The Gulf War Lies
The initial excuse given by the #
Bush administration was that U.S. forces were needed in the Middle East to defend Saudi Arabia from an impending Iraqi invasion. But if the Iraqis intended to take Saudi Arabia, why did they not move into that country immediately after grabbing Kuwait and well before U.S. troops arrived? Contrary to the disinformation passed around, journalists could find no Iraqi troops massed on the Saudi border.
Bush claimed that his attack came only after "months of constant and virtually endless diplomatic activity," and that Iraq displayed no interest in a negotiated settlement. This was an outright lie.
In the one "diplomatic" session held with the Iraqis by Secretary of State Baker in Geneva, he simply ordered them to leave Kuwait. By his own account, Baker made no effort to explore Iraq's grievances with Kuwait. When the Iraqis floated peace feelers through the remainder of 1990, they were ignored by the White House.
The Bush administration was spoiling for the one-sided fight. White House spokespersons were quoted as describing an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait as "the nightmare scenario." Why so? Would not the avoidance of war have been a dream scenario? The policymakers understood that a peaceful withdrawal would remove the casus belli and deprive the president of "a glorious victory against aggression."
The president also claimed he was concerned with protecting human rights in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Middle East. But there was precious little democracy in any of the region's feudal emirates and autocracies. In Saudi Arabia, women were still stoned to death on charges of adultery.
In Kuwait, democratic councils and other organized political groupings were regularly crushed. One filthy-rich family controlled the country's politico- economic life.
It was also maintained that the United States was upholding the United Nations commitment to defend member states against aggression. But why
only in this instance? Both Syria and Israel invaded Lebanon and still occupied portions of that country; Turkey grabbed half of Cyprus; Morocco waged a war of aggression against the Western Sahara; Indonesia invaded and annexed East Timor at a great loss of Timorese lives. Yet Washington maintained close and supportive relations with all these aggressors. When Iraq invaded Iran, a few years before the Gulf War, Washington sent military aid to both countries. U.S. leaders themselves invaded Grenada and Panama. One can look with skepticism on Washington's sudden and highly principled intolerance of aggression.
In August 1990, Bush asserted that he was trying to prevent Saddam from monopolizing "all the world's great oil reserves." This alibi at least brought us closer to the truth: oil was definitely a consideration. But the charge was false. No single producer can control the global oil market, not even a powerful consortium like OPEC, let alone an individual leader like Saddam. Even with the 1990 embargo that cut off the oil from Iraq, the world's net petroleum production remained roughly the same.
The White House then charged that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. This polemic was tacked on to Bush's list of pretexts months after he had embarked upon intervention and immediately after opinion polls showed Americans responded apprehensively to the possibility of Iraq's developing a nuclear capability. In any case, with sanctions in place, it was impossible for Iraq to get the necessary materials to build a nuclear bomb.
In November 1990, Secretary Baker argued that the intervention would safeguard jobs at home.
This was the first time anyone in Bush's national security entourage had evinced concern for the nation's work force. Nobody specified how a costly massacre in the Middle East would protect jobs at home. In fact, after the war, unemployment increased slightly. Besides, there were more effective and less horrible ways of keeping Americans employed than wreaking destruction upon another nation.
Some Real Reasons There were a number of compelling considerations for war against Iraq that the Bush administration preferred to leave unmentioned. First, #
Saddam #
Hussein was trying to stop the Kuwaiti slant drilling into his oil reserves and was trying to bolster the oil price he could get. His temerity in putting considerations about his own country's economy ahead of the interests of the international oil cartel suddenly made him an unpopular personage in Washington.
Second, thanks to the major networks, the Gulf War served as a video promotional event for the military-industrial complex, a rescue operation for a bloated defense budget. In July 1990, for the first time in years, the Democratic leadership in Congress was talking about real cuts in military spending. The Gulf War hoopla brought Congress meekly back into line.
