Chapter One
TRUTH AS THE FIRST CASUALTY1
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was not without precedent: there have been dozens of other U.S. invasions, dating back to the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893.2
The date was January 16, 1991. An event which one young U.S. pilot would soon describe as “the best light show I've seen since the Fourth of July,” had begun over Baghdad. As the bombs rained down on that city, forty infants were in incubators, mothers at their sides, at Baghdad's Saddam Central Children's Hospital. The hospital director described what happened next.
First the electricity went out. With the thunder of war all around, the mothers were panic-stricken. In their desperation, they grabbed their children and rushed them into the basement. Six hours later, twenty of the babies were dead from lack of life support.1
Even if Saddam Hussein deserved being called “the most hated man in the world,” as The New York Times characterized him, what of these newborn infants? The story of the Saddam Central Hospital infants failed to make it into the media, although earlier, as we will see, the same media were quick to report erroneous accounts that the “Butcher of Baghdad” and his invading Iraqis killed 312 newborn infants in Kuwaiti hospitals, a charge later denied by Kuwaiti hospital workers following their “liberation.”2 While the media accepted the stories of Iraqi atrocities at face value and gave them wide play, American horror stories were ignored or treated as simply generic examples of the tragedies of war. No news organizations suggested the U.S. was an outlaw nation for violating the Geneva Conventions on chemical warfare by using napalm. And six months after the war ended, when, as part of a campaign to “terrorize 2 Common Cents the Iraqis into surrendering,” the Pentagon admitted using tank-bulldozers to bury Iraqi troops alive in mass graves, The Globe and Mail found a Washington spokesperson to comment that, “There's no nice way to kill somebody in a war.”3 In a speech marking the first anniversary of the war, U.S. President George Bush called on Iraqis to overthrow their leader.4 What remained unreported by the mass media were the efforts by Bush and others to deliberately target and destroy the Iraqi civilian infrastructure, contrary to international humanitarian law. It is becoming increasingly apparent that much of what the public was told about the reasons for the Gulf War and what happened during and after the war was not true or selectively presented. There are two reasons for this: military censorship which prevented the press from knowing what was going on, and self-censorship -- the process of ideological blinkering that prevents the press from telling the public much of what it knows. We will first look briefly at the former before concentrating on the latter.
Military Censorship
Of approximately 1,400 journalists in the Persian Gulf, only 192 of them, including technicians and photographers, were placed in press pools covering combat forces, of whom perhaps 30 were at the front at any one time. The military selectively chose these people to report on the activities of over 800,000 “coalition” troops, and the pool members relayed information to the vast majority of reporters who were excluded. Newsweek reporter Tony Clifton commented,
Now I know why I haven't had children. It's because later in my life, I don't want some innocent child saying, `Daddy, what did you do in the gulf war?' Because I would have to reply, `Child, I watched it on CNN, from an armchair in a big hotel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.'5
To put the above figures into perspective, more than 1,500 accredited journalists reported on the 1990 Super Bowl, not including technicians. Mainstream news executives filed a complaint with U.S. Defence Secretary Richard Cheney in the early summer, 1991, about various forms of censorship in the Gulf war. “By controlling what journalists saw and when they saw it, the military exercised great power to shape and manage the news,” the complaint read.6 The military used three major forms of media censorship, not including their selective control over who was granted a visa to enter Saudi Arabia.7 First, only pool reporters were permitted to cover hostilities; second, reporters had to stay with their military affairs escort at all times; third, all stories were subject to “security review” (censorship) by military officials. The official justification for censorship is that it prevents the enemy from 3 Truth as the First Casualty getting any military secrets. In fact, the major purpose appeared to be impression management aimed at those on the home front: manipulating public opinion. The pool requirement, for example, makes it easier to exclude media coverage altogether on some occasions. Generally it not only favours mainstream media, but only those currently in the military's good graces. For example, France's main news agency, Agence France-Presse, was excluded from the photography pool, and launched a lawsuit in protest. Pool reporter Douglas Jehl of The Los Angeles Times reported that 50 U.S. military vehicles were missing, and censors cleared his story. Later, the military decided the story was contrary to their “best interests” and ordered Jehl out of the press pool.8 New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was interviewing shopkeepers in Saudi Arabia on February 10, 1991, when he was picked up by the U.S. military and detained for five hours before being sent back to his hotel in Dhahran without his press credentials. When he went to the press centre later to retrieve them, officials at first refused to admit him, telling him he had an “attitude problem.”9 When James LeMoyne of The New York Times quoted enlisted personnel who criticized President Bush and questioned the purpose of the war, officials cancelled a scheduled interview with General Norman Schwarzkopf, and didn't re-schedule it. For the next six weeks, LeMoyne said almost all print news reporters were denied access to Army units.10 LeMoyne's news organization, The New York Times, had one correspondent in the news pool, while the U.S. military organ, The Stars and Stripes, had several. Use of press pools constitutes news management at its most effective, on a comparable basis with a Ronald Reagan press conference, complete with screened questions and video teleprompter. Only the favoured are admitted, and one `mistake' and you are out. Partly as a result, journalists identify with the military spirit and goals. In the Gulf, they were “eager” to take part in the training and fitness tests provided by the army. They started to “wear uniforms and adopted army slang.”11 As a result, says New York Times reporter Malcolm Browne, “in effect each pool member is an unpaid employee of the Department of Defence.”12 “With limited exceptions, such as on D-Day in WW2 (when 27 pool reporters went ashore with the first wave of forces), press pools were not used in any U.S. war until the 1983 invasion of Grenada.13 In WW2, reporters were “allowed easy access to the battlefield.” Limitations were due to the relatively small number of reporters, rather than military controls.14
[During World War II] correspondents flew on bombing missions, rode destroyers, went on patrols, and accompanied assault troops in the first stages of battle in numerous invasions...Pool correspondents accompanied the first waves of forces landing on the Normandy beaches on
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D-Day.15
According to CBS news president Eric Ober, who was in the infantry in the Vietnam War, “reporters could go anywhere -- anytime.”
There were two basic restrictions in Vietnam. First, that no troop movements be reported prior to engagement. Second, that no faces of dead or wounded soldiers be shown before their families had been properly identified.16
Ron Nessen, who covered Vietnam for NBC news and later served as press secretary to Gerald Ford, said “there were no censors” in Vietnam.17 Reporters were given guidelines, asked to cooperate, and to a very great extent they did so.” The tight censorship of the Gulf War had its beginnings in the Falkland Islands. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher kept the British press under tight restrictions and banned television crews from the Falkland Islands during her brief and successful war to recapture that colony from Argentina.18 Following Thatcher's cue, the Reagan Administration established the precedent for virtually total media censorship in the U.S. invasion of Grenada in October, 1983. The press was not allowed to accompany the invasion force, and was kept from the island for two days. This provoked an uproar resulting in a small number of journalists being granted access, but only with military escorts.19 When the U.S. invaded Panama in December, 1989, the official press pool was denied access until the second day, after the fighting ended at Rio Hato and Patila, and was barred from getting close to fighting still going on at Commandancia. Their main source of information turned out to be CNN broadcasts of Pentagon briefings from Washington. Hundreds of other journalists who arrived to cover the events were restricted to a military base.20 According to Patrick Sloyan, writing in The Washington Post, the “muzzling” of the press in Panama created the “illusion of bloodless battlefields”21 which later became so evident in the Gulf. This formal censorship, with its beginnings in the Falklands, is responsible for much of the uninformed and misleading coverage of the Gulf war. Sydney Schanberg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times reporting from Cambodia, complained shortly before the air assault started that the previous five months had been full of “soft” stories about the Gulf:
[H]uman interest pieces about how our soldiers are faring in the heat, features about planes being refuelled in mid-air, stories about Dan Quayle's visit, stories about the lousy military food, etc. etc. 5 Truth as the First Casualty
-- and this soft journalism is the direct product of the press controls.22
Well, not entirely, as we will see. In addition, the requirement of a military escort for pool reporters had a “chilling effect” on the willingness of soldiers to speak to reporters. For example, when one Marine complained to a journalist that the food was too starchy, his Major General reprimanded him, saying “You're not an expert on the components of food. Keep to your area of expertise.”23 The military also employed commercial marketing techniques, which first targeted civilians in the 1980s to help build an all-volunteer army24 to “package” the war in a way that would garner public support. Finally, the “security review” or direct censorship of reports served as a check on any material which somehow managed to get through the above-mentioned filters. For example, when pilots aboard the USS John F. Kennedy told an AP reporter they were watching pornographic movies before flying bombing missions, a military censor deleted the information as “too embarrassing.” And, when a Detroit Free Press reporter filed a story describing returning pilots as “giddy,” a censor changed it to “proud.”25 After a protest and heated argument, they compromised on “pumped up.” But the military held up his story for two more days before allowing it to be filed. Although the media complained to the military, and even launched lawsuits over the censorship, publicly they clung to the myth of their unfettered watchdog role. It's almost as if they feared that by drawing too much attention to their own censorship they would undermine the credibility of what they reported. For example, a front page article in The New York Times by R.W. Apple Jr. effectively bemoaned Hussein's success in publicizing civilian casualties.
As is always the case, the openness of American society, with reporters permitted and indeed expected to challenge official versions of events, puts the United States at some disadvantage in the image war with controlled societies like Iraq. Military officials here accept that and they know they cannot change it, but it still engenders some bitterness. `No one asks tough questions in Baghdad,' one officer said.26
The point is that very few reporters were asking tough questions in Saudi Arabia, Washington, or Ottawa either. As important as these forms of military censorship were in leading to misinformation or a lack of meaningful information about the war, in crucial respects they served as a scapegoat. For, by far the bulk of censorship in Gulf war coverage was
6 Common Cents voluntary in nature, wittingly and unwittingly acceded to, with nary a complaint, effortlessly and painlessly called forth, as was R.W. Apple Jr.'s instinctive apology quoted above. Michael Deaver, the former deputy Chief of Staff for Ronald Reagan, commented on the Pentagon's handling of media coverage of the war, that, “If you were to hire a public relations firm to do the media relations for an international event, it couldn't be done any better than this is being done.”27 Precisely. Another aspect of this media management was the Pentagon's special program to bring at least 450 `local' American reporters to Saudi Arabia, at military expense. The “hometowners” spent up to four days with troops from their cities, writing mostly very favourable stores.28 To understand the extent of the media's complicity, and the reasons for it, we will return to the events of the war and its aftermath, with reference to the invasions of Panama and Grenada and Vietnam before it.
Voluntary Censorship
By the beginning of March, 1991, after a 43-day campaign, George Bush declared victory. He also closed the books on another chapter of historical engineering. “By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” Bush gushed in what The New York Times described as “a spontanteous [sic] burst of pride” following the war.29 CNN echoed that “America beat back the ghost of Vietnam and zeroed in on Saddam Hussein.”30 This was in keeping with the theme of his press conference held to announce the commencement of the war, only hours after the massive bombing of Iraq began on January 16. “This will not be another Vietnam,” Bush had said, evidently promising to deliver public support for the war. “Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world. They will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.” This forms an example of what French philosopher Armand Mattelart described as the claim of universality by the elite class. In order to have its own history appear as “natural,” and the only interpretation, it has to “colonize” the history of the other classes.
It allows us to see how a culture conveyed by the media attempts to deprive the people of its memory. While giving the illusion of relying on and assuming a patrimony of myths, this culture actually standardizes, serializes and appropriates history, which it mutilates and reduces to a series of miscellaneous news items (faits divers). The greatest standardization is undoubtedly that of 7 Truth as the First Casualty
historical time.31
Vietnam: Fighting The Last War
While George Bush was ostensibly fighting the Iraqis, he was also trying to win the Vietnam war. And the fact that the media has been cast in the role of the villain in the Vietnam war was one of the reasons journalists were determined to demonstrate their loyalty in this war. The U.S. dropped 4,600,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam, and 400,000 tons of napalm. They sent 2,150,000 troops to Vietnam, of whom 57,900 died while killing 1,921,000 Vietnamese.32 So, in what way was the U.S. fighting with “one hand tied behind their backs?” It certainly wasn't a lack of military firepower. American academic (and mainstream media pariah) Noam Chomsky suggested that this refers to the presence of the Soviet Union as a superpower deterrent to unlimited U.S. aggression, a deterrent which internal problems in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have since removed.33 In Vietnam, there was always the danger that the U.S. would stray too far afield and incur the wrath of the Soviets or Chinese. To do so, Chomsky has wryly noted, would be to ignore “the first rule of statesmanship,” which is that you don't shoot at someone who is capable of firing back. Another possible interpretation is the lack of public support for a sustained war abroad. Bush addressed the troops at his first “welcome home” ceremony, in Sumter South Carolina, on St. Patrick's day. “When you left it was still fashionable to question America's decency, America's courage, America's resolve,” he said. “No one, no one in the whole world doubts us any more. [Applause] What you did, you helped us revive the America of our old hopes and dreams.” Bush told the public and troops' families,
You don't have to wear a uniform to be a war hero. Here, crowded on the bleachers, and out there on the field, are heroes and heroines of all ages. Mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, children, neighbours, friends...the loved ones and even strangers all across our great country hung out yellow ribbons, unfurled flags, sent letters and gifts...no one understands this magic but it's a kind of blessing that enables good people to accomplish great deeds.34
Thus did Bush establish that those at home waving the flag were heroes too, and in
8 Common Cents so-doing, he included the public as part of the war effort, leaving little room for protest and effectively defining non-support for the war out of existence.35 In designating the supportive observers as war heroes, Bush reinforced the key concept of individual determinism. Even as they waved their tiny American flags and rose (en masse) to deliver standing ovations, the spectators were congratulated on their individual roles. If public responses such as ribbons, flags and letters are due to individual and inexplicable “magic,” then this indeed is a “blessing” for Bush's “good people.” It may also be self-evident that if we ourselves are responsible for everything ranging from our social status to the war on Saddam Hussein, then there is no point in looking for broader causal factors. The “Vietnam syndrome,” was an underlying theme of the Gulf war. In referring to it, Bush appeared to mean an (unjustified) lack of public support for the war effort.36 Others viewed it as the public's desire for peace.37 Neither is accurate, although the latter comes much closer than the former. An understanding of conflicting interpretations of the Vietnam war is crucial in order to place the Gulf war in perspective. Hence, we will examine the Vietnam syndrome in some detail at the outset. As seen by the official government and mainstream media and perhaps the public recollection as well, the Vietnam war bears more resemblance to a “Rambo” film than to actual events.38 Although not as extreme, the CNN version of the Gulf war is closer to the former than the latter.39 This “common sense” perception of Vietnam is roughly as follows: in the 1950s, as the French abandoned their fight against the communist hordes in Vietnam, the U.S. and several allies were compelled to step in and defend democracy. This gradually escalated until the U.S. was provoked by the Vietcong, in the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, and from then on U.S. involvement accelerated rapidly. This involvement of course was undertaken at the urging of the South Vietnam government and people, who opposed the Vietcong and communism. After about four years of heavy involvement, and following the communist Tet offensive of 1968, U.S. media coverage turned against the war. Television in particular, with its vivid footage of My Lai-type massacres and U.S. bodybags, also served to turn public opinion against the war. With media and public against them, the Administration and Pentagon had little recourse but to seek “peace with honour.” According to this perspective, the Vietnam syndrome represents the inability of armed forces to win a protracted war which is unpopular with media and public back home. Even though the goal of the U.S. Administration might be the altruistic defense of small third world countries faced with naked communist aggression, this means nought when filtered by the leftist media40 and opposed by their peacenik collaborators. A competing interpretation, or what Ralph Nader termed a “dissenting ideology” as applied to Vietnam, might be as follows: by the late 1940s, U.S. backing of France's post-WW2 attempts to reconquer its Indochina colonies meant that the U.S. was aligned against Vietnamese nationalist forces struggling for freedom and 9 Truth as the First Casualty representing the overwhelming majority of the population. With French withdrawal in 1954, the U.S. subverted the Geneva agreements which laid the groundwork for unification of Vietnam, and established a client State in South Vietnam. This client controlled its population with substantial violence. In the early 1960s, the U.S. bombed South Vietnam in an effort to drive millions of people into “strategic hamlets” which were no more than barbed-wire concentration camps, and which would ostensibly protect the South Vietnamese from communist guerrillas whom they were willingly supporting.41 Contrary to the arguments of proponents of the Vietnam syndrome, the evidence points to media coverage and popular opinion which were supportive of the U.S. Administration's war effort, up until 1968, when the Tet offensive convinced the U.S. government to abandon hopes of a military victory.
