[Reader-list] The Lies We Are Told About Iraq (Victor Marshall)

[Harsh Kapoor]

LOS ANGELES TIMES
January 5, 2003
OPINION

The Lies We Are Told About Iraq

Pentagon propaganda got us into the first Gulf War.
Will we be fooled a second time?

By Victor Marshall, a research fellow at the
Independent Institute, a public policy group, is the
author of "To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw
Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War."

OAKLAND - The Bush administration's confrontation  with Iraq is as 
much a contest of credibility as it  is  of military force. 
Washington claims that Baghdad  harbors ambitions of aggression, 
continues to  develop  and stockpile weapons of mass destruction and 
maintains ties to Al Qaeda. Lacking solid evidence,  the public must 
weigh Saddam Hussein's penchant for  lies against the 
administration's own record. Based  on  recent history, that's not an 
easy choice.

  The first Bush administration, which featured Dick  Cheney, Paul D. 
Wolfowitz and Colin L. Powell at the  Pentagon, systematically 
misrepresented the cause of  Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the nature of 
Iraq's  conduct in Kuwait and the cost of the Persian Gulf  War. Like 
the second Bush administration, it  cynically  used the confrontation 
to justify a more expansive  and  militaristic foreign policy in the 
post-Vietnam era.

When Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990,  the  first 
President Bush likened it to Nazi Germany's  occupation of the 
Rhineland. "If history teaches us  anything, it is that we must 
resist aggression or it  will destroy our freedoms," he declared. The 
administration leaked reports that tens of thousands  of Iraqi troops 
were massing on the border of Saudi  Arabia in preparation for an 
invasion of the world's  major oil fields. The globe's industrial 
economies  would be held hostage if Iraq succeeded.

The reality was different. Two Soviet satellite  photos  obtained by 
the St. Petersburg Times raised  questions  about such a buildup of 
Iraqi troops. Neither the  CIA  nor the Pentagon's Defense 
Intelligence Agency  viewed  an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia as 
probable. The  administration's estimate of Iraqi troop strength  was 
also grossly exaggerated. After the war, Newsday's  Susan Sachs 
called Iraq the "phantom enemy": "The  bulk  of the mighty Iraqi 
army, said to number more than  500,000 in Kuwait and southern Iraq, 
couldn't be  found."

Students of the Gulf War largely agree that  Hussein's  invasion of 
Kuwait was primarily motivated by  specific  historical grievances, 
not by Hitler-style  ambitions.  Like most Iraqi rulers before him, 
Hussein refused  to  accept borders drawn by Britain after World War 
I  that  virtually cut Iraq off from the Gulf. Iraq also  chafed  at 
Kuwait's demand that Iraq repay loans made to it  during the 
Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

Administration officials seemed to understand all  this. In July 
1990, U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad April  Glaspie told Hussein that 
Washington had "no opinion  on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border 
disagreement  with Kuwait," a statement she later regretted.

  The National Security Council's first meeting after  Iraq's invasion 
of Kuwait was equally low key. As  one  participant reportedly put 
it, the attitude was,  "Hey,  too bad about Kuwait, but it's just a 
gas station -  and who cares whether the sign says Sinclair or 
Exxon?"

But administration hawks, led by Cheney, saw a huge  opportunity to 
capitalize on Iraq's move against  Kuwait. The elder Bush publicly 
pronounced, "a line  has been drawn in the sand," and he called for a 
"new  world orderŠ free from the threat of terror." His  unstated 
premise, as noted by National Security  Advisor Brent Scowcroft, was 
that the United States  "henceforth would be obligated to lead the 
world  community to an unprecedented degree" as it  attempted  "to 
pursue our national interests."

  The administration realized that a peaceful solution  to the crisis 
would undercut its grand ambitions.  The  White House torpedoed 
diplomatic initiatives to end  the crisis, including a compromise, 
crafted by Arab  leaders, to let Iraq annex a small slice of Kuwait 
and  withdraw. To justify war with Hussein, the Bush  administration 
condoned a propaganda campaign on  Iraqi  atrocities in Kuwait. 
Americans were riveted by a  15-year-old Kuwaiti so-called refugee's 
eyewitness  accounts of Iraqi soldiers yanking newborn babies  out 
of hospital incubators in Kuwait, leaving them on a  cold floor to 
die.

The public didn't know that the eyewitness was the  daughter of 
Kuwait's ambassador to the United  States,  and that her 
congressional testimony was reportedly  arranged by public relations 
firm Hill & Knowlton  and  paid for by Kuwait as part of its campaign 
to bring  the United States into war.

  To this day, most people regard Operation Desert  Storm  as 
remarkably clean, marked by the expert use of  precision weapons to 
minimize "collateral damage."  While American TV repeatedly broadcast 
pictures of  cruise missiles homing in on their targets, the 
Pentagon quietly went about a campaign of carpet  bombing. Of the 
142,000 tons of bombs dropped on  Iraq  and Kuwait in 43 days, only 
about 8% were of the  "smart" variety.

The indiscriminate targeting of Iraq's civilian  infrastructure left 
the country in ruins. A United  Nations mission in March 1991 
described the allied  bombing of Iraq as "near apocalyptic" and said 
it  threatened to reduce "a rather highly urbanized and  mechanized 
societyŠ to a preindustrial age."  Officially, the U.S. military 
listed only 79  American  soldiers killed in action, plus 59 members 
of allied  forces.

A subsequent demographic study by the U.S. Census  Bureau concluded 
that Iraq probably suffered 145,000  dead - 40,000 military and 5,000 
civilian deaths  during the war and 100,000 postwar deaths because of 
violence and health conditions. The war also  produced  more than 5 
million refugees. Subsequent sanctions  were estimated to have killed 
more than half a  million  Iraqi children, according to the U.N. Food 
and  Agriculture Organization and other international  bodies.

  The Gulf War amply demonstrated the merit of two  adages: "War is 
hell" and "Truth is the first  casualty." To date, nothing suggests 
that a second  Gulf War would prove any less costly to truth or 
humans.