Third, the quick and easy victory was a promotional event for interventionism itself, a cure for the "Vietnam syndrome" (that is, the public's unwillingness to commit U.S. forces to violent conflicts abroad). The Gulf War seemed to solve a problem U.S. interventionists long have faced: how to engage in military action without a serious loss of American lives. (Their concern was more political than humanitarian. Heavy losses make the intervention unpopular with the U.S. public.) The way to economize on American lives was to apply an air, land, and sea firepower of such superior magnitude that it could destroy the opponent's military capacity, infrastructure, and life support systems without any great commitment of U.S. troops.
It is not true, as was claimed by antiwar activists, that Iraq was bombed back into the nineteenth century. Iraq in the nineteenth century had a productive base roughly commensurate with the population needs of that time. The destruction created a far greater crisis than that. In March 1991, a United Nations mission to Iraq reported that the conflict "has wrought near- apocalyptic results" by destroying "most means of modern life support," relegating Iraq "to a preindustrial age, but with all the disabilities of post- industrial dependency on intensive use of energy and technology."
Not without cause did U.S. militarists boast that the attacks were "surgical." True, most of the bombs were free-falling and killed people wantonly. But the thousands of air strikes did surgically remove most of Iraq's electrical systems and seriously damaged the agricultural system. Without electricity, water could not be purified, sewage could not be treated. Hunger, cholera, and other diseases flourished.
The Gulf War was followed by a vindictive United Nations embargo that several years later still denied Iraq the technological resources to rebuild its food production, medical dervices, and sanitation facilities. As late as 1993, CNN reported that nearly 300,000 Iraqi children were suffering from malnutrition. Deaths exceeded the normal rate by 125,000 a year, mostly affecting "the poor, their infants, children, chronically ill, and elderly" (Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1994). Iraqi citizens, who previously had enjoyed a decent living standard, were reduced to destitution. So was realized one of the perennial goals of imperialism: to reduce to impotence and poverty all potential adversaries and upstarts.
Fourth, the Gulf crisis allowed U.S. leaders to establish a long-term military presence in the Middle East, a region of troubled regimes and abundant oil reserves. U.S. forces now could more immediately and effectively safeguard existing autocracies from their own restive populations.
Fifth, many wars are begun, noted Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 6, because of the political interests of leaders. By plunging into conflicts abroad, they seek to diminish the impact of troublesome issues at home, thereby securing their political fortunes. The war against Iraq came in the middle of a serious recession, one that President Bush was more interested in ignoring than resolving. In July 1990, his popularity also was slumping badly because of the savings and loan scandal. Every evening, TV news programs were peeling off successive layers of corruption, thievery, bribery, and plunder of the public treasury, in what was the greatest financial conspiracy in the history of the world. But once the media became preoccupied with selling the high-tech video war, the savings and loan issue was dropped from the evening news. The Gulf victory also made it harder to investigate disclosures implicating Bush in the Iran-Contra conspiracy, as he basked in what seemed like an untouchable popularity.
While the war was still in progress, I wrote in CovertAction Information Bulletin (Spring 1991): "The morning after victory, more of the American public may begin to wonder if the bloodshed and the $80 billion bill was worth it. They might recall that the only war worth supporting is what Benjamin Franklin called 'the best war,' the one that is never fought." Indeed, the slaughter perpetrated against Iraq and all its attendant hoopla were not enough to carry Bush to reelection the following year.
"Against Empire" by Michael Parenti https://archive.org/details/against-empire_202601#
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book Additionally:
The Nayirah testimony
The Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who was publicly identified only as Nayirah at the time, and presented herself as having been a volunteer nurse at a Kuwaiti hospital at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In her testimony, which took place two months after the invasion, she claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking premature babies out of incubators in a maternity ward before looting the incubators and leaving the babies to die on the floor. Nayirah's statements were widely publicized and cited numerous times in the United States Senate and by American president George H. W. Bush to contribute to the rationale for pursuing military action against Iraq. Her portrayal of Iraqi war crimes was aimed at further increasing global support for Kuwait against the Iraqi occupation during the Gulf War, which resulted in the expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait by a 42-country coalition led by the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