The Tet offensive of January 1968...convinced U.S. elites that the war was proving too costly to the United States, and that strategy should shift toward a more `capital-intensive' operation with reliance on an indigenous mercenary army (in the technical sense of the phrase) and gradual withdrawal of the U.S. forces, which were by then suffering a severe loss of morale, a matter of growing concern to military authorities.42
Thus, the media and eventually the public merely “mirrored the changes in elite opinion.”43 Content analyses of the period indicate that the media were pro-war. Polls taken indicate that watching TV coverage made the American public more, rather than less, supportive of the war effort up until 1969, when the focus of media coverage shifted to the Paris peace talks.44 So, rather than media portrayals turning public opinion against the war, eventually resulting in low troop morale and political pressures which caused the U.S. to lose the war, it's evident that media and public merely followed the decisions, attitudes, and lead of the Administration, Pentagon, elites generally (in the form of Johnson's “wise men,”) and even the demoralized troops themselves. Chomsky quotes from a New York Times' analysis of the debate over the Vietnam War, written long afterward, which stated:
There are those Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth...A decade of fierce polemics has
10 Common Cents
failed to resolve this ongoing quarrel.45
So, the hawks allege that the U.S. could have won, while the doves say victory was always beyond their grasp. In clarifying his dissenting ideology, what Chomsky says is missing is a third position: “the United States simply had no legal or moral right to intervene in the internal affairs of Vietnam in the first place.” This third position exceeds what Chomsky calls, “The Bounds of the Expressible,” and illustrates the genius of “brainwashing under freedom.” If one rejects the common sense view in favour of Chomsky's dissenting view, then the question of how the Administration (successfully) has foisted the former view on us, becomes paramount. In part, the media have been, perhaps willingly, victimized by a powerful propaganda or “flak” machine. This is all the more evident, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky point out, in that the two-volume study constituting the authoritative “proof” that the media lost the war through their biased, anti-government reporting, was sponsored by Freedom House,46 one of the preeminent organizations which “harass the media and put pressure on them to follow the corporate agenda and a hard-line, right-wing foreign policy.”47 The effectiveness of this approach may be seen in the way the media toed the official line in reporting on Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, and the Gulf war. By the start of the Gulf War a new history of the Vietnam conflict had been imposed on the American consciousness, a history which the media played a key role in reinforcing.
The War in the Gulf
For the public, the protestations of support for the troops at peace rallies, combined with the ubiquitous flag waving and yellow ribbons, may in part attest to public guilt and remorse over the “doctrinal consensus” on Vietnam. As New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen put it, “From the beginning it has been difficult to publicly oppose this war, to express reservations or even forgo the exuberant display of national accord.”48 The one U.S. correspondent who remained in Baghdad, Peter Arnett of CNN, came under a barrage of criticism led by Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who called him an Iraqi “sympathizer” for continuing to report from Iraq, although his transmissions carried a disclaimer that they were subject to Iraqi censorship.49 When Arnett reported that U.S. planes bombed a “baby milk plant” in Baghdad, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater accused CNN of serving as a conduit for Iraqi “disinformation.”50 Six further, brief examples are illustrative of the patriotic frenzy and climate of intolerance aroused no doubt in part by the remorse over Vietnam. 1. Seton Hall (N.J.) College basketball player Marco Lokar returned to his native Italy following death threats against him for refusing to wear the U.S. flag on his uniform as a show of support for Gulf troops.51 11 Truth as the First Casualty
2. At a war protest rally held at the SUNY college campus in New Paltz N.Y., professor Barbara Scott urged American military personnel not to kill innocent people. In the enormous brouhaha following the event, the media dubbed her “Baghdad Barbara,” in reference to Tokyo Rose of WW2. Republican Senator Charles Cook went so far as to publicly accuse Scott of treason. Letter campaigns were aimed at the college president and Governor Mario Cuomo, urging them to fire Scott. Meanwhile, hate mail arrived at her office.52 3. In Kutztown Pa., a newspaper editor was fired for his editorial titled, “How about a little peace!”53 4. Editor and columnist Warren Hinckle of the San Francisco Examiner wrote approvingly of an antiwar march, and was put on a partially paid three-month leave. “I take the position that I was censored,” Hinckle said.54 5. The PBS network postponed a rebroadcast of a Bill Moyers “Frontline” program on the Iran-Contra affair. An internal PBS memo indicated that because the program raised “serious questions about then-Vice President Bush's involvement and actions,” (for example, Bush lied about a $100 million cash for Contra support tit-for-tat with the Honduran government) this made it “journalistically inappropriate” during the war against Iraq, because “the program could be viewed as overtly political by attempting to undermine the President's credibility.”55 6. The Military Families Support Network, an organization of people with relatives serving in the Gulf, prepared a thirty-second paid commercial which was rejected by three Washington area television stations and CNN. In the ad, a photo of the Emir of Kuwait is followed by flag-draped coffins, and an announcer says: “The Emir is waiting for Americans to go to war...Don't send our husbands, wives and our children to their deaths for this man and his oil.” One television official called the ad “exploitative and sensational,” and another said it “does not add to the community's dialogue on this very important issue.”56 These examples illustrate that it doesn't pay to be `unpatriotic,' even if you're not American, or to promote peace or oppose the war, or to be critical of the president, especially in light of the Vietnam syndrome. Recall that Bush's interpretation was that this would constitute an unjustified lack of support for the war effort. Indeed, coverage of peace demonstrations was negligible. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader commented that the peace march held in Washington D.C. on January 26, 1991,
was probably the biggest citizen demonstration ever [held] in Washington in winter. CBS gives them a four-second --that may be an exaggeration -- scan while someone is saying, `Meanwhile, there were protests on both coasts today.' They didn't interview anybody...The media have gone to the point where they don't even cover the bizarre, if the
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bizarre reflects a dissenting ideology.57
An estimated 250,000 people took part in this demonstration. As of February 1, 1991, there were more than 3,200 events against the war held in the U.S. alone.58 Hodding Carter III, former State department spokesperson for the Carter Administration, noted that the Bush White House was “grousing about coverage of the antiwar demonstrations -- which, I would note, was almost nonexistent.”59 Thus, there was significant opposition to the war, despite the overwhelmingly propaganda in favour of it in the mainstream media, where public opinion was portrayed as being universally in favour of the war and the Bush Administration. However, the “Vietnam syndrome” mindset was evident even at anti-war demonstrations and teach-ins, where the majority of speakers went out of their way to explain that they too “support our troops.” This demonstrates that even the so-called “peaceniks” subscribe to, or have been influenced by, the “preferred” version of Vietnam. As Z Magazine publisher Michael Albert noted:
Of course we want them back alive. But they are Bush's troops insofar as they are soldiers fighting an unjust war. We cannot support that...Of course I want to help save the ground soldiers from having to kill or be killed. But I oppose what the ground soldiers are doing.60
Noam Chomsky commented in May, 1991 that: Huge media campaigns wielding vacuous slogans to dispel the danger of thought are now a staple of the ideological system. To derail concern over whether you should support their policy, the PR system focuses attention on whether you support our troops -- meaningless words, as empty as the question of whether you support the people of Iowa. That, of course, is just the point: to reduce the population to gibbering idiots, mouthing empty phrases and patriotic slogans, waving ribbons, watching gladiatorial contests and the models designed for them by the PR industry, but, crucially, not thinking or acting.61
It may be argued that the net result was “an almost fascist popular culture,”62 in support of the war effort. Mainstream media in Canada and the U.S. played an instrumental role in delivering public support for the war to Bush and Brian Mulroney, while simultaneously misdirecting attention from domestic problems which in Canada 13 Truth as the First Casualty included Native issues such as Oka, the Goods and Services Tax, the Free Trade Agreement, the failed Meech Lake Accord, et cetera.63 It wasn't only the Americans, with their ubiquitous yellow ribbons, who were duped. Although survey results consistently show that only about 20 percent of Canadians say war is justified when other means fail, support for the war (option) climbed to 55 percent after it actually began.64 And when it was all over, most Canadians polled (66%) by Angus Reid-Southam News said they would support another U.S. military attack to eliminate Iraq's nuclear weapons capability.65 The Mulroney Government conducted its own PR campaign aimed at rallying public support for participation in the war. A special task force organized by the Privy Council Office emphasized the UN role and contacts with other world leaders, to lessen the appearance of merely following Bush's orders. Senator Lowell Murray, in charge of the cabinet committee on communications, had one eye on the next election and thought perceptions of Mulroney's decisiveness would help his image, especially in view of Jean Chretien's alleged flip-flop on the war.
[T]he Liberals have blown it completely, so the issue will be there. People who have forgotten about the war will have had their perceptions of Mulroney's leadership versus [Jean] Chretien's leadership affected very strongly by what happened this week.66
With careful orchestration, it was only after Israel was struck by the first Scud missile and public support for the war took a measurable jump, that Mulroney went beyond the UN framework to talk about dismantling Hussein's war machine. Both voluntary and involuntary censorship supporting the war were underway long before it began. Media hype climaxed in an `inevitable' momentum on January 15. Minutes before Bush's deadline to Iraq passed, an American TV news anchor said that if an attack didn't follow soon, “there may be a certain sense of letdown.”67 This gleeful anticipation typifies the mainstream media role, which generally may be described as `cheerleading,' and which served to `amnesthetize' the public. There were a number of other characteristics: naming, or characterizing war as peace; dehumanizing the Iraqis; demonizing Saddam Hussein; playing up the terrorist threat; overestimating the Iraqi war machine; claiming war was the Final Resort after failed diplomacy; and ignoring illegal actions and U.S. war crimes. Finally, the media severely restricted the range of debate, by propagating the official U.S. Administration's version of events. There were relatively minor exceptions, as is evident from some of my mainstream media sources. But the overwhelming emphasis, reflected in public support for the war effort, was on the fairytale spun by the “military-industrial complex.” North Americans were subjected to a glut of `infotainment' which totally
14 Common Cents obscured the real picture, replacing it with the “common sense” version approved by the Bush Administration and its military and media arms. In the rest of this chapter I will outline each of these elements of news media portrayals, prior to discussing an alternative version of reality. It should be noted however that the problem wasn't restricted to news coverage. Star-studded welcome home troop extravaganzas; Whitney Houston's video rendition of the U.S. national anthem; the 1991 Super Bowl halftime show with George and Barbara Bush; and talk show host Arsenio Hall, who initially opposed the war but eventually appeared draped in the U.S. flag; form an important part of the popular media perspective on the war, which is not addressed here.
What's in a Name?
To begin with, it was not called a “war.” And, as with Korea and Vietnam, war was never declared. In Vietnam, it was called a “conflict.” But the Orwellian Newspeak dictionary has taken a giant leap forward since then. War has become more sanitized, and surgically clean: an “operation.” Toronto Globe and Mail editor-in-chief William Thorsell gloated that the Gulf war,
was really more of a campaign than a war. It consisted of the largest and best targeted bombing campaign in the history of armed conflict. The Iraqi side cowered, evaded, endured and finally broke under relentless pounding from the air.68
The 1989 invasion and war waged on Panama in search of general Manuel Noriega was labelled “Operation Just Cause.” The war in the Gulf began with operation “Desert Shield,” and moved to operation “Desert Storm.” Indeed, in July 1991 we were still reading stories under the logo “After The Storm,” in The Windsor Star. Of course storms are both naturally occurring and beyond human control, so this conjures up an extremely useful and satisfactory image from the Pentagon's perspective. Today, “wars” are only waged on poverty and drugs, not people. With the language of Newspeak, the raining of massive death and destruction has taken on the surrealistic atmosphere of a combination video-game and sports extravaganza. In the St. Patrick's Day address in Sumter, S.C. referred to above, Bush summed up the war by saying “The coalition victory in Kuwait” involved the merging of “nine allied nations” into “a seamless theatre airforce,” which conducted “the most intense, most successful air assault in history.”69 “That powerful, precise air assault crushed Saddam's war machine while sparing innocent Iraqi citizens and while saving allied lives,” Bush lied.70 But the media not only reported Bush's words, and those of Schwartzkopf and others, they also carried video footage or ran special sections with full colour diagrams, witnessing their 15 Truth as the First Casualty own fascination with war technology. In so doing, they disguised brutal force as symbolic violence. Just as war became a game, so too have games become war. For example, as hockey's Pittsburg Penguins reached their first Stanley Cup final, en route to becoming 1991 NHL champions, the media labelled this, “Operation Ice Storm.”
