Mr. Sheeple* wrote:
A "thug" was needed to get rid of the
communists in Iraq. How were they to know that he would stage a coup and
eventually himself become a dictator "liquidating" thousands who opposed
him?
Takes a thug to "neutralize" a thug and
a thug to pay the thug to do thuggery. And it takes a population of
thugs to pay out of their hard-earned wages to support a thuggish
government to do its thuggery. Otherwise, the only problem with your
unhistorical, hysterical analysis is that support for the thug did not
end at the coup. It continued nearly 20 years until 1990 when little
thug asked big thug if he minded a little take over of Kuwait and big
thug lied to little thug, "It is of no concern to us." (April Glaspie)
I apologize
for boring you with history, but in history are the patterns that shape
tomorrow. The lies of today are only possible because of ignorance of
what really happened in the past. Ignorance of what really happened
makes fools of stupid people who dodge responsibility for their
complicity by playing dumb and being intellectually lazy for too many
years. So to soften the ossification of knee-jerk and slavish
subservience to propagandists and political icons here is a bit of
poetry to rediscover reality:
Big thugs
have little thugs upon their payroll to work for 'em
and little thugs have smaller thugs upon the gravy train for mayhem.
The smaller thugs have smaller thugs and so it goes on ad infinitum.
white eagle soaring
*[Name changed to protect
the gullible]
Transcript of Meeting
Between Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq,
April Glaspie. - July 25, 1990 (Eight days before the August 2, 1990
Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait)
July 25, 1990 - Presidential Palace - Baghdad
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - I have direct instructions from President Bush
to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for
your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your
confrontation with Kuwait. (pause) As you know, I lived here for years
and admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. We know
you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should
have the opportunity to rebuild your country. (pause) We can see that
you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that
would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of
your threat s against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be
concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you,
in the spirit of friendship - not confrontation - regarding your
intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait's
borders?
Saddam Hussein - As you know, for years now I have made every effort to
reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait. There is to be a meeting
in two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief
chance. (pause) When we (the Iraqis) meet (with the Kuwaitis) and we see
there is hope, then nothing will happen. But if we are unable to find a
solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - What solutions would be acceptab le?
Saddam Hussein - If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al Arab - our
strategic goal in our war with Iran - we will make concessions (to the
Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the
Shatt and the whole of Iraq (i.e., in Saddam s view, including Kuwait )
then we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to
keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is
the United States' opinion on this?
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab
conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James)
Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq
in the 1960's, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.
(Saddam smiles)
On August 2, 1990 four days later, Saddam's massed troops invade and
occupy Kuwait. _____
Baghdad, September 2, 1990, U.S. Embassy
One month later, British journalists obtain the the above tape and
transcript of the Saddam - Glaspie meeting of July 29, 1990. Astoun ded,
they confront Ms. Glaspie as she leaves the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Journalist 1 - Are the transcripts (holding them up) correct, Madam
Ambassador?(Ambassador Glaspie does not respond)
Journalist 2 - You knew Saddam was going to invade (Kuwait ) but you
didn't warn him not to. You didn't tell him America would defend Kuwait.
You told him the opposite - that America was not associated with Kuwait.
Journalist 1 - You encouraged this aggression - his invasi on. What were
you thinking?
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - Obviously, I didn't think, and nobody else
did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.
?
Journalist 1 - You thought he was just going to take some of it? But,
how could you? Saddam told you that, if negotiations failed , he would
give up his Iran (Shatt al Arab waterway) goal for the Whole of Iraq, in
the shape we wish it to be. You know that includes Kuwait, which the
Iraqis have always viewed as an historic part of their country!
Journalist 1 - American green-lighted the invasion. At a minimum, you
admit signaling Saddam that some aggression was okay - that the U.S.
would not oppose a grab of the al-Rumeilah oil field, the disputed
border strip and the Gulf Islands (including Bubiyan) - the territories
claimed by Iraq?
(Ambassador Glaspie says nothing as a limousine door closed behind her
and the car drives off.)
Excerpted from
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You,
Chapter 10
"If I wanted to lie, or if we wanted to
lie, if we wanted to exaggerate, I wouldn't use my daughter to do so. I could
easily buy other people to do it."
--Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the United States and Canada
The Mother of All Clients
On August
2, 1990, Iraqi troops led by dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-producing
nation of Kuwait. Like Noriega in Panama, Hussein had been a US ally for nearly
a decade. From 1980 to 1988, he had killed about 150,000 Iranians, in addition
to at least 13,000 of his own citizens. Despite complaints from international
human rights group, however, the Reagan and Bush administrations had treated
Hussein as a valuable ally in the US confrontation with Iran. As late as July 25
- a week before the invasion of Kuwait - US Ambassador April Glaspie
commiserated with Hussein over a "cheap and unjust" profile by ABC's Diane
Sawyer, and wished for an "appearance in the media, even for five minutes," by
Hussein that "would help explain Iraq to the American people."69
Glaspie's
ill-chosen comments may have helped convince the dictator that Washington would
look the other way if he "annexed" a neighboring kingdom. The invasion of
Kuwait, however, crossed a line that the Bush Administration could not tolerate.
This time Hussein's crime was far more serious than simply gassing to death
another brood of Kurdish refugees. This time, oil was at stake.
Viewed in strictly
moral terms, Kuwait hardly looked like the sort of country that deserved
defending, even from a monster like Hussein. The tiny but super-rich state had
been an independent nation for just a quarter century when in 1986 the ruling
al-Sabah family tightened its dictatorial grip over the "black gold" fiefdom by
disbanding the token National Assembly and firmly establishing all power in the
be-jeweled hands of the ruling Emir. Then, as now, Kuwait's ruling oligarchy
brutally suppressed the country's small democracy movement, intimidated and
censored journalists, and hired desperate foreigners to supply most of the
nation's physical labor under conditions of indentured servitude and
near-slavery. The wealthy young men of Kuwait's ruling class were known as
spoiled party boys in university cities and national capitals from Cairo to
Washington.70
Unlike Grenada and
Panama, Iraq had a substantial army that could not be subdued in a mere weekend
of fighting. Unlike the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Hussein was too far away from
US soil, too rich with oil money, and too experienced in ruling through
propaganda and terror to be dislodged through the psychological-warfare
techniques of low-intensity conflict. Waging a war to push Iraq's invading army
from Kuwait would cost billions of dollars and require an unprecedented, massive
US military mobilization. The American public was notoriously reluctant to send
its young into foreign battles on behalf of any cause. Selling war in the Middle
East to the American people would not be easy. Bush would need to convince
Americans that former ally Saddam Hussein now embodied evil, and that the oil
fiefdom of Kuwait was a struggling young democracy. How could the Bush
Administration build US support for "liberating" a country so fundamentally
opposed to democratic values? How could the war appear noble and necessary
rather than a crass grab to save cheap oil?
"If and when a
shooting war starts, reporters will begin to wonder why American soldiers are
dying for oil-rich sheiks," warned Hal Steward, a retired army PR official. "The
US military had better get cracking to come up with a public relations plan that
will supply the answers the public can accept."71
Steward needn't
have worried. A PR plan was already in place, paid for almost entirely by the
"oil-rich sheiks" themselves.
Packaging the Emir
US Congressman
Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana - a conservative Democrat who supported the Gulf War -
later estimated that the government of Kuwait funded as many as 20 PR, law and
lobby firms in its campaign to mobilize US opinion and force against Hussein.72
Participating firms included the Rendon Group, which received a retainer of
$100,000 per month for media work, and Neill & Co., which received $50,000 per
month for lobbying Congress. Sam Zakhem, a former US ambassador to the oil-rich
gulf state of Bahrain, funneled $7.7 million in advertising and lobbying dollars
through two front groups, the "Coalition for Americans at Risk" and the "Freedom
Task Force." The Coalition, which began in the 1980s as a front for the contras
in Nicaragua, prepared and placed TV and newspaper ads, and kept a stable of
fifty speakers available for pro-war rallies and publicity events.73
Hill & Knowlton,
then the world's largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign.
