore ask George W. Bush what he would have
done differently if he'd been in his father's place;
and we should ask Dick Cheney all the questions
that he wouldn't let us ask -- and that we couldn't
even think to ask -- ten years ago.
Mark Crispin Miller is a Professor of Media Ecology
at New York University, where he also directs the
Project on Media Ownership. His books include
Boxed In: The Culture of TV and Seeing Through
Movies. His MAD SCIENTISTS, a study of modern
propaganda, will be published by W.W. Norton in
2001.
Do you believe the hype? Discuss the Gulf War, and
how it was spun, in the Loop.
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Culture | Technology | Loop
�2000 FEED Magazine
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