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CounterPunch
December
28, 2002
"What We
Say, Goes!"
How Bush Sr.
Sold the Bombing of Iraq
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.
Mitchel Cohen
is the co-editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of
the Greens/Green Party
USA. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
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. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
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