The Persian Gulf TV War

Douglas Kellner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000304329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Douglas Kellner's Persian Gulf TV War attacks the myths, disinformation, and propaganda disseminated during the Gulf war. At once a work of social theory, media criticism, and political history, this book demonstrates how television served as a conduit for George Bush's war policies while silencing anti-war voices and foregoing spirited discussion of the complex issues involved. In so doing, the medium failed to assume its democratic responsibilities of adequately informing the American public and debating issues of common concern. Kellner analyzes the dominant frames through which television presented the war and focuses on the propaganda that sold the war to the public–one of the great media spectacles and public relations campaigns of the post-World War II era. In the spirit of Orwell and Marcuse, Kellner studies the language surrounding the Gulf war and the cynical politics of distortion and disinformation that shaped the mainstream media version of the war, how the Bush administration and Pentagon manipulated the media, and why a majority of the American public accepted the war as just and moral.

Chapter One
The Road to War

ON THE WEEKEND OF July 21, 1990, Iraq moved 30,000 troops, tanks, and artillery to its border with Kuwait. Iraq was angry that Kuwait had been selling its oil below the agreed-upon OPEC figure, thus driving down the price of oil and costing Iraq many billions of dollars. In addition, Kuwait had refused to negotiate a long-standing border dispute with Iraq and had declined to cancel debts incurred by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. In that war, Iraq claimed to be fighting for Arab interests against the threats of Iranian Islamic fundamentalism.

During the Iran-Iraq war, the United States entered into a strategic relationship with Iraq, which was perceived as a secular bulwark against the spread of radical Islamic fundamentalist revolution.¹ The United States presented Iraq with military equipment and intelligence, agricultural credits, and "dual use" technology that could be used for building highly destructive weapons systems.² With the sudden end of the Iran-Iraq war in August 1988, Iraq continued buying massive amounts of arms from the West and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein persisted in building up his military machine with Western help. Despite the fact that Iraq brutally suppressed the Kurds who lived in northern Iraq and that his human rights record was atrocious, Hussein continued to receive aid and favored treatment from the Bush administration. The State Department talked of the importance of the U.S. relationship with Iraq and U.S. senators visited Iraq for Saddam Hussein's birthday in 1990, advising him that his image problem was merely a product of the Western media that could be corrected with a better public-relations (PR) policy.³

On July 25, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with Saddam Hussein and indicated sympathy for his desire to raise oil prices to rebuild his country after the war with Iran. Glaspie told him that the United States had "no opinion" on the border dispute and other disputes with Kuwait.⁴ On the same day, the U.S. State Department stopped the Voice of America from broadcasting an editorial stating that the United States was "strongly committed to supporting its friends in the Gulf" (Newsweek, October 1, 1990, pp. 24-25). On July 31, in a talk on Capitol Hill, John Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs, stated that the United States had no formal commitment to a defense of Kuwait (in Ridgeway 1991, pp. 57-58). He also stated that the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq was "a hypothetical," which "I can't get into" (Ridgeway 1991, pp. 57-58). Finally, Kelly stated that events since February had "raised new questions about Iraqi intentions in the region," but that "sanctions would decrease the [U.S.] government's ability to act as a restraining influence" (Economist, Sept. 29, 1990, pp. 19-21). The scene was set for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

The question arises as to whether the United States purposively led Iraq to believe that there was no major U.S. objection to invading Kuwait or whether the Bush administration was simply incompetent. On the conspiracy account (suggested by Agee 1990, Becker in Clark et al. 1992, Emery 1991, Frank 1991, and Yousif in Bresheeth and Yuval-Duvis 1991), the United States encouraged Kuwait to lower its oil prices and to refuse to settle its disputes with Iraq in order to provoke Iraq into military action that would legitimate U.S. military intervention in the Gulf and even the destruction of Iraq. At the same time, in this account, the United States sent signals to Iraq that it would not object to an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and some believed that this was a trap that would enable the U.S. to mobilize a coalition against Iraq. Such an action against Iraq would enable the United States to become a permanent military presence in the Gulf and to assert itself as the number one military superpower. A triumph would help protect the military from budgetary cutbacks and fuel another cycle of arms spending to pick up the failing economy. A successful Gulf intervention and war would also promote the interests of George Bush, whom most interpreters of the complex events leading up to the war depict as the chief promoter of a military option to the crisis.⁵