Its activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign
ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents
Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American
people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it. Nine days after
Saddam's army marched into Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a
contract under which Hill & Knowlton would represent "Citizens for a Free
Kuwait," a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti
government and its collusion with the Bush administration. Over the next six
months, the Kuwaiti government channeled $11.9 million dollars to Citizens for a
Free Kuwait, whose only other funding totalled $17,861 from 78 individuals.
Virtually all of CFK's budget - $10.8 million - went to Hill & Knowlton in the
form of fees.74
The man running
Hill & Knowlton's Washington office was Craig Fuller, one of Bush's closest
friends and inside political advisors. The news media never bothered to examine
Fuller's role until after the war had ended, but if America's editors had read
the PR trade press, they might have noticed this announcement, published in
O'Dwyer's PR Services before the fighting began: "Craig L. Fuller, chief of
staff to Bush when he was vice-president, has been on the Kuwaiti account at
Hill & Knowlton since the first day. He and [Bob] Dilenschneider at one point
made a trip to Saudi Arabia, observing the production of some 20 videotapes,
among other chores. The Wirthlin Group, research arm of H&K, was the pollster
for the Reagan Administration. . . . Wirthlin has reported receiving $1.1
million in fees for research assignments for the Kuwaitis. Robert K. Gray,
Chairman of H&K/USA based in Washington, DC had leading roles in both Reagan
campaigns. He has been involved in foreign nation accounts for many years. . . .
Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, account supervisor on the Kuwait account, is a former
Foreign Service Officer at the US Information Agency who joined Gray when he set
up his firm in 1982."75
In addition to
Republican notables like Gray and Fuller, Hill & Knowlton maintained a
well-connected stable of in-house Democrats who helped develop the bipartisan
support needed to support the war. Lauri Fitz-Pegado, who headed the Kuwait
campaign, had previously worked with super-lobbyist Ron Brown representing
Haiti's Duvalier dictatorship. Hill & Knowlton senior vice-president Thomas Ross
had been Pentagon spokesman during the Carter Administration. To manage the news
media, H&K relied on vice-chairman Frank Mankiewicz, whose background included
service as press secretary and advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern,
followed by a stint as president of National Public Radio. Under his direction,
Hill & Knowlton arranged hundreds of meetings, briefings, calls and mailings
directed toward the editors of daily newspapers and other media outlets.
Jack O'Dwyer had
reported on the PR business for more than twenty years, but he was awed by the
rapid and expansive work of H&K on behalf of Citizens for a Free Kuwait: "Hill &
Knowlton . . . has assumed a role in world affairs unprecedented for a PR firm.
H&K has employed a stunning variety of opinion-forming devices and techniques to
help keep US opinion on the side of the Kuwaitis. . . . The techniques range
from full-scale press conferences showing torture and other abuses by the Iraqis
to the distribution of tens of thousands of 'Free Kuwait' T-shirts and bumper
stickers at college campuses across the US."76
Documents filed
with the US Department of Justice showed that 119 H&K executives in 12 offices
across the US were overseeing the Kuwait account. "The firm's activities, as
listed in its report to the Justice Department, included arranging media
interviews for visiting Kuwaitis, setting up observances such as National Free
Kuwait Day, National Prayer Day (for Kuwait), and National Student Information
Day, organizing public rallies, releasing hostage letters to the media,
distributing news releases and information kits, contacting politicians at all
levels, and producing a nightly radio show in Arabic from Saudi Arabia," wrote
Arthur Rowse in the Progressive after the war. Citizens for a Free Kuwait
also capitalized on the publication of a quickie 154-page book about Iraqi
atrocities titled The Rape of Kuwait, copies of which were stuffed into
media kits and then featured on TV talk shows and the Wall Street Journal.