Operation Ice Storm has entered the ultimate theatre of NHL operations. Operation Desert Storm, the successful military campaign in the Middle East earlier this year, was the instigation for some Penguins fans to hang an Operation Ice Storm sign in the Civic Arena on Saturday when their conquering heroes defeated the Boston Bruins 5-3 to win the Wales Conference championship.71
During the war, the folks back home heard about “sorties” or “visits” carried out using smart “ordinances” virtually guaranteed to avoid “collateral” damage.72 Of course, there was the obvious use of terms such as “Patriot” versus “Scud” missiles, both names being American in origin. “Surgical strikes” called up images of diseased tissue being removed. It's like the television commercial for Dash detergent, which promotes “a stain-seeking system that gets dirt out fast!” But those “surgical strikes” first were introduced in Vietnam, where hundreds of thousands of Indochinese villagers perished. During the Gulf war, about one bombing raid per minute was conducted on Iraq. In the first week of the air war, the U.S. dropped twice the tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany during 1944. In total, the “coalition” forces used 84,200 tons of bombs. But while media and public remained rivetted to technical displays of the laser-guided wizardry of the Cruise and Patriot missiles, et cetera,73 U.S. officials admitted that only 60% of the laser-guided bombs hit their target, so two out of five missed, “sometimes by thousands of feet.”74 U.S. General Merrill McPeak, Air force Chief of Staff, told reporters the guided bombs “hit their targets more than 90 percent of the time.” Even so, “only about one-quarter of the conventional bombs...hit their targets. And the vast majority of the bombs used in the war -- almost 93 percent -- were these conventional `iron' bombs.”75 Subsequent reports bore out these figures. Of the 84,200 tons of bombs dropped, 91.2 percent were “dumb.”76 Yet, in their reportage, the media were fascinated by the surgical precision of the bombing attack, merely relaying the military's perspective. Just after the war was started, for example, The Washington Post reassured us that: U.S. experts have spent months planning ways to minimize `collateral damage.' For example, military officials have plotted bomb runs so that
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munitions that fall short or long will miss hospitals, schools and the like. Senior defense officials have stressed recently that only military and military-industrial targets are at risk.77
When one of the intended targets turned out to be an air raid shelter, hundreds of civilians were killed by the “smart” weaponry. The Pentagon conceded that they knew the al Ameriyya air raid shelter, bombed at 4:30 a.m. on February 13, 1991, was used as a civil defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war. Yet, they failed to warn the Iraqis that they considered its protected status as a civilian shelter to have ended. Under the Geneva Conventions, a warning must be given, setting a reasonable time limit in such circumstances.78 Instead, U.S. military spokespersons responded that it was Saddam Hussein's fault for nefariously duping civilians into hiding in military targets. Bush laid the groundwork for this when he said in an earlier news conference that:
[W]e are doing everything possible and with great success to minimize collateral damage, despite the fact that Saddam has now relocated some military functions, such as command and control headquarters, in civilian areas such as schools.79
This was reminiscent of the `they brought it on themselves' logic used by an American official in Vietnam:
What the Vietcong did was occupy the hamlets we pacified just for the purpose of having the allies move in and bomb them. By their presence, the hamlets were destroyed.80
During the Gulf war coverage, on one of the few occasions when civilian casualties were mentioned, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw intoned, “We must point out again and again that it is Saddam Hussein who put these innocents in harm's way.”81 A clear demonstration of media objectivity. In what some might regard as a form of heresy, a human rights group's investigation castigated the U.S. for its use of the “Patriot” missiles. Despite the glowing reports of technological wizardry, and the psychological morale boost provided to troops and (especially Israeli) citizens, Middle East Watch concluded after an extensive investigation that the use of the Patriot “may have contributed to greater harm to civilian life and property” than would have occurred without using it.82 Their position was supported by MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who wrote in a paper that the Patriot experienced “an almost total failure to intercept quite primitive attacking 17 Truth as the First Casualty missiles.” The Patriot's manufacturer, Raytheon Corp. of Lexington, Massachusetts, challenged professor Postol's findings but even Raytheon has downgraded its initial “almost perfect” assessment of the Patriot's performance. The company now says the Patriot destroyed 90 percent of its Scud targets in Saudi Arabia and 50 percent in Israel.83 This contrasts greatly with media coverage, which left the impression that American technology was virtually infallible. In meeting the ultimate qualification for Orwellian Newspeak, however, war has been classified as peace. Bush told the U.S. Congress that a vote to give him war powers offered the best chance for peace, and The New York Times intoned, “Congress has armed the President, first and foremost, for peace.”84 Canadian External Affairs Minister Joe Clark commented that “What the world is doing in the Gulf...[is] returning to the notion that peace should not only be kept, but made.”85 Defence Minister Bill McKnight told the House of Commons on November 30, 1990 that Canadian forces “are there to enforce the world's condemnation of Iraq. They are there to bring about peace and security in a region where it is important.”86 The obfuscating and misleading use of terms such as “peace,” “defence,” and “operation,” which was not only perpetrated by the Bush Administration but adopted wholesale by the media, is further evidence of their perhaps unthinking, but nonetheless tangible, complicity.87
Dehumanizing the Iraqis
The massive bombing was undertaken and maintained in order to crush Iraqi resistance and reduce the number of U.S. body bags arriving home: another distasteful image of Vietnam. Of course, in this manner the lives of American troops were exchanged for those of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians. This was explained as a simple exercise of “degrading the Iraqi army.” This is a `rerun' of the enormous casualties and devastation for the Vietnamese civilian population in that war.88 As indicated earlier, one young pilot described the “light show” over Baghdad as “the best I've seen since the Fourth of July.” Thus were the Iraqis dehumanized. A U.S. pilot described what it was like picking off Iraqi tanks along the Saudi border with Kuwait: “It's almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen late at night and the cockroaches started scurrying and we're killing them.”89 This wasn't an isolated view. Here's Marine pilot Lieutenant-Colonel Dick White, describing for pool reporters what it was like to see Iraqi troops in Kuwait from his plane: “It was like turning on the kitchen light late at night and the cockroaches started scurrying. We finally got them out where we could find them and kill them.”90 And these are the comments which, perhaps intentionally, made it past the censors. In addition, Iraqis were called “camel jockeys,” and “sand niggers,” an incredible epithet, given the large proportion of Afro-American troops in the Gulf. Like the use of “Japs,” “Reds” (for the Chinese) and “Vietcong,” with its
18 Common Cents connotation of the Congo and Blacks in addition to its denotation of Cong San or communist, these terms are blatantly racist. And this attitude was not restricted to the military. Writing in The Nation, an observer commented that: “One TV reporter told [the U.S.] after the first 8000 sorties had pulverized Iraqi forces, `Soon we'll have to stop the air war and start killing human beings.'”91 Journalists such as this one came to subscribe to the view that no one was dying -- or at least no one of importance. Credence was lent to this perspective by the Pentagon's refusal to release estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties. (In June, 1991, the U.S. released estimates that 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 300,000 wounded in the war.92) Nearly a week into the air war, with Iraqis under constant bombardment, ABC's Ted Koppel said, “Aside from the Scud missile that landed in Tel Aviv earlier, it's been a quiet night in the Middle East.”93 The Pentagon's sanitized air war had defined the Iraqi people out of existence. Thus, while television showed film footage of ducks immersed in oil slicks, alleged victims of Hussein's “eco-terrorism,” we were largely denied access to the death and destruction wrought on the Iraqi people. Commenting on one segment of Iraqi casualty footage, NBC correspondent Dennis Murphy said “Until we get some Western reporters and photographers in there to vouch for it, I think we'll have to call it propaganda.” Anchor Garrick Utley agreed, “That's a pretty good name for it.”94 Earlier, in order to help justify the war, the Iraqi people were portrayed as innocent victims of Hussein who had to be saved from him. This is again reminiscent of Vietnam, as indicated earlier. All of the above serves as tangible evidence for the impact of the cooperative campaign by the true coalition forces: the U.S. government, military-industrial complex and mainstream media.
Demonizing Saddam Hussein In George Orwell's classic book, 1984, Winston Smith's Oceania is (at first) at war with Eurasia, which is led by the Enemy of the People, Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein was once one of the leading figures of the government Party of Oceania, but now “was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.”95 Saddam Hussein, too, was once a welcomed member of the fold. Prior to the August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait, he was an ally and friend to the U.S. and the West, which armed and backed him in his eight-year war with Iran, from 1980-1988. As early as 1975, The New York Times, for example, characterized Iraq as “pragmatic,” and “cooperative,” with credit for this shift going to Hussein's “personal strength.”96 During the Iran-Iraq war, Western leaders went to extraordinary lengths to find excuses for Baghdad.
When an Iraqi warplane launched a French-made missile that crippled the USS Stark, former U.S. 19 Truth as the First Casualty
president Ronald Reagan not only quickly accepted Baghdad's explanation but added that it was Iran (whose tankers were the targets) that was really at fault.97
In late January 1992, we learned that despite claims to being “neutral,” the U.S. “was arming both sides” in the Iran-Iraq war, in its desire to see neither side dominate the region. Perhaps arming both sides could be seen as one definition of “neutral.”98 As recently as November, 1989, the U.S. gave Iraq $1 billion in loan assurances, second only to Mexico, and became Iraq's largest trading partner.99 No longer. On February 1, 1991, a political cartoon on the op-ed page of The New York Times titled “The descent of man,” showed in descending order: Clark Gable, a gorilla, a monkey, a snake, and Saddam Hussein.100 Hussein's rapid fall from glory as America's champion in the war with Iran has less to do with his (deserved) long term reputation as a brutal dictator and murderer, than it does with the fact that, like Panama's General Manuel Noriega before him, he became more useful as an enemy than as a friend.101 In this respect his position was similar to that of the democratically elected government of Iran, prior to the CIA sponsored coup (led by General Norman Schwartzkopf's own father!) which installed the Shah of Iran in 1953.102 In the spring of 1990, Iraq had massive debts of from $70 to $100 billion U.S., incurred during the Iran-Iraq war, including what it had hoped was $40 billion worth of forgivable loans from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.103 OPEC set the price of oil at $18 per barrel in 1986, along with production quotas to maintain that price. But Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates exceeded their quotas, driving the price down to around $13 in June 1990.104 Iran and Iraq were operating near capacity and regarded quota-cheating and lower prices with alarm. Meanwhile, Kuwait was exporting vast amounts of oil at the deflated price, some of which was being pumped from the Rumailah oilfield straddling the border and jointly-owned with Iraq. This harmed Iraq's ability to recover financially from the war with Iran,105 as oil constitutes 95 percent of Iraq's exports. Hussein was desperate. As The New York Times indicated on March 1, 1991, with the war safely over, “Iraq's near-empty treasury has been both a cause of war and an obstacle to its conclusion.” One former diplomat was quoted as saying, “They (Iraqis) were in a very tight condition financially, which is why we had the invasion” of Kuwait.106 On top of this, Iraq feared another Israeli or U.S. attack, as the U.S. was grumbling about Hussein's military buildup. In a July 1990 meeting with April Glaspie, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Hussein was reassured that border disputes between Iraq and Kuwait were a local matter, and the U.S. would not intervene. He may have interpreted this as a green light from the U.S., similar to that given for his aggression against Iran. Thus, the U.S. has the right to defend its interests by force, according to the official view presented in justification of its invasion of Panama,107 and as indicated by its very presence in the Persian Gulf. Other leaders and countries which operate under
20 Common Cents the same philosophy are portrayed as the Antichrist. This is some of the background to the invasion of Kuwait, not to be found in mainstream media108 bent on portraying Hussein as another “Hitler,” as Bush repeatedly put it, or a madman whose ruthless acts are unsupported by rhyme or reason. CNN captured Bush in their war video saying, “What we are looking at is good and evil. Right and wrong.” The Globe and Mail, in an editorial titled: “The world unites against Saddam Hussein,” commented on the day the war began that “The world faces war in the Middle East because of the intransigence of one man.”109 After the war, The Globe commented, “The defeat of evil on the other side certainly justifies great satisfaction, as does the successful defence of important coalition interests.”110 Just as the ground war was coming to an end, The New York Times led off an editorial by intoning, “At every chance, Saddam Hussein has worked to make himself the most hated man in the world.”111 In a television interview in mid-April, 1991, former U.S. president Richard Nixon called Hussein “an international menace,” and said if he was still the president, he would have Hussein killed. “If I could find a way to get him out of there, even putting a contract out on him, if the CIA still did that sort of a thing, assuming it ever did, I would be for it.”112 In his own endearing, ham-fisted way, Nixon was merely echoing publicly what George Bush indicated privately, months before. The previous August, only weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Bush signed a top-secret authorization for the CIA to begin covert operations to overthrow Hussein. According to The New York Times, a few senior members of Congress were briefed about the authorization in December.113 One of the most striking portrayals of Hussein was in The New York Post. When Hussein used a video which included him shown patting the head of one of the Western child hostages taken in Kuwait, the newspaper ran a photo on its front page, with the screaming headline: “Child Abuser!”114 The New Republic magazine ran a cover photo of Hussein doctored to make him look like Adolf Hitler. Newsweek called him “a monster” whom “Bush may have to destroy,” and CBS said he was “psychologically deformed.”115 All of which is not to say that Hussein is anything other than a vicious thug. But as Noam Chomsky notes, “Saddam Hussein is a murderous gangster, just as he was before August 2, when he was an amiable friend and favoured trading partner.”116 And he is certainly not the only thug around. It is the hypocrisy, misrepresentation and unnecessary death and destruction that rankles most. On January 6 1992, the CBC programme The Fifth Estate broadcast an exposé about “A massive public relations campaign that whipped up [Gulf] war fever in the U.S.” a year earlier. Reference was made above to the alleged Iraqi massacre of 312 Kuwaiti infants in hospital incubators. In the fall of 1990, during the build-up to the war, the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing at which a young Kuwaiti woman identified only as, “Nayirah, Age 15, Kuwaiti escapee,” testified. The 21 Truth as the First Casualty only eyewitness to the alleged incubator murders, Nayirah sobbingly told the hearing and TV cameras that as a volunteer in a Kuwaiti hospital, she saw the Iraqis as they “took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.” Hundreds supposedly died, and eventually the figure 312 was arrived at. Television footage showed what were alleged to be mass graves. Subsequently, George Bush repeated the story of the incubator deaths six times in his verbal war against Hussein. The UN convened a rare public forum on the issue, and in a vote two days later, the UN approved the use of force by coalition troops in the Gulf. In the Senate debate authorizing the use of U.S. troops, the incubator babies story was cited by “at least seven senators...in voting for the war resolution.”117 Ultimately, the Senate motion of approval passed by only five votes. The Fifth Estate reported that the incubator deaths were “a complete hoax,” part of an attempt to portray Hussein as “evil incarnate,” and which contributed to “overwhelming public consensus” on the war. It turned out that “Nayirah” has the last name “al-Sabah,” she is part of Kuwait's ruling family, and is the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and Canada, facts which were withheld from the Congressional caucus and the media. Although the incubators were said to have been removed from the hospitals and trucked to Baghdad, the Iraqis brought Western journalists into the hospitals and showed them the babies and incubators, when the story broke. After the war ended, groups such as the London-based Physicians for Human Rights went into the hospitals and interviewed Kuwaitis who showed them the incubators and denied the story. Spokesperson Ian Pollock said, “The story evaporated.”118 Nayirah had been carefully coached by Hill and Knowlton, the largest PR firm in the U.S. Hill and Knowlton in turn was hired by a temporary coalition of Kuwaiti citizens and government members calling themselves “Citizens for a Free Kuwait.” According to The Fifth Estate, Citizens for a Free Kuwait paid Hill and Knowlton $10.7 million over a five or six month period, to win over American public support for the war effort. Polling conducted by the [Richard] Wirthlin Group in Washington,119 which was hired by Hill and Knowlton, indicated that early on most Americans were unconcerned over the fate of Kuwait. Consequently, a Wirthlin spokesperson told The Fifth Estate that they asked themselves:
[W]hat is it that we can do to emotionally motivate people to support actions...to drive the Iraqis out? The emotional things that would do that were 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.120
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Evidently one of the things they could do to garner support for the war and hatred for Hussein, was to help perpetrate a shocking hoax on the American people, Congress, and Senate. With great success. One academic analysis of media coverage of the Iraqi invasion continuing through to the Gulf war, “was little more than a verbatim account of government rhetoric.”121 Thus, the Kuwaiti Government hired the largest American public relations firm to convince the American public to go to war in the Gulf. This was accomplished through an extensive PR campaign which included providing free stories and film footage for the news media, but which also specifically targeted Saddam Hussein's image. Craig Fuller, chief of staff for Bush when he was Vice President, handled the Kuwaiti account for Hill and Knowlton. Two weeks into the war, a report by New York Newsday found that in the months leading up to the war the Bush Administration “frequently exaggerated or distorted U.S. intelligence analyses” as part of “its campaign to cast Iraq as an evil and outlaw State,” according to federal documents and State Department officials. The article tackled three assertions made by Bush: 1) Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was unprovoked; 2) Hussein also planned to invade Saudi Arabia; and 3) Hussein was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. The investigation found that the allegations were groundless, and consisted of “contorting” intelligence in an effort “aimed at rallying support for the president's policy.”122 Other examples of demonization abound. In a retrospective editorial on the first anniversary of the war, The Globe and Mail argued that the war was justifiable in part because of Hussein's “pan-Arabist designs.”