The conspiracy theory explains why Kuwait would stand up to an extremely belligerent and dangerous Iraq and why Iraq would risk invading Kuwait. For without a prior U.S. pledge of support it is implausible that Kuwait would provoke Iraq and refuse to negotiate what were arguably reasonable issues. The theory that the United States was enticing Iraq to invade Kuwait also helps explain the seeming appeasement of Iraq by the Bush administration, but other accounts are also plausible. Waas (1991) described U.S. diplomacy leading up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as a result of the "Bush administration's miscalculations" and "sheer incompetence," which he describes as "the worst diplomatic failure by any modern president" (p. 60). Salinger and Laurent (1991, pp. 56-79) do not explicitly advocate the conspiracy theory, though they believe that, inadvertently or not, Glaspie and Kelly gave a "green light" to Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. Commenting on Kelly's July 31, 1990, testimony to Congress, where he confirmed that the U.S. had "no treaty, no commitment which would oblige us to use American forces" to drive Iraq out of Kuwait were a hypothetical invasion to take place, Salinger and Laurent claimed:

John Kelly's statements were broadcast on the World Service of the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] and were heard in Baghdad. At a crucial hour, when war and peace hung in the balance, Kelly had sent Saddam Hussein a signal that could be read as a pledge that the United States would not intervene.

In the recent history of American diplomacy there had been only one other example of such a serious miscalculation, and that was Secretary of State Dean Acheson's statement to Congress in 1950 that "South Korea was not part of the United States' zone of defense." Soon afterwards North Korea had invaded the South. (1991, p. 69)

Because the Bush administration has a record of both incompetence and Machiavellian machinations, it is not possible at this point to know for sure why the United States failed to more vigorously warn Iraq against invading Kuwait, why Kuwait refused to settle its disputes with Iraq, or why Iraq finally decided to invade its neighbor. Mediating the conspiracy theory and incompetency interpretation, Edward Herman argued:

This failure to try to constrain Hussein by diplomatic means, and de facto invitation to invade, reflects either staggering incompetence or a remarkably sophisticated conspiracy to entrap him. The failure of the U.S. mass media to consider this set of facts and issues as worthy of front page reporting and intense debate is prime evidence of their irresponsibility to the public and service to the state. My own view is that the Bush gang invited Hussein into Kuwait through sheer incompetence, but were not only deeply annoyed, they also saw that he could usefully be set up as a naked aggressor who must be taught a lesson. . . . The banking, oil, pro-Israei, and military-industrial complex constituencies could be mobilized to support this new thrust, but in my view this is a presidential war par excellence with the causes to be found in the parochial and self-serving calculations of Bush and his security state coterie. (Z Magazine, March 1991, p. 16)

Herman's argument is persuasive though it may underestimate the Machiavellian proclivities of Bush and his circle, who might well have engineered the crisis and the war. In any case, the events leading up to the invasion are highly suspicious and require further investigation and scrutiny. Furthermore, it is worth noting that whichever interpretation of the causes of the Gulf crisis one accepts, the Bush administration was largely responsible for both Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the war, as it could easily have warned Iraq that the United States would not tolerate an invasion of Kuwait and could have urged Kuwait to satisfactorily negotiate its problems with Iraq, thus avoiding the Gulf crisis and war. For weeks there were clear signals that Iraq was planning an invasion of Kuwait and despite the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and military intelligence indicating that an invasion was imminent, the United States continued to appease Iraq.