The Kuwaiti embassy also bought 200,000 copies of the book for distribution to
American troops.77
Hill & Knowlton
produced dozens of video news releases at a cost of well over half a million
dollars, but it was money well spent, resulting in tens of millions of dollars
worth of "free" air time. The VNRs were shown by eager TV news directors around
the world who rarely (if ever) identified Kuwait's PR firm as the source of the
footage and stories. TV stations and networks simply fed the carefully-crafted
propaganda to unwitting viewers, who assumed they were watching "real"
journalism. After the war Arthur Rowse asked Hill & Knowlton to show him some of
the VNRs, but the PR company refused. Obviously the phony TV news reports had
served their purpose, and it would do H&K no good to help a reporter reveal the
extent of the deception. In Unreliable Sources, authors Martin Lee and
Norman Solomon noted that "when a research team from the communications
department of the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and
correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about US policy in the region, they
drew some sobering conclusions: The more television people watched, the fewer
facts they knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more
likely they were to back the Bush administration."78
Throughout the
campaign, the Wirthlin Group conducted daily opinion polls to help Hill &
Knowlton take the emotional pulse of key constituencies so it could identify the
themes and slogans that would be most effective in promoting support for US
military action. After the war ended, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
produced an Emmy award-winning TV documentary on the PR campaign titled "To Sell
a War." The show featured an interview with Wirthlin executive Dee Alsop in
which Alsop bragged of his work and demonstrated how audience surveys were even
used to physically adapt the clothing and hairstyle of the Kuwait ambassador so
he would seem more likeable to TV audiences. Wirthlin's job, Alsop explained,
was "to identify the messages that really resonate emotionally with the American
people." The theme that struck the deepest emotional chord, they discovered, was
"the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even
against his own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he
needed to be stopped."79
Suffer the Little Children
Every big media
event needs what journalists and flacks alike refer to as "the hook." An ideal
hook becomes the central element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a
strong emotional response, and sticks in the memory. In the case of the Gulf
War, the "hook" was invented by Hill & Knowlton. In style, substance and mode of
delivery, it bore an uncanny resemblance to England's World War I hearings that
accused German soldiers of killing babies.
On October 10,
1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill which
provided the first opportunity for formal presentations of Iraqi human rights
violations. Outwardly, the hearing resembled an official congressional
proceeding, but appearances were deceiving. In reality, the Human Rights Caucus,
chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter,
was simply an association of politicians. Lantos and Porter were also co-chairs
of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a legally separate entity that
occupied free office space valued at $3,000 a year in Hill & Knowlton's
Washington, DC office. Notwithstanding its congressional trappings, the
Congressional Human Rights Caucus served as another Hill & Knowlton front group,
which - like all front groups - used a noble-sounding name to disguise its true
purpose.80
Only a few astute
observers noticed the hypocrisy in Hill & Knowlton's use of the term "human
rights." One of those observers was John MacArthur, author of The Second
Front, which remains the best book written about the manipulation of the
news media during the Gulf War. In the fall of 1990, MacArthur reported, Hill &
Knowlton's Washington switchboard was simultaneously fielding calls for the
Human Rights Foundation and for "government representatives of Indonesia,
another H&K client. Like H&K client Turkey, Indonesia is a practitioner of naked
aggression, having seized . . . the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in
1975. Since the annexation of East Timor, the Indonesian government has killed,
by conservative estimate, about 100,000 inhabitants of the region."81
MacArthur also
noticed another telling detail about the October 1990 hearings: "The Human
Rights Caucus is not a committee of congress, and therefore it is unencumbered
by the legal accouterments that would make a witness hesitate before he or she
lied. ... Lying under oath in front of a congressional committee is a crime;
lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations."82
In fact, the most
emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl,
known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full
name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family
in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes
in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media
kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan
hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into
the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in
incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and
left the babies on the cold floor to die."83
Three months
passed between Nayirah's testimony and the start of the war. During those
months, the story of babies torn from their incubators was repeated over and
over again. President Bush told the story. It was recited as fact in
Congressional testimony, on TV and radio talk shows, and at the UN Security
Council. "Of all the accusations made against the dictator," MacArthur observed,
"none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi
soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on
the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City."84
At the Human
Rights Caucus, however, Hill & Knowlton and Congressman Lantos had failed to
reveal that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father, in
fact, was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the US, who sat listening
in the hearing room during her testimony. The Caucus also failed to reveal that
H&K vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached Nayirah in what even the
Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony.