Having invaded two countries within a decade (Iran was the first), at the loss of millions of lives, [Hussein] would scarcely be squeamish at taking another -- Saudi Arabia? Egypt? -- in pursuit of his pan-Arabist designs.123
This was the same tack taken by George Bush 18 months earlier, in persuading the reluctant Saudis to accept American troops to defend them against Hussein. Yet Hussein had already emphasized that Iraq had no designs on Saudi Arabia, citing the 1989 non-aggression treaty between the two countries. But the Bush Administration had already begun a “concerted press campaign” emphasizing the danger Hussein posed to the Saudis. Both The New York Times and Washington Post carried front-page stories on August 4, 1990, that “Iraqi forces were massing at the frontier, ready to invade.” Both articles had been leaked by the Administration.124 On August 8, The Post ran a comment by an unidentified senior Saudi official, who said “If we were to allow the status quo to remain, there is little question we would be next on Iraq's list.” Post columnist Mary McGrory commented in her August 7 essay titled “Bush and the Beast 23 Truth as the First Casualty of Baghdad” that “Saudi Arabia is in imminent danger of being invaded by Saddam.”125 Saddam Hussein the beast represented the forces of darkness against whom the penetrating forces of light directed their efficient, superior technology. This technological rationalism has translated into the moral superiority of Western culture, not just in the Gulf war, but dating back at least 500 years, to Columbus. The efficient technology became the evidence of moral virtue. Morality became legitimated by efficiency, which substituted for ethical decisions and choices. It was possible to believe that the smart weapons were delivering the Western forces from moral dilemmas, when they were actually distancing actions from their human consequences.126
The Terrorist Threat
It's February 1991, and a small army navy surplus store in Windsor, Ontario is having a run on an unusual item -- gas masks. Ultimately, they sell out. For weeks, the North American media have been running stories on Israeli preparations for Hussein's use of chemical warfare. Reporters' voices are muffled and camerapersons' vision blurred, as they follow instructions and sit in plastic-sealed rooms, wearing their gas masks, distributed free to Israelis by their government. It takes a court decision to force the Israeli government to distribute the masks to Palestinians living in the West Bank, as well. Families provide guided tours to journalists, showing them their “safe” rooms, with the food stores and plastic lining. The coverage intensifies as the occasional Scud missile lands in Tel Aviv, or Haifa. Scrambling for Gulf-related stories which can be “localized,” the media report on gas mask sales, and “terrorist” threats which seemingly are synonymous with mention of the word “Palestinian.” Symptomatic of the hysteria over terrorism, CBS anchor Dan Rather asks the F.B.I. director whether Jewish Americans should send their children to school the next day. Air travel is down. People are buying gas masks, 20,000 kilometres away from the Middle East. Gas masks and air travel indicate that, like the media, the public managed to “localize” the Middle East crisis, to bring the threat down to a local level and thus exaggerate its importance. It seems reasonable to conclude that the real or imagined terrorist threat served this purpose, while simultaneously heightening the demonization of Hussein and dehumanization of Iraqis and Arabs generally. Like most North American dailies, The Windsor Star was chock-full of “Desert Storm” stories. Every possible local angle was pursued, and no story was too trivial to include. Save one. A journalist interviewed two university professors who were critical of “coalition” involvement in the war, and media coverage of it. One of the professors is a Kurdish Iranian with intimate knowledge of the history of the area. The reporter's editors rejected his story, with the excuse that they had “already covered that angle.” But the media were not the only ones scrambling. In the West, a version of hate crime was perpetrated on Arab-Americans who were subjected to “arson, bomb threats,
24 Common Cents and indiscriminate beatings.”127 The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee logged only five “hate” crimes against Arab-Americans in the first seven months of 1990, but 34 in the final months of the year, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. There were also examples of discrimination by corporations. For example, Pan-American Airways barred Iraqi nationals from it flights until the filing of a lawsuit and a human rights complaint.128 These racist attitudes pervade the highest levels of military and government. Bob Woodward writes that during sensitive negotiations amongst Bush and his top advisers, with the Saudis, before the U.S. was invited in to “defend” that country, “There was a pessimism in the group about the Arabs in general. They could not be relied on.”129 One Canadian-Iraqi commented that “most Iraqis have received visits from CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) agents.”130 Shortly before the onset of the war, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation began to interview Arab-Americans, ostensibly to gather information about possible terrorist activity. When civil liberties organizations objected, F.B.I. Director William Sessions claimed in a letter to The Washington Post that: “the persons who were contacted are not regarded as targets or suspects. The contacts were voluntary, and the individuals were certainly not subjected to any form of interrogation, surveillance or investigation.”131 Sessions went on to argue that it was “critical” during the “current situation” that the F.B.I. continue to “dialogue” with the Arab-American community. Some came to the defense of the F.B.I. Writing for The Washington Post, two former members of the U.S. Administration decried the “hysterical reaction” to the “interview program.”132 Again, civil liberties groups differed. The New York based Fund for Free Expression, a committee of Human Rights Watch, for example, listed a number of incidents of discrimination taken from media reports. One Lebanese-born American working as an electronics engineer for the Federal Communications Commission in Washington reported that F.B.I. agents went to his office on a day he was absent and questioned his co-workers about him.133 There were other examples of Arabs being questioned about their possible involvement in terrorist groups. Interrogating and generally harassing people because of their national origin is just one step removed from rounding them up and putting them in internment camps, as was done with Canadians and Americans of Japanese origin during World War Two.
The Iraqi War Machine
Exploiting the alleged “terrorist threat” was a major means of justifying the Gulf war, as was the emphasis on the chemical weapons threat, the mystique of the “battle-hardened” Elite Republican Guard, and the portrayal of tiny Iraq -- a nation of 18 million with an economy devastated from eight years of war, and an army of conscripts -- as the “fourth largest army in the world.” Prior to the ground war which began on February 24 1991, the U.S. estimated the number of Iraqi troops in the 25 Truth as the First Casualty
“Kuwaiti theatre of operations” as 540,000, with some estimates rising as high as 1,000,000. Afterwards, estimates were revised downwards to between 200,000 and 320,000. “We'll never know, and it really doesn't matter,” one U.S. Administration official said cavalierly.134 Iraqi defenses of bunkers, fire pits and minefields, “terrifyingly portrayed in newspaper graphics around the world,” were “much less formidable in reality.”135 Yet, the Pentagon kept silent beforehand about what they afterwards termed, the “hollow Iraqi threat.”136 In fact, just as Bush was finally calling a halt to the war at the end of February, The New York Times was busy relaying Schwarzkopf's justification for the ground offensive. “A bold strike was needed, [Schwarzkopf] said, because the Iraqis outnumbered the allies 3 to 2 overall and 2 to 1 in fighting forces, when the offense classically needs a 3-to-1 superiority over the defense.”137 Terrorists have no scruples, so Saddam Hussein could be expected to use chemical weapons on civilians. Indeed, On January 17, 1991, with the first Scud attack on Israel, CBC national radio news reported that a mustard gas attack was underway. In fact, the Americans were the only ones to use chemical warfare, in the form of napalm. (Of course, we were told that it was only used to set fire to oil in ditches dug by the Iraqis to defend against tanks. We're to believe that all of the napalm, a deadly incendiary gel, fell on ditches rather than troops.) The admitted use of napalm by the Americans was buried in the war coverage.138 R.W. Apple did report on page one that “...hundreds of canisters of napalm, the gel that bursts into flame when it lands, were dumped into deep, oil-filled trenches in front of enemy lines to try to burn off the oil.” And also that, “It was the first known use of napalm in the Persian Gulf war.” The elaboration was carried in the third-last paragraph, on page eight. “The Associate Press quoted an unidentified marine air officer as saying napalm was being used against Iraqi troops, as it was against the enemy in Vietnam. But Lieut. Comdr. John Tull, a command spokesman, denied the report, asserting that allied warplanes were dropping the gel only on Iraqi defensive works.” Leaving aside Apple's assertion that napalm was only used on the “enemy in Vietnam,” and not North or South Vietnamese citizens, it's clear that faced with conflicting reports from AP and a military spokesperson, he has sided with the latter. This is evident from his front-page description of how napalm was being used. A separate story by Malcolm Browne that same day, “Allies Are Said to Choose Napalm For Strikes on Iraqi Fortifications,” (p. 8a) also presented the U.S. military perspective. Accompanied by a photo of a napalm bomb attached to a Marine Harrier jet, the story provided a lengthy technical description of the origin of napalm (invented at Harvard University during World War Two), and its makeup (gasoline thickened with acids and ignited on contact). The article then went on to describe napalm as “a mainstay of armies and airforces throughout the world.” It said it was being used in the gulf “by allied aircraft” which “are dropping napalm canisters on ditches excavated by Iraqi forces in Kuwait as tank obstacles...Dropping napalm appears to be in an effort to burn off the oil before an attack.”
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The final paragraph of the Browne story read: “The napalm attacks may also be intended to inflict casualties on front-line Iraqi troops and to depress their morale.” Contrast this with the prominent and outraged coverage afforded to charges by Shiite rebels that Iraqi government forces “massacred thousands of people in napalm attacks,” in fighting following the war. This coverage of the napalm issue also exemplified the media's predilection for favouring the military position, when contrasting views were available.139 Another aspect of this highly functional portrayal of Iraq involved “eco terrorism,” over the Gulf oil spills. Late in January, an oil slick was reported in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. blamed Iraq for an intentional release of oil from Kuwaiti facilities. Bush said Hussein's “scorched water strategy” was “kinda sick.”140 While much attention deservedly has been paid to Iraq's destruction of Kuwaiti oil facilities, very little has been paid to the U.S. bombing of Iraqi oil refineries, rigs, tankers, and other targets, resulting in widespread spills. U.S. bombers also knocked out the civilian water supply to major cities like Baghdad, bombed water purification plants, and operational nuclear facilities,141 all bona fide acts of eco terrorism.
The Final Resort
In late January, 1991, George Bush told the National Association of Religious Broadcasters that the Gulf war was a “last resort” after “extraordinary” diplomatic efforts had been tried and failed.142 This was the U.S. Administration's “diplomacy has failed” line, which was dutifully reported by the media. The New York Times, for example, noted on January 20, 1991 that “now that diplomacy has failed and it has come to war.”143 Almost a year later in an anniversary editorial, The Globe and Mail said “The use of force...came only after five months of increasingly frantic diplomatic manoeuvres...failed to persuade Mr. Hussein to withdraw.”144 In reality, the Bush Administration blocked all efforts at peaceful settlement, although continuing to pay lip service to it. The continuing economic embargo was only in effect for five months when the U.S. attacked. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Admiral William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that the question wasn't whether the embargo would work, but whether the United States had the patience to let it work. The CIA reported in early December, 1990 that the embargo was already seriously affecting the civilian economy, and Iraq's military could maintain its level of readiness for no more than nine months. Noting this in The Globe and Mail, Morris Wolfe commented, “Unfortunately, Bush didn't have the `courage of patience,' to use Eisenhower's apt phrase.”145 Yet editorially, The Globe looked back a year later and intoned, “The strictest economic sanctions the world could muster showed no signs of dislodging Mr. Hussein then. Even had they been sustained, it is at least doubtful they would have had any more success by now.”146 The very next day on its own opposite-editorial page, The Globe ran a column by an Iraqi-born Laval University professor who had just returned from Iraq. He described life and death in the 27 Truth as the First Casualty
“wreckage” of Iraq, and the devastating effect of the economic sanctions, still in effect.147 As early as August 12, 1990, Hussein offered to withdraw completely from Kuwait if others too would withdraw from occupied Arab lands: Syria from Lebanon, and Israel from the territories it conquered in 1967. The Financial Times of London suggested this offered “a path away from disaster...through negotiation.” The Bush Administration, however, dismissed it with utter derision.148 So too did Barbara Walters of ABC's Nightline, who characterized Hussein's proposal as: “Unless you solve all the problems of the Middle East, we're going to stay in Kuwait.”149 Hussein also offered to withdraw if an international conference was held on the Palestinian question. On August 23, 1990, Iraq offered to withdraw from Kuwait and to allow foreigners to leave in return for the lifting of sanctions, guaranteed access to the Gulf, and full control of the Rumailah oil field. Although a Mideast affairs specialist in the Bush Administration described this proposal as “serious” and “negotiable,” the White House responded that it “had not been taken seriously because Mr. Bush demands the unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait.”150 The U.S. position was expressed with great clarity by Bush in the letter he wrote to Hussein on January 5, 1991, which was rejected by Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The letter was presented by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, and rejected by Aziz on the grounds that its language was inappropriate for correspondence between heads of State. Bush stated in the letter that “There can be no reward for aggression. Nor will there be any negotiation. Principle cannot be compromised.” Thus, as Chomsky has noted, Bush merely informed Hussein that his choice was either to capitulate without negotiation, or be crushed by force. “Diplomacy is not an option,” Chomsky said.151 When by late February Iraq agreed to a Soviet proposal for unconditional withdrawal over three weeks, an unconditional withdrawal was no longer adequate: it had to be done according to Bush's timeframe of one week. Because the Soviet/Iraqi peace plan called for the removal of economic sanctions once the withdrawal was complete -- sanctions which only existed because of the invasion in the first place -- this was seen as a “conditional” peace offer, which was unacceptable.152 Of course, the Soviet motives were portrayed as suspect.153 Bush's desire for a total military victory led him to reject the proposal, which failed only in its inability to match Bush's escalating demands. Bush was uncompromising in that he offered no opportunity for Hussein to save face. The New York Times commented, “American officials are confident that American and allied forces are on the verge of a decisive military victory and are seeking a peace settlement that is the political equivalent of a rout.”154 The morning after the ground war began, CBS Sunday Morning anchor Charles Kuralt asked correspondent Bill Plant at the White House why the ground war was necessary given Hussein's clear indication that he was willing to leave Kuwait. After acknowledging that there was little difference in the U.S. and Soviet proposals, Plant admitted that without the ground war Bush would not have been able “to humiliate
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Saddam Hussein. He really wanted to go mano-a-mano with Hussein.”155 One U.S. academic has commented that for this to be left as a plausible reason for an “inevitable” ground war, “is astonishing,” and marks “one of the lowest ebbs in the level of political discussion in this country.”156 Opposition to Bush's hard-line stance was non-existent in the mainstream media. For example, Democratic House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt said, “The president spoke this morning for the entire country when he reiterated our insistence on an immediate withdrawal by Iraq.”157 In Canada, editor-in-chief William Thorsell of The Globe and Mail celebrated the use of force, rather than a peaceful resolution. “We did a lot of things right in managing this conflict,” he wrote. “We were not distracted by Mr. Hussein's last-minute efforts to extract political points in defeat through a negotiated settlement.”158 Far better that “we” mete out death and destruction than to allow Hussein to score “political points.”