For instance, on August 1, 1990, the day after Kelly's testimony, there were reports that Iraq had amassed 100,000 troops on the Kuwaiti border. Both the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) claimed that Iraq was ready to invade Kuwait, but still the Bush administration took no action.⁶ Representatives of Iraq and Kuwait met on August 1 at the Saudi resort town of Jidda to negotiate their problems and the Saudis and others seemed to believe that these negotiations would resolve the Kuwaiti/Iraqi disputes. They did not, and Time magazine claimed that the failure of the negotiations was due to "the Iraqis, who demanded Kuwait's total capitulation on every count" and who "were determined to see the negotiations break down" (Aug. 13, 1991, p. 19).⁷ Other observers, however, blamed the breakdown on the Kuwaitis: "[T]he reportedly contemptuous and dismissive attitude of the Kuwaiti delegation during the first round of meetings prompted the Iraqi team to walk out before a second session could be convened. Iraqi forces crossed the border into Kuwait early the next morning" (Fred Dawson, Middle East Report, Jan.-Feb. 1991, p. 35).⁸

During the night of August 2, Iraqi tanks and troops rumbled unchallenged down the 37 mile superhighway from Iraq to Kuwait City and quickly seized control. Key elements of Kuwait's small army were on vacation and many Kuwaiti troops and the royal family fled immediately. After sporadic fighting, the Iraqis gained control of the whole city, including government buildings, military posts, and radio and television facilities. Suddenly the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait became the number one story on the news agenda and remained so for many months.

Cockburn and Cohen speculate that the United States did not send a stronger warning to Iraq because of its strategic relationship with Iraq, but that Saddam Hussein went too far in seizing all of Kuwait (1992, p. 17):

Unless one espouses the conspiracy theory that the United States wanted Iraq to invade Kuwait as an excuse to crush Saddam Hussein, then surely the simplest explanation is that the Bush administration was trying to shove Kuwait into a more tractable posture with regard to the price of oil and possibly to the leasing of the two islands so desired by Iraq for the construction of a deep harbor in the Gulf. Iraq, after all, was a U.S. ally and already a serious trading partner. Nor would the Administration, strongly orientated to the oil lobby, have been at all averse to seeing a hike in prices, which had drifted in real terms below their 1973 level. By seizing the whole of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein overplayed the hand allowed by the United States.

In a New York Times interview (September 12, 1990, p. 19), the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, hinted that the United States was surprised that Iraq had seized the entirety of Kuwait, as if they expected Iraq to merely take the off shore islands and disputed oil field. The question arises, however, why Saddam Hussein believed he could get away with invading Kuwait. The mainstream media never discussed in any detail the complex relations between Iraq, its Arab neighbors, and the West that apparently led Iraq to conclude that it could seize and keep Kuwait, or at least bargain its way out in a manner that would benefit Iraq.

In any case, Saddam Hussein grossly miscalculated the world response to his invasion of Kuwait. During the past decade, the dominant Western powers had beaten a path to his door to give him military information and support during the Iran/Iraq war, to sell him the latest military technology, to enter into economic arrangements with Iraq, and, of course, to buy Iraq's oil. In the light of this attention and support, it is not surprising that Hussein would think that his Western friends would let him get away with his robbery of Kuwait (which might, in the last analysis, merely have been a way to get Kuwaiti attention in order to extort financial and territorial concessions from the greedy Kuwaitis, who simply refused to negotiate what were serious problems). But Iraq miscalculated the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the void that would be filled by the United States. Iraq failed to perceive that the United States would neither allow any threat to its two key interests in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Israel, nor would it allow an independent country like Iraq to wield political influence and help control oil prices in the region. The Iraqis also failed to see that George Bush and the U.S. military-industrial establishment desperately needed a war to save Bush's failing presidency and to preserve the military budget and U.S. defense industries at the end of the cold war (see 1.3).

