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From, READ MY APOCALYPSE:
The Role of the 1991 Gulf War in the emergence of George Bush's New World Order
by Mitchel Cohen
This Chapter:
How George Bush, Sr. Sold the 1991 Bombing of Iraq to America
"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.
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Mitchel Cohen is the co-editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of
the Greens/Green Party USA. www.greenparty.org.
Mitchel Cohen
2652 Cropsey Avenue, #7H
Brooklyn, NY 11214
(718) 449-0037
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