Illegal Versus Legal Actions in War
The conduct of military operations by all parties to the Gulf war was governed by the United Nations' four 1949 Geneva Conventions for the protection of war victims,159 and by other customary-law restraints on combat. At least since the 1907 Red Cross Hague Regulations, the hinterlands of belligerents have been believed to be secure from the effects of hostilities. According to customary legal restraints, superfluous violence and destruction, even in time of war, is immoral. Additionally, warring parties are required at all times “to distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives.”160 In this section we will examine the conduct of the war to see if it was in accord with international, humanitarian law. To begin with, in its review of the war, Middle East Watch concluded that the “Scud” missile attacks by Iraq on Israel (killing 13 civilians) and Saudi Arabia (killing 1 civilian, in addition to the 28 U.S. soldiers killed in their barracks in Dhahran) constituted “serious violations of humanitarian law.”161 This condemnation is largely based on Iraq's deliberate targeting of civilian populations. Since this was played up by the media during the war, it won't come as a surprise, any more than tales of Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait.162 But what is the answer to the complementary, but largely unasked question, did the U.S. target the Iraqi civilian population? The evidence mentioned above regarding the bombing of the al Ameriyya air raid shelter, is circumstantial, although at a minimum there was serious and fatal neglect. The Pentagon had, and has, a deliberate policy of not disclosing information in their possession about harm to Iraqi civilians and civilian property. From their highly detailed accounts of military targets struck, it is patently evident that they have these 29 Truth as the First Casualty figures and even film footage. For example, General Schwarzkopf reported on January 30 that over the period from 12 noon on January 29 to 3 a.m. on January 30, 178 Iraqi trucks, 55 artillery pieces, and 52 tanks were destroyed.163 There is similar prima facie evidence that Iraqi civilians were targeted, owing for example to the extent of the bombing, as discussed earlier. In addition, Middle East Watch concluded that “indiscriminate” allied attacks failed to distinguish between military and civilian objects on the highways.164 Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the U.S., obtained permission to go into Iraq with a camera crew. His group travelled 2000 miles across Iraq, from February 2 to 8th, 1991, examining civil damage in Baghdad, Basra, and Diwaniya. “There was no `collateral' military damage; all the destruction was to civilians...We saw no evidence of military presence in any of the bombed areas we visited.”165 Clark concluded that “The air assault deliberately targeting the civilian population of Iraq is a war crime.” In the section above on “Naming” in the war, I discussed the sanitized view of the war in the Western media. On February 6, 1991, Radio Baghdad accused coalition forces of trying “to expel Iraq from the 20th century,” claiming the bombing of scientific, economic, cultural and medical installations as well as places of worship and residential areas. Months after the war, commentators agreed. One wrote in The Globe and Mail that “Iraq has been set back to an almost pre-industrial age.”166 But the same day as the radio broadcast, President Bush said the bombing campaign “has been fantastically accurate,” and that he was disturbed by such “statements coming out of Baghdad.” At a news conference at the White House on February 5, Bush said: “We are not trying to systematically destroy...Iraq.”167
I'd like to emphasize that we are going to extraordinary, and I would venture to say unprecedented, length to avoid damage to civilians and holy places. We do not seek Iraq's destruction, nor do we seek to punish the Iraqi people for the decisions and policies of their leaders.168
But in May, 1991, a Greenpeace report on the war said that laser-guided weapons “were sometimes aimed at exclusively civilian installations.”169 A Harvard University team estimated that in the first few days of the air war 13 out of 20 Iraqi electrical generating stations were destroyed or incapacitated. And U.S. Air Force officials involved in planning the air war have indicated that one purpose of destroying that system was to harm civilians and thus encourage them to overthrow Saddam Hussein. For example, in an interview with The Washington Post, an Air Force planner stated that the attacks on Iraq's electrical system were intended to send a message to the Iraqi people: “We're not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we'll fix your electricity,” he said.170
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But in addition to hospital incubators, electricity drives food refrigeration and Iraq's largely mechanized, irrigation-based agricultural system. This is aside from hardships posed by the UN Security Council's sanctions. Water purification and sewage treatment facilities were crippled, creating a serious health hazard. Food storage and warehouses, dairy factories, flour mills and water treatment facilities all were bombed. A UNICEF representative in Iraq noted in May 1991 that the resultant poor hygiene, contaminated water and poor diet left about 100,000 Iraqi children under one year-old, vulnerable to diarrhoea and dehydration.171 A Harvard medical team survey in May 1991 estimated that as many as 170,000 more Iraqi children would die in 1991 alone, from disease and the “catastrophic” breakdown of the health care system. That study was criticized by some public health experts as too speculative, being based on a survey of hospital wards. So, in late August and September a new study was conducted in more than 9,000 Iraqi households, reporting on 16,000 births. Here it was found that disease and poor nutrition increased the mortality rate as much as fourfold, from a prewar level of 20 to 30 deaths per 1,000 to 80 deaths per 1,000.172 An experienced war correspondent based in Baghdad prior to and during part of the air war told Middle East Watch that “Early on I had the impression that the aim was to destroy the infrastructure, to destroy the country economically.”173 Aside from the bombing of military targets, this was accomplished through an overzealous, deliberate targeting of the civilian economy. For example, economic sanctions cut off non-emergency food supplies, and Iraq normally imports 70 percent of its food. By mid-July, 1991, mainstream media reported Iraqi electricity and water “running at 30 to 40 percent of prewar levels,” and an economy “battered into free fall” by bombing and continuing economic sanctions.174 What possible reason could the U.S. have for wreaking such devastation? George Bush provided the answer in mid-February, in rejecting an Iraqi peace proposal. “[T]here's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”175 In post-war interviews with U.S. military planners, The Washington Post concluded that many of the targets in Iraq “were chosen only secondarily to contribute to the military defeat of Baghdad's occupation army in Kuwait.”176 The primary concern was the widespread disruption and destruction of civilian life, with the goal of destabilizing the Iraqi government. In thus failing to distinguish between civilians and military, the U.S. government, military and its coalition partners were indeed guilty of war crimes. As Middle East Watch noted,
Whether or not one shares the goal of overthrowing Saddam's regime, it is clearly inappropriate to target the civilian population as a means of achieving that goal, since such attacks conflict with the customary-law duty to distinguish between 31 Truth as the First Casualty
military targets and the civilian population.177
The targeting of the civilian population persisted once the war was over, with the continuing economic sanctions. In May 1991, Bush commented that “[M]y view is we don't want to lift these [economic] sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”178 Just as the indiscriminate “surgical” bombing of Iraq was undertaken to avoid the Vietnam war image of returning U.S. bodybags, so too were civilians deliberately targeted by economic and bombing campaigns aimed at ousting Saddam Hussein. For their part, the media allowed themselves to be both handcuffed and spoonfed by the Pentagon and U.S. Administration. While they objected to the official military censorship, they censored themselves by voluntarily omitting or significantly downplaying crucial perspectives such as those described above.
The Limited Range of Debate
Much of the above describes the limited range of the debate carried in the mainstream media. But how did the media conduct and portray the debate over their own role in coverage of the war? Some attention was given to broader issues, such as media complicity, oil interests and economic imperatives.179 But just about all of the navel-gazing and criticism was of the `safe,' conformist variety. For example, CBC radio's Media File, which in some respects provided a wonderful and unique (and now defunct) service, carried the views of two journalism professors. The `critical' one argued that the media behaved irresponsibly, by reporting inaccurately in their rush to be first with the news. The `fawning' one argued that criticism arises out of print journalists' envy of TV, which can provide “history in real time,” where you can “see the facts,” and “see a Patriot missile destroy a Scud.” Hence, despite the inaccuracies, getting the news to consumers fast is worth it. One media/academic foundation connected simultaneously to the Gannett newspaper chain and Columbia University, reported in June 1991 on the press and the Gulf war. Among their findings, “Despite the press restrictions imposed by the military, the media were able to keep Americans informed of most major occurrences, and often very quickly.” Of 11 recommendations arising from the report, only one was not self serving: “Excessive reliance on a few sources, especially retired military officers, ought to be questioned.” This mild rebuke was nestled amongst suggestions that: the media use “one voice” on matters of censorship, reform of the press pools, and that “Media organizations...should be praised for their...commitment to quality news” in Gulf war coverage.180 Writing in The Windsor Star, author and military expert Richard Rohmer decried the Pentagon's censorship, which gave it “great power to shape and manage the news.” Then he concluded that all the same, “We got information all right. Buckets of it. Censorship may have been at play but so was the electrifying action in the gulf.”181
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One professor wrote in The Windsor Star that despite shortcomings in war coverage, “one of the more encouraging aspects” was “the media's concern about their own performance.” He was heartened by the press “monitoring its own performance,” as an indication of “a quality of professional concern” which was “not nearly as evident 20 years ago.”182 Of course, the newspaper chose to play up this optimistic angle in the article headline. But is there really cause for enthusiasm when the fox is guarding the henhouse? Criticism of war coverage focused on the media's evident need to fill a seemingly endless void with the idle speculation and trivial gossip of armchair quarterbacks. With their sports analogies and surrealistic game-like atmosphere, the media role was described as irresponsible and useless.183 Such narrow, safe criticism overlooks the utility underlying this type of reporting. Marjorie Nichols of The Ottawa Citizen asked some tough questions about television's role, but wound up delivering a confused message to readers. She wondered what we really know about a war that has produced a rain of bombs on Iraq? But the target of her attack was the “illusion of factual information” created by television pictures. By implication, the press told the truth. And she went on to defend military censorship, concluding that “there's nothing odious about censorship” in a time of war, when there is a need for some “agency to separate reality from illusion.” Just how censorship accomplishes this was not made clear. Nichols then listed what she called, “the verifiable facts” such as the number of allied planes lost as of that date, information which came from the censors.184 Fred Bruning, a Newsday writer who also writes monthly for Maclean's, wrote a piece which for mainstream media fare was positively insightful. He noted that the Gulf shootout looked swell on television, “the Vanna White of all battles,” and then he went on to bemoan the fact that a year later we won't know the underlying causes (did we ever?), or that half of the U.S. population opposed armed conflict prior to the fighting, or that the U.S. had done a brisk business with Iraq for years. He said we wouldn't remember how many Iraqis or Americans died, or that “We subdued a tyrant by atomizing his people.” But Bruning didn't blame the media or governments or military or armament manufacturers for this. He blamed the American public for its historical amnesia.
It is not that the American people have short memories. It is that they have no memories at all. When it comes to world events, we are 230 million [sic] patients on the same Alzheimer's ward. We remember little, one moment to next. We make no connections, see no whole in all the parts.185
In the context of the above discussion, this extremely safe criticism found in the mainstream media is appalling in the way it frames the discussion and precludes critical perspectives. Thus, not only is the content itself distorted, but the discussion of that 33 Truth as the First Casualty distorted content itself is confined to the very limited perspective of “two sides,”186 (of the same coin) fulfilling the need for “balance” and the myth of “objectivity.” Despite occasional references in the media to some of the issues and viewpoints outlined earlier, the vast infotainment glut on the Gulf war followed the Bush agenda as faithfully as any Ministry of Propaganda.
Authorized Knowers and Common Sense
It's apparent that like Vietnam before it, the Gulf war was fought to preserve global economic interests, a topic which is addressed in the next section. What concerns us here is the enabling role served by the mass media, which as we will see in the next chapter, function as the delivery system for elite goals and ideas. The result is what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky call the “doctrinal consensus,” which is “based on serviceability to important domestic power interests.”187 Fundamental to this consensus, of course, is “the subordination of the media to the requirements of the State propaganda system.”188 Obviously, this is a complex topic about which numerous authors have written books. Our goal here is to focus on two related aspects of this situation, as they apply to the media role in the Gulf war: the use of authorized knowers, and the development of a common sense perspective. As they do on a daily basis, during the Gulf war the media exercised a form of self-censorship by relying extensively, if not exclusively on what has been characterized as “elite authorized knowers.”189 As generalists, newsworkers rely on specialist sources for the quotes, opinions and interpretations contained in their ostensibly `objective' stories. Indeed, the myth of objectivity, which is still pervasive in journalism, although increasingly expressed in terms such as “balance,” or “neutrality,” is one of the underlying driving forces behind the use of official sources.190 Unable to overtly opine themselves, given the pretext of objectivity,191 journalists, editors and producers actively frame their stories and then seek out sources who will support their perspective. They also allow themselves to be willing conduits for their sources. The sources relied upon overwhelmingly tend to be official in nature: politicians, corporate leaders, academics, members of “nonpartisan” think-tanks, et cetera. One study at the University of Minnesota, for example, looked at the three major U.S. networks over a 30-month period.