The Iraqi seizure of Kuwait was of immediate interest to the western capitalist societies because Iraq and Kuwait together would control approximately 20 percent of the world's known oil reserves. With the potential wealth generated from future oil sales and control over oil prices, Saddam Hussein could play a major role on the world's political and economic stage. Consequently, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait produced a crisis for the world capitalist system, for U.S. and European economic interests, and for the stability of the Middle East. Iraq was not able to get control of Kuwaiti investments because much of their money had been transferred out of the country. Yet, rather than encouraging a diplomatic solution to the crisis that would return Kuwait's sovereignty and secure the region, George Bush responded with a military intervention, which inexorably led to the Gulf war itself.

1.1 Big Lies, Compliant Media, and Yellow Journalism

Interest in the crisis increased when the U.S. claimed that Iraq might also invade Saudi Arabia, which was said to control 25 percent of the world's known oil reserves and an investment portfolio even larger than Kuwait's.⁹ George Bush, who had initially attacked the invasion as "naked aggression," heated up his rhetoric and declared on August 5 that the invasion "would not stand." Two days later, he sent thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia. The Bush administration had thus set the stage for the Gulf war by failing to warn Iraq of the consequences of invading Kuwait and then by quickly sending troops to Saudi Arabia while, as I shall argue in the next section, undercutting diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis.

Although the United States constantly accused Iraq and Saddam Hussein of lying and compared the Iraqi leader to Hitler, the Bush administration itself systematically disseminated Big Lies to promote its war policy. Suspicious claims by the administration began with reports that the Iraqis had positioned an offensive force on the Saudi Arabian border, poised to invade that country. On August 3, for instance, Forrest Sawyer reported on ABC's Nightline that: "tens of thousands of Iraqi troops are reportedly massed along the Saudi Arabian border, and there is still fear that Saddam Hussein will carry his blitzkrieg across Saudi territory. It would not be much of a fight, Iraq's million-man battle-seasoned army against the nearly 66,000 Saudi troops, 5,500 Iraqi tanks, 10 times as many as Saudi Arabia."

There is no compelling evidence that Iraq did have large numbers of troops on the Saudi border and the same day ABC news reported the Iraqi ambassador's claim that Iraq had no intention whatsoever of invading Saudi Arabia and that it was "just a big lie" that there were Iraqi troops preparing to invade Saudi Arabia. Moreover, as I shall show, there are indications that from the beginning the Pentagon and Bush administration consistently exaggerated the Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia, or even manufactured it, to justify their intervention. There is also reason to believe that the Bush administration deliberately overestimated the size and competency of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and that the mainstream media uncritically reproduced the Administration's (dubious) figures repeatedly. On August 4, the New York Times headline read: "Iraqis Mass on Saudi Frontier" and the story indicated that: "Pentagon officials said that more than 60,000 Iraqi troops were massing in the southern part of Kuwait, not far from a major oilfield in Saudi Arabia. A State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said Iraqi troops were within five to ten miles of the frontier. The British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, said that Iraqi troops were massing on the border. . . . There were conflicting reports about the size of the Iraqi military force in Kuwait, but one Pentagon official estimated late today that it was approaching 100,000 troops, or more than Iraq needs to pacify and occupy Kuwait" (p. A4).

The television networks dutifully repeated these figures day after day without a modicum of skepticism. There is no reason, however, why one should have accepted these figures or the claim that the Iraqis were gathering on the Saudi Arabia border as if to invade. On the contrary, compelling evidence suggested that U.S. claims concerning the imminent Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia were pure disinformation designed to legitimate a U.S. military intervention in the Gulf. In particular, the claim that Iraqis were ready to invade Saudi Arabia served to scare the Saudis into allowing a major U.S. troop deployment on their soil and to convince the U.S. and world public that serious interests (i.e., the flow of oil) were being threatened. The Iraqis claimed repeatedly that they had no designs on Saudi Arabia, no intention of invading, and because there were no independent sources of information in Kuwait, it was impossible to verify if the United States was or was not telling the truth concerning the Iraqi troop formations on the Saudi border that were allegedly poised for invasion.

On August 5, the Pentagon continued to claim that Iraq was threatening Saudi Ar...