If Nayirah's outrageous lie had been exposed at the time it was told, it might
have at least caused some in Congress and the news media to soberly reevaluate
the extent to which they were being skillfully manipulated to support military
action. Public opinion was deeply divided on Bush's Gulf policy. As late as
December 1990, a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that 48 percent
of the American people wanted Bush to wait before taking any action if Iraq
failed to withdraw from Kuwait by Bush's January 15 deadline.85
On January 12, the US Senate voted by a narrow, five-vote margin to support the
Bush administration in a declaration of war. Given the narrowness of the vote,
the babies-thrown-from-incubators story may have turned the tide in Bush's
favor.
Following the war,
human rights investigators attempted to confirm Nayirah's story and could find
no witnesses or other evidence to support it. Amnesty International, which had
fallen for the story, was forced to issue an embarrassing retraction. Nayirah
herself was unavailable for comment. "This is the first allegation I've had that
she was the ambassador's daughter," said Human Rights Caucus co-chair John
Porter. "Yes, I think people . . . were entitled to know the source of her
testimony." When journalists for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asked
Nasir al-Sabah for permission to question Nayirah about her story, the
ambassador angrily refused.86
Front-line Flacks
The military
build-up in the Persian Gulf began by flying and shipping hundreds of thousands
of US troops, armaments and supplies to staging areas in Saudi Arabia, yet
another nation with no tolerance for a free press, democratic rights and most
western customs. In a secret strategy memo, the Pentagon outlined a
tightly-woven plan to constrain and control journalists. A massive babysitting
operation would ensure that no truly independent or uncensored reporting reached
back to the US public. "News media representatives will be escorted at all
times," the memo stated. "Repeat, at all times."87
Deputy Secretary
of Defense for Public Affairs Pete Williams served as the Pentagon's top flack
for the Gulf War. Using the perennial PR strategy of "good cop/bad cop," the
government of Saudi Arabia played the "heavy," denying visas and access to the
US press, while Williams, the reporters' friend, appeared to intercede
repeatedly on their behalf. This strategy kept news organizations competing with
each other for favors from Williams, and kept them from questioning the
fundamental fact that journalistic independence was impossible under military
escort and censorship.
The overwhelming
technological superiority of US forces won a decisive victory in the brief and
brutal war known as Desert Storm. Afterwards, some in the media quietly admitted
that they'd been manipulated to produce sanitized coverage which almost entirely
ignored the war's human cost - today estimated at over 100,000 civilian deaths.
The American public's single most lasting memory of the war will probably be the
ridiculously successful video stunts supplied by the Pentagon showing robot
"smart bombs" striking only their intended military targets, without much
"collateral" (civilian) damage.
"Although
influential media such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal
kept promoting the illusion of the 'clean war,' a different picture began to
emerge after the US stopped carpet-bombing Iraq," note Lee and Solomon. "The
pattern underscored what Napoleon meant when he said that it wasn't necessary to
completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no
longer mattered."88
Notes
- John R. MacArthur, Second Front:
Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, (Berkeley, CA: University of CA
Press, 1992).
- Ibid.
- Hal D. Steward, "A Public Relations Plan
for the US Military in the Middle East," Public Relations Quarterly,
Winter 1990-91, p. 10.
- "H&K leads PR charge in behalf of Kuwaiti
cause," O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, Vol. 5, No. 1, Jan. 1991, p.8.
- "Citizens for Free Kuwait Files with FARA
After a Nine-month Lag,"
O'Dwyer's FARA Report, Vol. 1, No. 9, Oct. 1991, p. 2. See also Arthur E.
Rowse, "Flacking for the Emir," The Progressive, May, 1991, p. 22.
- O'Dwyer's FARA Report, Vol. 1, No.
9, Oct. 1991, pp. 2.
- O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, Vol.
5, No. 1, Jan. 1991, pp. 8, 10.
- Ibid., p. 1.
- Rowse, pp. 21-22.
- Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon,
Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (New York:
Lyle Stuart, 1991), p. xvii.
- Transcript, "To Sell A War", pp. 3-4.
- MacArthur, p. 60.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p.58.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 54.
- New York Times/CBS News poll, as reported
in O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, Jan. 1991, p. 10.
- "To Sell A War," pp. 4-5.
- MacArthur, p. 7.
- Lee & Solomon, p. xix.
Center for Media &
Democracy, 520 University Ave., Suite 310, Madison, WI 53703;
phone (608) 260-9713; email editor@prwatch.org