[C]orrespondents and producers established a pattern of returning time and again to a very small group of the same experts...They tend to be men rather than women, East Coasters rather than West, and Republicans (along with a few conservative Democrats) rather than critics of the political establishment. Also favoured by television news are ex-government officials (mostly from
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Republican administrations) and “scholars” from conservative Washington D.C. think tanks who appear to be more steeped in political partisanship than in academic credentials.192
Another study by the media watch group FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, looked at the ABC TV news program Nightline, with Ted Koppel. FAIR studied 865 programs broadcast over 40 months, with almost 2,500 guests. Their 1989 report concluded that “The narrow range of guests makes Nightline a fundamentally conservative political program.” The leading guests, with 14 appearances each, were Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. Next came State Department official Elliott Abrams and the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell, with 12 appearances each.193 There is little reason to think that a study of Canadian TV news would yield anything much different. One content analysis of the three Toronto papers indicated that from 80 to 90 percent of the stories reflect “official news” such as government coverage, press conferences, speeches, press releases, crime and the courts, rather than coverage stemming from the newspapers' own initiative.194 As 1992 began there was the usual spate of year-in-review stories, which of course focused in part on the Gulf war. Indeed, Time magazine chose as its “Man of the Year,” CNN mogul Ted Turner. In addition, since the war itself began on January 16, 1991, the media were brimming with “anniversary” stories a year later. One of these was an interview with two American “experts” on CBC radio's Morningside, with Peter Gzowski, January 9, 1992. The two authorized knowers selected by Morningside producers were a professor from the American University (AU) in Washington, and an “expert” from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The line of questioning taken by Gzowski was that little had changed in a year's time and hence the war had not accomplished much. Both of his chosen experts strenuously disagreed with him. Representing the “moderate” view, the AU professor said that after some agonizing, he “supported the use of force” in the form of war, as a means to “teach better lessons.” The mistakes made were that we “should have toppled Hussein and his regime,” and that we “could have imposed a more democratic order in Kuwait.” In response, the AEI spokesperson held that “The big picture here is the picture of success.” The war was justified for him because of the need “to punish these bad actors” such as Hussein. He argued that Bush went as far as he could, and that the “problem” was that the other coalition members “would not support toppling Saddam.” Nonetheless, by disarming Hussein and taking away the nuclear threat, “We did solve a big problem,” although “It's not perfect,” he said. Within the accepted norms of mainstream journalism, Morningside did its “job.” The producers sought out two slightly differing views, and had their authorized knowers debate their perspectives, with Gzowski playing a very minor role of gadfly (his was the most progressive perspective). Well, this should sound alarm bells for listeners. When a middle-of-the-road journalist holds the most critical perspective, 35 Truth as the First Casualty that's an indication of the narrow range of the debate. In this instance we had one party saying that the Pentagon, U.S. Administration and its allies did a great job, and the “moderate” on the other side arguing that they should have “toppled Hussein and his regime” and “imposed a more democratic order in Kuwait.” Nowhere to be found in all of this is the mildly moderate position that the UN's economic sanctions were working and thus there was no need for the war. Still further from sight was the more critical perspective that the U.S. had no right to use the UN as a vehicle to intervene in the first place, and that even the economic sanctions were uncalled for. Or at the very least there should have been economic sanctions against the U.S. when a (U.S. vetoed) UN Security Council resolution condemned the U.S. during the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama.195 These views were generally “beyond the bounds of the expressible,” although they were noted in rare instances, such as comments by Stephen Lewis and Eric Kierans on CBC radio's Morningside. The reasons lie in part with the choice of experts. Most university professors are quite conservative, despite recent media portrayals of their “political correctness.” Indeed, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky says that professors are among society's most indoctrinated, as they are charged with the responsibility of indoctrinating others. American professors are by and large even more conservative than their Canadian counterparts. As for the AEI, it was founded by industrialists in 1943, and “has become a $10 million (U.S.) per year, fifty-scholar-strong media spin factory for the Republican party.”196 A White House official told The Atlantic magazine in 1986 that “Without AEI, Reagan never would have been elected. AEI made conservatism intellectually respectable.” Over one-half of the AEI budget comes from corporations. Most of its 25 trustees are top officers of those donor corporations, and many of those are Pentagon contractors. For its part, The Globe and Mail regularly relies on “Washington-based writer” Stefan Halper, who served in the White House under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and in the State Department under Ronald Reagan. In December, 1991, he wrote an op-ed opinion piece in which he rebuked Bush for ignoring economic problems at home. “Americans are no longer particularly interested in the `new world order' and glittering images of democracy and freedom for people far away.”197 Of course, U.S. success abroad in achieving “democracy and freedom” was just taken for granted, as was their right to do so. But what was assumed here is in fact a clearly debatable notion: U.S. altruism is only now coming to an end. The global altruists are going to get lean, mean and selfish. The use of authorized knowers helps to maintain the image of objectivity, and protects the media from charges of bias. It makes journalists' work easier: rather than reading that lengthy tome written by some academic, they merely ask you to sum it up in a sentence or two. We saw this in the Gulf war, where journalists ostensibly covering “the war,” were ensconced in hotel rooms hundreds of kilometres from the action, wearing army fatigues and watching press conferences on television. The use of retired generals and other military experts was pervasive. What's more, the media hung on
36 Common Cents every official word spoken by Defence Secretary Dick Cheney, Colin Powell of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gulf forces commander Norman Schwartzkopf, George Bush, et cetera. The media/source relationship is a symbiotic one. Sources make newsworkers' jobs easier, while media deliver sources' propaganda, free of charge and with an added credibility component. When George Bush says we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome, the public may remain sceptical, but it's likely that scepticism will wear down under the constant repetition by The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, the television news, and so forth. In short, as University of Toronto criminologist Richard Ericson and his associates sum it up, news is “framed so as to translate sources' politically interested views into a seemingly apolitical, no-nonsense, common-sense view.”198 This common sense view is in certain respects the picture we carry around in our heads. It is a type of conventional wisdom, which is inherent in one's world view, for example, the view that communism is (was?) bad, or that capitalism is synonymous with democracy, or indeed the notion of a Vietnam syndrome discussed earlier, and just what this is.199 British academic Stuart Hall argues that such “preferred codes” as these:
[H]ave been rendered invisible by the process of ideological masking and taking-for-granted...They seem to be, even to those who employ and manipulate them for the purposes of encoding, simply the `sum of what we already know.'200
Given our understandably limited first-hand exposure to world events, journalists play a crucial role in formulating our common sense perspectives. As Ericson et al. note, “His (sic) is the power of news transformation, constructing as part of the common sense what most people do not know otherwise.”201 As was the case with Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, and a myriad of national and international events before them, this is the legacy of the Gulf war.
[News] shapes not only our knowledge of the world, but also our knowledge of how to know. In transforming the bureaucratic knowledge of other social controllers into the common sense, journalists are simultaneously providing citizens with a means not to know.202
This then is the crux of the epistemological problem for those of us prominently displaying our flags and yellow ribbons, the patriots Bush described as heroes without uniforms: we don't know what is going on, have no idea that we are being misinformed, 37 Truth as the First Casualty and even if we suspect something is amiss we have no idea how to begin to get a better grasp on reality.
The U.S. -- Mercenaries to the World
Some elements of an alternative perspective on the Gulf war have been outlined above. What's missing is an answer to the “why” question: why did the Bush Administration perpetrate this war? The answers are fundamental to our understanding of just what it is that the media left out of their coverage. Implicitly, we've rejected the conventional explanation that it was to “liberate Kuwait,” or as an ingenious placard held by demonstrator Robert Letcher in the January 1991 Washington demonstration put it, to “Restore Kuwait's Legitimate Dictator!”203 At the time of the Iraqi invasion, for example, there were 400,000 Kuwaiti citizens and 2.2 million foreign labourers “who were denied rights of citizenry and treated by the Kuwaitis as lesser beings.”204 In addition to meting out extreme jail sentences, such as 15 years for wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of Hussein, the returned Kuwaiti authorities inflicted “torture, murder and deportation” on thousands of residents.205 Of course, the so-called “wimp factor” undoubtedly played a role, as Bush evidently found this label to be quite disconcerting, and probably relished the thought of shedding it for good.206 The immediate aftermath indicated that this worked, as The New York Times commented:
The war provided a clarity and passion to Mr. Bush's leadership that had been missing. He seemed more focused, more constant in purpose, and less a chameleon of public opinion...Mr. Bush appeared to be acting from strong, unequivocal beliefs.207
An added bonus was his subsequent rise in the polls, and attainment of a support rating in excess of 90 percent: even higher than it was following the Panama invasion and operation “Just Cause.” This resembled Margaret Thatcher's experience in the Falklands war. In the spring of 1982, Thatcher trailed her two rival parties, with a mere 26 percent in the polls. Such is the popularity of these short wars, that afterwards the Tories had leapt ahead to 45 percent. Within days of the Gulf war's end, The Times was expounding on Bush's excellent re-election chances.208 Although his approval rating has since dropped, sitting at about 46 percent in January 1992, Bush's image was indubitably enhanced, on the whole, by the war. Political scientist Jean Smith argues in his forthcoming book that it was British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who gave Bush a “backbone transplant” and convinced him to punish Hussein. The two met on August 3, 1990, one day after
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Hussein invaded Kuwait. In the morning, before meeting with Thatcher, Bush said he was “not contemplating” military intervention, despite a Kuwaiti appeal. After the Thatcher meeting, Bush “lashed out” at Hussein, and began making phone calls, lobbying King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to accept U.S. troops. By Monday, August 6, Defense Secretary Richard Cheney was meeting with Fahd and delivering an ultimatum: “The United States would fight to defend Saudi Arabia” if Hussein invaded, “but it would not fight to liberate it.” King Fahd relented, but he demanded a U.S. commitment to “total war,” so Hussein “would not get up again.”209 But regardless of Thatcher's role, much more was at stake than George Bush's personal pride or political future, or whim, which is what professor Smith seems to argue. Oil interests certainly played a part. Since 1985, oil imports have risen from 31 to 52 percent of U.S. domestic consumption, with Middle East oil increasing to 12 percent of the total. During the same period, U.S. domestic production fell by 15 percent. Based on current trends, the U.S. could be importing from 50 to 70 percent of its oil from the Middle East by 2000.210 Historically, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia “in effect exchanged U.S. military protection in return for managing the region's oil in the interests of Western consuming nations rather than the rest of the Arab world.”211 Another welcomed outcome of the war was its impact on Saudi Arabia. Exporting losses by Iraq and Kuwait represented gains for the Saudis, who stepped up production to the point where they now provide 40 percent of OPEC output. This obviously represents an end to the “hawkish” Iraqi policy of higher prices and lower output.212 But it's more complicated than just oil. Economist Tom Riddell says that throughout the post-World War II period, the U.S. has functioned as a global police force. War or the threat of war has been used by the multinational corporate elite to protect their national and global economic interests. Hence, both old and new “world orders,” or the U.S. sphere of influence, in Chomsky's terms, has consisted of the following:
[T]he promotion of international trade; open access to markets, raw materials, cheap labor, and investment opportunities; and a set of trading and financial institutions that primarily benefited multinational corporations and the already developed countries. [It promotes] profitability and economic growth. Military assistance to cooperative regimes, global military power, and frequent interventions were used to reinforce this order and to support U.S. hegemony within it...War, then, is the ultimate prop for the global 39 Truth as the First Casualty
capitalist system under U.S. leadership, when power itself is insufficient to determine the course of events and relationships. In this sense, the U.S. intervention in the Middle East is about protecting access to oil, preserving jobs (Baker), and continuing the “American way of life” (Bush).213
The U.S. response was not so much about physically protecting access to oil or seeking a specific price, or U.S. jobs, but rather maintaining and even extending U.S. hegemony world wide.214 Middle East stability and the integrity of the Gulf states forms a vital base for U.S. power in the international system. This perspective received some support from Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who quit as France's defence minister during the Gulf war. A year later, he said, “This war merely served to reinforce the hegemony of the United States.”215 In the post-Cold War period, the U.S. military establishment was facing drastic cutbacks. With Satan himself (a “communist” USSR) no longer around to justify exorbitant military expenditures on “defence,” it becomes necessary to invent new enemies, some of whom may be former friends and allies, such as Panama's Manuel Noriega, or Hussein. The unsavoury alternative is to reduce military spending and corporate profits in that sector, possibly diverting the funding to social programs, and towards the huge federal deficit, estimated at $300 billion for 1991. In considering the viability of this “alternative,” we would be wise to remember, for example, that NBC TV news is owned by RCA, which in turn is owned by General Electric, a major U.S. military contractor. GE designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. in the Gulf war, including the Patriot and Tomahawk missiles, the Stealth and B-52 bombers, et cetera.216 As Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted, “In other words, when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”217 Indeed, as Robert Hackett says, “Not only ideological predisposition, but ownership's direct economic interests, might lead the media to support militarism.” It has been argued that in the early 1970s the three main U.S. television networks “turned down the first option on the `Pentagon Papers' because their parent companies were all heavily involved in servicing the war effort.”218 Bush chose to use the enormous military expenditures to relieve the economic depression, all the while reducing spending on social programs. The beauty of this approach is that the costs of the war have been more than paid for by foreign pledges -- so, the U.S. global police force is openly mercenary! The Saudis, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Germany, and Korea pledged about $54 billion (U.S) to the war effort, a total that was estimated would finance the war for three months.219 Since the war lasted for less than two months, costing an estimated $45 billion, it turned out to be profitable for the military, as well as the corporations falling over themselves to rebuild
40 Common Cents
Kuwait. (With preference going to American companies, and bidders pre-ranked according to their national war effort.) Or as The Times put it, with “the Kuwaiti policy of favouring the ally that has done the most fighting.”220 Just as the ground war was coming to an end, The Times reported that: “In the rush for postwar business deals, American companies have won about 70 percent of the roughly 200 contracts signed so far, worth more than $800 million.”221 By February 28, 1991, we learned that the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers had a $45 million contract to “help manage the recovery program” in the first 90 days after the war. That is, the army arranged contracts for U.S. businesses said to be “burning up the phones” with eagerness to get in on the rebuilding.222 Total U.S. trade with Kuwait for the first five months of 1991 was $1.5 billion; the total for all of 1989 was $53 million.223 In Canada, the Quebec newspaper Le Devoir reported in February 1992 that the Gulf war produced at least $100 million worth of contracts for Canadian arms merchants. The report included information that the Canadian Commercial Corporation, an agency of the External Affairs Department, set up a telephone hotline staffed 24 hours a day to ensure that “requests from allies wouldn't get snarled in red tape.”224 Who says war doesn't pay? Thus, Bush was at least potentially able to deliver on his promise not to raise taxes to finance the Gulf war -- he didn't need to, it was financed abroad. Of course, with the ground war pending and victory at hand, he immediately asked Congress for $15 billion.225 The question that occurs is, if the U.S. and other countries were willing to spend all of this money waging war, and if Iraq's dire economic straits were a major contributing factor in its invasion of Kuwait in the first place, why weren't financial arrangements simply made, such as forgiving some of the Iraqi debts to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? Why wasn't there a negotiated settlement? Chomsky argues that the U.S. blocked the diplomatic track because it didn't want the crisis defused at the cost of a few token gains for Iraq: no outcome would be tolerated other than Iraqi capitulation to U.S. force.226 Of course, having sold the American public on the image of Saddam Hussein the monster, Bush could hardly negotiate anything which would look like a form of aid to Iraq. To do so would be to again risk being labelled as a wimp, when the idea was to shed that image. It was far easier given the context which had been created, to justify “aid” to the military and armament manufacturers, in the form of war, than to justify “aid” to Iraq. In mid-August, 1991, we learned from a Congressional report that U.S. weapons sales to the Third World more than doubled in 1990, to $18.5 billion, from $8 billion in 1989. This includes $14.5 billion in U.S. weapons for Saudi Arabia, most of which was supplied after the invasion of Kuwait. Additionally, the report said, “The White House is planning to ask Congress for another massive weapons sale to Saudi Arabia of some $14.5 billion in fighters, tanks and other arms.”227 All of this U.S. involvement was ignored by The Globe and Mail when it 41 Truth as the First Casualty published a Gulf war anniversary story deploring the buildup of armaments in Third World countries and the Middle East, and blaming North Korea, China, the “Soviet Union,” France, Saddam Hussein's Scuds -- but not the U.S. The front page, “Cover Story” article stated that:
[F]or Western countries, the shock of seeing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein wield such a potentially destructive weapon [the Scud] never wore off. Ever since, Western governments have been striving to halt the spread of missiles in the Third World.228
The article did not explain how the U.S. was striving to halt the spread of missiles by doubling its weapons sales to the Third World. These sales may go a long way toward explaining why the war took place, when economic sanctions were working. The answer to the `why' question is evidently complex, having already been the sole subject of several lengthy articles and at least one book. In his analysis, Colin Gordon sums up the reasons for the war as the U.S. “Acting on traditional and mundane concerns for the stability of commodity markets and world trade, and for its credibility as a world power.”229 But whether or not this is entirely true, or the entire truth, it is evident that the public justifications proffered by Bush, and swallowed wholesale by the media, will be recognized as just plain drivel by thinking people everywhere. A final word must be said about the plight of the Kurdish refugees. As Edward Herman noted,
[T]here has even been a tilt back in [Hussein's] favor as a counterweight to more fearsome local nationalist extremists...The fact that Bush repeatedly urged the Iraqis to overthrow the tyrant, and then stood by while the tyrant slaughtered them, I have seen mentioned only in Doug Ireland's column in the Village Voice.230
The Kurdish people have paid an enormous price for the U.S. Administration's successful efforts to thwart Iraqi democracy.231 The New York Times did make passing mention of “the distinct question of whether Mr. Bush implied more support for rebels against Saddam Hussein than he was prepared to deliver.”232 And columnist William Safire commented, “People like the too-trusting Kurds now know they can get killed by relying on Mr. Bush's assurances.”233 But such references in no way detract from Edward Herman's point, which is that the media downplayed how the Kurds got into this plight in the first place.
42 Common Cents
The United Nations refugee agency reported in December 1991 that 200,000 Kurds fleeing from the Iraqi army were back on the trails to snow-capped peaks where hundreds froze to death in March and April, 1991. Tens of thousands of Kurds were fleeing shelling by the Iraqi army, “living under plastic sheets in snow, sleet and bone-numbing cold.” In November 1991, the UN completed efforts to provide winter shelter for 500,000 Kurds “whose homes had been destroyed in fighting or who were afraid to return to them.”234 Despite his repeated calls for Hussein's ouster, Bush would not support the Kurdish “nationalist extremists” or the Iraqi people at large who oppose Hussein, as this would represent a greater threat to U.S. interests than the dictator himself. Citing “deep background” sources, William Safire commented that the “premature cessation” of the war was the result of a decision by Bush “to place cool pragmatism above morality,” in “choosing military dictatorship over a less-orderly system of self-determination.”235 (Of course, Safire went on to bemoan the fact that Bush was “too timid to impose democracy.”) For an analogy, it is instructive to refer to Bush's concerns during the failed Panamanian coup in October 1989, prior to the U.S. invasion of Panama two months later. Although some commentary said Bush's failure to support the coup proved he was a wimp, The New York Times said he exercised “sensible restraint,” in not backing the attempted coup d'état on Panamanian “military strongman,” General Manuel Noriega.236 The major fears were that either: the coup would fail, or the U.S. would wind up simply backing “an unknown new strongman.” These are the reservations which prevented Bush from eliminating what The Times called, “the humiliating Noriega problem.” Gradually, Bush aides admitted to “bad handling” of the failed coup, and members of Congress charged that “confusion among officials cost the United States an opportunity to capture” Noriega.237 Two months later, with the above reservations apparently overcome, the U.S. invaded and overthrew the Noriega government, installing their own “client government.” Noriega himself was eventually kidnapped and brought to the U.S. to face American charges. The same U.S. concerns apply to Iraq: better the devil you know than the one you don't. Unless you can hand pick and install your own replacement despot, it's better to wait lest matters get “out of control” with -- heaven forbid -- some semblance of democracy taking hold.238 Of course, the reasons given by the Administration/media are quite different. According to them, as of this writing, Hussein is using his people as pawns, creating a “looming humanitarian crisis,” just to force the UN to end sanctions. Despite mounting pressure to topple Hussein, in part because of the impending 1992 presidential election campaign, Bush, the Pentagon and State Department are “reluctant” to back the Kurds in a civil war. This is because the Kurds “would need a great deal of allied support.” This would be “all the more problematical” since Turkey would “oppose arming Kurds” and object to “providing rear area bases.”239 As the U.S. demonstrated in its war on the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s, rear area bases such as those in Honduras 43 Truth as the First Casualty are indispensable. Indeed, the “prestige” press reported with alacrity White House concerns that Hussein be removed because he constitutes an embarrassment to Bush in an election year. Here is how both The New York Times and The Globe and Mail reported this: “The White House remains deeply concerned that the Iraqi leader is still in power at the outset of a presidential election year. The ouster of Mr. Hussein would remove the shadow he casts over Mr. Bush's campaign.”240 Obviously, if Hussein is standing in the way of Bush's re-election, he will have to be removed. No further rationale is required. The influential and conservative British newspaper, The Economist, commented that Bush has obvious political reasons for wanting to complete a victory that was “muddied” by Hussein's staying power. But while there is “no question” that the world would be more desirable without Hussein, it warned that “the active pursuit of this aim is a chancy business” because of Hussein's strength, weak opposition, and the risk in helping “a Shia Iraqi faction that is closely linked to Iran.”241 This additional concern expressed by the media/Administration in ousting Hussein, is over the balance of power in the Middle East. Destroying the Republican Guard might create a “military vacuum” which would be readily filled by Iran, Syria or Turkey.242 The U.S. is constantly on guard against “destabilizing” an important region such as the Middle East, which might allow others to counterbalance or interfere with U.S. interests. One problem with the destabilization theory is that it doesn't account for the U.S. role as Global Cop. Iran, Syria, Turkey, and indeed even major powers will steer clear of any U.S. protectorate, especially after the example of what happened to Iraq.
Conclusions
The objectives of this chapter have been twofold: first, to demonstrate how the media presented a united front on the political, economic, and military goals of the Persian Gulf war; and second to delineate the hidden corporate and State apparatus interests and methods which were at best ignored by the media, when knowledge of them is fundamental to developing an oppositional perspective. It's quite clear from the above analysis that the role of the mainstream media in the Gulf war identified them as both a cohesive and integral part of the State apparatus, or what I have termed simply “the Bush Administration.” There is very strong, if not unequivocal evidence for what Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci called a “unison of economic and political aims,” as well as “intellectual and moral unity,” in this reading of media reportage. Consequently, as far as this particular case study is concerned, diversity of content was restricted almost entirely to alternative media, notorious for their limited readership. The occasional exceptions which found their way into the mainstream consciousness industry outlets, were “engulfed” by public relations material. In a manner which is in keeping with Gramsci's notion of hegemony, the
44 Common Cents mediated reality about the Gulf conflict and subsequent war was consistently favourable towards and in keeping with the views of Bush, the Pentagon, and General Electric. The resulting ideological unity, best epitomized by the yellow ribbons, was a result of the media/corporate/military/government nexus successfully framing “competing” definitions of reality within their range, while omitting or marginalizing dissenting views. In this manner the common sense view of events depicted by that nexus became our lived reality. Such minor diversity as initially existed within that nexus, such as the squabble over whether the UN sanctions were working, was soon resolved, with the resulting consensus enveloping mainstream political parties and media alike. Some would defend the performance of the media with the excuse that they were censored, and thus had no choice. This simply doesn't hold water. Censorship doesn't prevent the asking of questions, it merely inhibits the provision of some answers. The alternative media, which continued questioning and seeking answers and context, portrayed a very different picture of events, all the while suffering from even greater censorship. Additionally, if the problem were limited to one of military censorship, then the media would have altered their portrayal since the war ended. This has not happened. Thus the media self-censorship elaborated herein may be identified as the major problem, and the military censorship merely afforded a convenient scapegoat. In blaming the military, the mainstream media reinforced the common sense mythology of a pluralistic elite structure, and their own role as “oppositional,” or watchdogs for the public interest, in this case thwarted by the military. Generally speaking, the Canadian media were not as culpable as the American media were. Mildly oppositional views were presented in Canada, whereas they were heretical in the U.S. Examples include the attention given to the Kuwaiti incubator baby “deaths” story by The Fifth Estate on CBC, and the lengthy Globe and Mail excerpt of Jean Smith's somewhat critical book. Still, Canadian media by and large fell victim to the same patterns of self censorship, from the use of “Desert Storm,” to ignoring the U.S. use of napalm and its targeting of Iraqi civilians. Although at times more circumspect, Canadian media were caught up in the technology and “excitement” of the war as well, and were equally dependent on the U.S. military for information. Although somewhat more sceptical about U.S. motives, Canadian media did not explore the alternative explanations presented in this chapter. To get an inkling of the balance of coverage, we need only remember that two-thirds of Canadians polled in August 1991 favoured another U.S. military attack to eliminate Iraq's nuclear weapons capability. In Chapter Two we will explore more fully why the Canadian media are not substantially different from their American counterparts. In summary, the reality of Gulf war coverage indicates that the media were lapdogs rather than watchdogs. The separate reality recounted herein, including for example the illegal and immoral bombing of Iraqi citizens to pressure them to overthrow Saddam Hussein, was virtually excluded from what American journalist A.J. Liebling has called, “a monovocal, monopolistic, monocular press.” 45 Truth as the First Casualty
***
NOTES
1 Draft copy, from James Winter, Common Cents: Media Portrayal of the Gulf War and Other Events, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1992.
2 Cf. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, N.Y., 2003; and Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Times Books, N.Y., 2006. 1 . Dennis Bernstein and Larry Everest, citing M. Ismail, the hospital's director, in “Health Catastrophe in Iraq,” Z Magazine, 4:6, June 1991, p. 27. 2 . Chris Hedges, “Freed Kuwaities tell of Iraqi abuse including some cases of torture,” The New York Times, February 28, 1991, p. A1,A6. The story told of Iraqi torture and abuse, then towards the end said: “Some of the atrocities that had been reported, such as the killing of infants in the main hospitals shortly after the invasion, are untrue or have been exaggerated, Kuwaitis said. Hospital officials, for instance, said that stories circulated about the killing of 300 children were incorrect.” 3 . Reuters and AP, “Iraqi troops buried alive, Pentagon admits: `No nice way to kill somebody in war,' Washington spokesman says,” The Globe and Mail, September 13, 1991, p. A12. The story quoted Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Hawkins as saying the burial tactic “was designed in part to terrorize the Iraqis into surrendering,” but this was buried in the last two paragraphs of the story. 4 . Wire Services, “Bush urges overthrow of `plotting' Saddam,” The Windsor Star, January 17, 1992, p. A1. 5 . Quoted in “Managed News, Stifled Views,” published by The Fund for Free Expression, a committee of Human Rights Watch, N.Y., February 27, 1991, p. 5. See also, R.W. Apple Jr., “Correspondents protest pool system,” The New York Times, February 12, 1991; Thomas Lippman, “The briefers and the press: combatants on this side of the line,” The Washington Post, February 21, 1991; David Mills, “CBC reporter chafed at restrictions,” The Washington Post, January 26, 1991; Howard Kurtz, “CBS news crew held in Baghdad,” The Washington Post, February 16, 1991. 6 . Among the 17 signatories were the three U.S. TV networks and The New York Times. See Richard Rohmer, “Editors still angry at Pentagon's war censorship,” The Windsor Star, July 8, 1991, p. A7. 7 . “Freedom of Expression and the War,” The Fund for Free Expression, a committee of Human Rights Watch, N.Y., January 28, 1991, p. 4. 8 . “Jumping out of the pool,” Newsweek, February 18, 1991. 9 . R. W. Apple Jr., “Correspondents protest pool system.” 10 . James LeMoyne, “Pentagon's strategy for the press: good news or no news,” The New York Times, February 17, 1991. 11 . Peter Millar, “Facts, lies and videotapes,” The European, February 22-24, 1991. Quoted in Heikki Luostarinen, “Innovations of moral policy in the Gulf War,” Media Development, October, 1991, p. 13.
46 Common Cents
12 . Luostarinen, “Innovations of moral...” p. 14. 13 . Battle Lines: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Military and the Media,” Priority Press Publications, 1985. Cited in “Managed News...” p.2. 14 . Peter Braestrup, Battle Lines: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Military and the Media, Priority Press Publications, 1985. Cited in “Freedom of Expression and the War,” p.5. 15 . This assertion was made by The Nation magazine and other plaintiffs in their lawsuit against the Department of Defense, challenging the Pentagon's new rules for the Gulf war. Cited in “Freedom of Expression and the War,” pp. 4-5. 16 . Eric W. Ober, “A war is waged for the public's right to know,” The Wall Street Journal, January 7, 1991. 17 . “The Pentagon's censors,” The Washington Post, January 12, 1991. 18 . “No news: bad news,” The Nation magazine, January 29, 1991. 19 . “Freedom of Expression and the War,” p.6. 20 . “Freedom of Expression and the War,” p.7. 21 . Patrick Sloyan, “The war you won't see: why the Bush Administration plans to restrict coverage of Gulf combat,” The Washington Post, January 13, 1991. 22 . Sydney Schanberg, “Pentagon-pasteurized news tastes bad,” Newsday, January 11, 1991. 23 . “Military, media face off in Gulf,” The Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1991. 24 . Colonel Darryl Henderson (Retired) “How army is marketing the Gulf war to `soft' public,” The San Francisco Examiner, February 10, 1991. 25 . Howard Kurtz, “Correspondents chafe over curbs on news,” The Washington Post, January 26, 1991. 26 . R.W. Apple Jr., “Commanders deny error on target,” The New York Times, February 14, 1991, p. A1. 27 . Cited in “Managed News, Stifled Views,” p.1. 28 . Debbie Nathan, “Desert shielded,” The Texas Observer, January 11, 1991. 29 . Maureen Dowd, “War Introduces Nation to a Tougher Bush,” The New York Times, March 2, 1991 A1. 30 . CNN video, Desert Storm: The War Begins, narrated by Bernard Shaw, Turner Home Entertainment, 1991. 31 . Armand Mattelart, “Introduction” in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub, (Eds) Communication and Class Struggle, Vol. 1, International General, N.Y., 1978, p. 45. 32 . “What Does Bush Mean?,” Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, p. 42. 33 . Noam Chomsky, comments during a public lecture in Detroit, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, Friday September 20, 1991. 34 . From the Associated Press, “Bush greets soldiers returning from gulf,” as reported in The Windsor Star, March 18, 1991, p. A8. Also, from television news coverage of the ceremonies on March 17, 1991. 35 . This policy appeared to work. FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) says that during the fall 1990 buildup to the war, TV gave almost 3000 minutes of coverage to the crisis, but only 29 minutes (about 1 percent) to citizen opposition. See William Fore, “The shadow war in the Gulf,” Media Development, 47 Truth as the First Casualty
October, 1991, p. 52. 36 . In an article in The New York Times, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense to Ronald Reagan defined “the Vietnam syndrome” as “a reluctance to engage in any overseas military operations and to provide the wherewithal to do so.” He also referred to its “exorcism” by the Gulf war. Dov S. Zakheim, “Is the Vietnam syndrome dead? Happily it's buried in the Gulf,” The New York Times, March 4, 1991, p. A17. 37 . See “Quiddity,” Z Magazine, Vol. 4:3, March 1991, Boston, p. 3. 38 . These authors have been prolific on this topic, but see in particular, “The Indochina Wars (I): Vietnam,” Ch. 5, pp. 169-252, in Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media, Pantheon, N.Y., 1988. 39 . See the CNN video, Desert Storm: The War begins, narrated by Bernard Shaw, Turner Home Entertainment, 1991. 40 . Journalists in general have often been painted as left-of-centre. To take but one example, Paul Godfrey, Toronto Sun publishing president, said in the fall of 1991 that: “Too much of the media portrays [sic] a left-of-centre, sort of bleeding left-wing mentality. I think it becomes sort of ridiculous to portray yourselves as a free-enterprise newspaper and then do what some newspapers do -- lean to the left.” See Frances Misutka, “Making sure the voice of business is heard,” content magazine, November/December 1991, p. 14. 41 . Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 179-180. 42 . Herman and Chomsky, p. 183. 43 . Herman and Chomsky, p. 220 44 . Herman and Chomsky, p. 199 45 . Noam Chomsky, “The Carter Administration: Myth and Reality,” in C.P. Otero (Ed), Noam Chomsky's Radical Priorities, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 2nd Ed., 1981, p.141. 46 . See Peter Braestrup, Big Story, 2 Vols, Westview, Boulder, 1977. Freedom House, according to Herman and Chomsky, “has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and international right wing.” (p. 28) Ironically, Peter Braestrup appears to have changed his mind. Quoted in Richard Valeriani, “Talking Back to the Tube,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1991, Braestrup said “A lot of the military are living a myth -- that TV news had a decisive effect [on] public support for the war in Vietnam...People don't need television to impress upon them the realities of war.” 47 . Herman and Chomsky, p. 27. 48 . Anna Quindlen, “Reservations not accepted,” The New York Times, February 24, 1991. 49 . Howard Kurtz, “Senator Simpson calls Arnett `sympathizer,'” The Washington Post, February 8, 1991. 50 . Howard Kurtz, “White House criticizes CNN report,” The Washington Post, January 24, 1991. 51 . Murray Campbell, “A nation bound and determined to present a united front,” The Globe and Mail, February 18, 1991, p. A12. See also, Al Harvin, “College player quits, citing threats over flag,” The New York Times, February 14, 1991. 52 . Eric Coppolino, “Support Troops: Crush Dissent,” Letter in Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, Boston, p.6. Taken from the Student Leader News Service, New Paltz, N.Y. 53 . The Nation, Vol. 252:9, March 11, 1991, p.291. See also Quindlen,
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“Reservations not accepted.” 54 . Doug Ireland, “Citizen Hearst vs. Citizen Hinckle,” Press Clips, The Village Voice, February 19, 1991. 55 . Howard Kurtz, “PBS cancels `Frontline' repeat,” The Washington Post, February 19, 1991. 56 . Howard Kurtz, “Anti-war ad shot down; TV stations refuse spot by military families group,” The Washington Post, January 12, 1991. 57 . Richard Valeriani, “Talking Back to the Tube,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April, 1991, p. 27. 58 . “Gulf War Responses,” furnished by The Public Eye, and published in Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, p.32. 59 . Valeriani, “Talking Back to the Tube,” p. 28. 60 . Michael Albert, “Loose Ends,” Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, p.11. 61 . Noam Chomsky, “`What we say Goes': the Middle East in the new world order,” Z Magazine, 4:5, May 1991, p.60. 62 . This quotation is taken from a statement by my colleague from Concordia University in Montreal, Dr. Jody Berland, who was speaking at a round-table discussion on the media and the Gulf war, held at the annual conference of the Canadian Communication Association, Queen's University, Kingston Ont., May 31, 1991. 63 . For a brief recounting, see Jim Winter, “Gulf war distracting voters from other woes,” The Windsor Star, January 29, 1991, p. A7. 64 . Michael Valpy, “Canadians gung ho on war, survey finds,” The Globe and Mail, March 20, 1991, p. A7. Valpy is quoting from the results of a survey by University of Lethbridge, Alta., sociologist Reginald Bibby. 65 . Ian Austen, “66% favor another attack on Iraq,” The Toronto Star, August 12, 1991, p. A3. 66 . Hugh Winsor, “Tory task force fights PR war on home front,” The Globe and Mail, January 25, 1991, p. A1. 67 . Jim Winter, “Gulf war distracting voters from other woes,” The Windsor Star, January 29, 1991 p. A7. 68 . William Thorsell, “The gulf war: For once, the good guys got almost everything right,” The Globe and Mail, March 2, 1991, p. D6. 69 . George Bush, address to the troops at the welcome home ceremony in Sumter S.C., March 17, 1991. Covered live on CNN. 70 . This was not unusual, either for George Bush or other U.S. presidents (or for that matter Brian Mulroney, Bill Vander Zalm, et cetera) See for example the article by York University political scientist Harvey Simmons, “Lying in high places threatens democracy,” The Toronto Star, December 29, 1991, B1. 71 . CP, “Penguins reach first cup final,” Windsor Star, May 13, 1991, p. C1. 72 . Time magazine defined “collateral damage” a few days after the war began, as follows: “a term meaning dead or wounded civilians who should have picked a safer neighborhood.” Cited in Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, Carol Publishing Group, N.Y., 1991, p. xviii. 73 . The examples proliferate. One was the Newsweek cover story, “The new science of WAR: high-tech hardware: how many lives can it save?” replete with a cover photo of an F-117A Stealth bomber, and the note: “INSIDE: pullout poster WEAPONS OF WAR.” February 18, 1991. 74 . Holly Sklar, “Buried stories from media gulf,” Z Magazine, Vol. 4:3, 49 Truth as the First Casualty
March 1991, p. 58. See Matthew Fisher and Colin MacKenzie, “Toll on Iraqis `horrendous,' U.S. believes,” The Globe and Mail, Feb. 20, 1991, p. A14. 75 . Colin MacKenzie, “Desertions, understaffed units eroded the threat of Iraqi army,” The Globe and Mail, March 19, 1991 p. A1. 76 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths in the Gulf War, Human Rights Watch, N.Y., 1991, p. 384. This was due to at least one Patriot misfiring and landing in a built-up area, but also the fact that when the Patriots intercepted Iraqi missiles over densely populated areas, large amounts of sometimes explosive debris fell on civilians. 77 . Rick Atkinson, “War's course depends on air power,” The Washington Post, January 17, 1991. 78 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths... p.7 79 . Quoted in a news conference at the White House, February 5, 1991. See Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 94, and Reuters, February 5, 1991. 80 . Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, N.Y., 1988, p. 221. 81 . Metta Spencer, “Prisoners of our own minds: Censorship and the Gulf war,” The Whig-Standard Magazine, August 31, 1991 p. 5. 82 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 6. 83 . Marcus Gee, “A weapon with `cachet,'” The Globe and Mail, January 15, 1992, p. A1, A6. 84 . Edward Herman, “Gulfspeak II,” Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, pp. 15-16. 85 . Joe Clark, “Make peace by force,” quoted in “Just what was said,” The Globe and Mail, November 12, 1990, p. A18. 86 . “What was said: Canada's role in the gulf,” The Ottawa Citizen, January 23, 1991. 87 . Of course, some terms were occasionally exposed for what they were by the media -- the most obvious one being collateral damage. However, this didn't prevent them from using the term. And, while the American government tried to not have it called a war, it was frequently called one by the media, along with the euphemisms. 88 . Edward Herman, “Mere Arabs,” Z Magazine, 4:2, February 1991, p. 72. 89 . Holly Sklar, “Buried stories from media gulf,” p. 60. 90 . Murray Campbell, “A nation bound...” p. A12. 91 . Lloyd DeMause, “The Gulf War as Mental Disorder,” The Nation, 252:9, March 11, 1991, p. 307. 92 . Reuters, “Political liberalization irreversible, Iraq says,” The Globe and Mail, June 6, 1991, p. A15. The estimate came from the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency in Washington. 93 . Lee and Solomon, Unreliable Sources, p. xix. 94 . Metta Spencer, “Prisoners...” p. 5. 95 . George Orwell, 1984, Harcourt, Brave, Jovanovich, N.Y., 1949, p.14. 96 . Christopher Hitchens, “Why we are stuck in the sand,” Harper's, January 1991, p.72. 97 . Paul Koring, “How Saddam became the enemy's enemy,” The Globe and Mail, March 2, 1991, p. D3. 98 . Seymour Hersh, NYT, “U.S. aided Iraq in `82, officials say,” The Globe
50 Common Cents
and Mail, January 27, 1992, p. A11. In 1981 as part of the Iran-Contra scandal, the U.S. supplied covert arms to Iran. A year later intelligence reports indicated that Iraq was on the verge of being overrun by Iran, and thus the U.S. supplied arms, technology and intelligence. 99 . Noam Chomsky, “Nefarious aggression,” Z Magazine, 3:10, October 1990, p. 23. 100 . Holly Sklar, “Buried stories from media gulf,” p.60. 101 . ABC TV's Ted Koppel opined that “Manuel Noriega belongs to that special fraternity of international villains, men like Qaddafi, Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Americans just love to hate.” So, Koppel concluded, “strong public support for a reprisal [sic] was all but guaranteed.” Colleague Peter Jennings denounced Noriega as “one of the more odious creatures with whom the United States has had a relationship,” while CBS's Dan Rather placed him “at the top of the list of the world's drug thieves and scums.” Cited in Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Verso, N.Y., 1991, pp. 145, 151. 102 . Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 1979. Roosevelt is a former CIA officer. 103 . The New York Times, “Reparations, without retribution,” Mar. 4, 1991, p. A16. 104 . Philip Agee, “Producing the proper crisis,” Z Magazine, 3:11, November 1990, p. 55. 105 . Noam Chomsky, “Nefarious aggression,” p. 24. 106 . Keith Bradsher, “War damages and old debts could exhaust Iraq's assets,” The New York Times, March 1, 1991, p. A6. 107 . Noam Chomsky, “Nefarious aggression,” p. 24. 108 . The April Glaspie meeting was reported, but what she said was disputed by the U.S. government, although the Iraqis released a transcript of the meeting. 109 . Lead editorial, “The world unites against Saddam Hussein,” The Globe and Mail, January 17, 1991, p. A16. 110 . William Thorsell, “The gulf war: For once, the good guys got almost everything right,” p. D6. 111 . “Beyond fury, cool calculation,” The New York Times, Feb. 27, 1991, p. A14. 112 . Reuters, “Hussein a Menace, Nixon Says,” The Globe and Mail, April 15, 1991, p.A9. 113 . Bob Woodward, The Commanders, Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1991, p. 282. See also Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths in the Gulf War, p. 85. 114 . Lloyd DeMause, “The Gulf War...” p. 303. 115 . See Clifton Abshire, “Media & war: the big lie,” Culture Concrete, Spr. 91, p. 10. 116 . Noam Chomsky, “The gulf crisis,” Z Magazine, 4:2, February 1991, p. 52. 117 . Laura Eggertson, The Canadian Press, “Gulf War -- history's lessons forgotten,” The Windsor Star, January 16, 1992, p. A1. Eggertson was quoting Harper's magazine publisher John MacArthur, who appeared on The Fifth Estate programme and whose book, The Second Front: Propaganda and Censorship in the Gulf War, is forthcoming. 118 . As indicated earlier, the hoax was reported as the war was coming to an end, by The New York Times. Unfortunately, the recantation only appeared at the 51 Truth as the First Casualty
end of another long recitation of Iraqi war crimes. See Chris Hedges, “Freed Kuwaities tell of Iraqi abuse including some cases of torture,” The New York Times, Feb. 28, 1991, p. A1, A6. 119 . Richard Wirthlin was the pollster for Ronald Reagan, and was a founding partner, with Allan Gregg, of Decima Research Ltd., the polling firm for Brian Mulroney's Conservative Government. Wirthlin sold out his interest in Decima in 1983 to Public Affairs International Ltd., (PAI) a public affairs consulting firm. In 1989, Decima-PAI was bought up by WPP in the U.S., which is also the parent company for Hill and Knowlton. See Roland Perry, Hidden Power, Beaufort Books, N.Y., 1984; Joyce Nelson, Sultans of Sleaze: Public Relations and the Media, Between the Lines, Toronto, 1989. 120 . D. Alsop of The Wirthlin Group, interviewed on The Fifth Estate, January 6, 1992. 121 . Abbas Malek and Lisa Leidig, “U.S. press coverage of the Gulf war,” Media Development, October, 1991, p. 16. 122 . Knut Royce, “Did U.S. distort facts on key Gulf issues?” San Francisco Chronicle, January 30, 1991. 123 . Editorial, “What if the bombs had never dropped?” The Globe and Mail, January 15, 1992, p. A14. 124 . Jean Smith, “George Bush's war: a storm with a silver lining,” The Globe and Mail, January 16, 1992, p. A15. Excerpted from his forthcoming book. 125 . Both quotes are from Abbas Malek and Lisa Leidig, “U.S. press coverage of the Gulf war,” Media Development, October, 1991, pp. 16,17. 126 . See Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins, “Exterminating angels: technology in the Gulf,” Media Development, October, 1991, pp. 26-29. Also, Joyce Nelson, The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age, Between The Lines, Toronto, 1987. 127 . “Home-grown hatemongers,” The New York Times, February 27, 1991, p. A14. 128 . The Fund for Free Expression, “Managed News, Stifled Views,” p.8. See also, Stephanie Saul, “Anti-Arab hate crimes up in U.S.,” New York Newsday, February 7, 1991; Elaine Rivera, “Pan Am agrees to end ban on Iraqi nationals,” New York Newsday, February 23, 1991; Sheryl McCarthy, “Bashing Arabs to silence debate,” New York Newsday, February 6, 1991. 129 . Bob Woodward, The Commanders, Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1991. Quoted from an excerpt published in the Toronto Star, May 3, 1991, p. A23. 130 . Adrienne Jones, “The Iraqi outcasts of Canada,” The Globe and Mail, September 28, 1991, p. D3. 131 . William Sessions, “Fighting terrorism and guarding rights,” Letters to the Editor, The Washington Post, February 14, 1991. 132 . Charles Lichenstein and Paul Joyal, “Singling out Arab Americans...” from The Washington Post newswire, January 21, 1991. Lichenstein was described as “a former U.S. deputy representative to the U.N. Security Council.” Joyal as “the former director of security of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.” 133 . “Managed News, Stifled Views,” p.7. See also Emily Sachar, “F.B.I. grills N.Y. Arab-Americans,” New York Newsday, January 29, 1991. 134 . Colin MacKenzie, “Desertions, understaffed units eroded the threat of Iraqi army,” Globe and Mail, March 19, 1991, p. A1. 135 . MacKenzie, “Desertions...” p. A1. 136 . MacKenzie, “Desertions...” p. A1. 137 . R.W. Apple Jr., “Kuwait is retaken after 7 months as allies destroy main Iraqi force,” The New York Times, February 28, 1991, p. A1, A9. See also Michael
52 Common Cents
Gordon, “Outnumbered and outgunned, allied forces outfox Hussein,” The New York Times, February 28, 1991, p. A9. 138 . See R.W. Apple Jr., “Air War is Pressed: Record Number of Raids Flown Over Kuwait -- Iraqis Burn Wells,” The New York Times, February 23, 1991, p. A1,8. 139 . AP and Reuters wire services, “Rebels accuse Baghdad of napalm massacre,” The Globe and Mail, March 18, 1991 p. A1. 140 . Zoltan Grossman, “Ecocide in the Gulf?” Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, p. 26. 141 . Zoltan Grossman, “Ecocide in the Gulf?” p. 26; see also Holly Sklar, “Buried stories from media Gulf,” pp. 60-61. 142 . Edward Herman, “Gulfspeak II,” Z Magazine, 4:3, March 1991, p. 14. 143 . Thomas Friedman, writing in The New York Times, January 20, 1991, cited in Edward Herman, “Gulfspeak II,” p. 14. 144 . Editorial, “What if the bombs had never dropped?” The Globe and Mail, January 15, 1992, p. A14. 145 . Morris Wolfe, “The wimp as a factor in the gulf war,” The Globe and Mail, March 14, 1991, p. C1. 146 . “What if the bombs...” p. A14. 147 . Louis Munther Azzaria, “Life (and death) in the wreckage,” The Globe and Mail, January 16, 1992, p. A15. 148 . Noam Chomsky, “Nefarious Aggression,” p. 22. 149 . Metta Spencer, “Prisoners...” p.5. 150 . Noam Chomsky, “Nefarious Aggression,” pp. 22-23. Chomsky also notes that: “Rejection of diplomacy was explicit from the outset. New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman (in effect, the State Department voice at the Times) attributed the Administration's rejection of `a diplomatic track' to its concern that negotiations might `defuse the crisis' at the cost of `a few token gains in Kuwait' for the Iraqi dictator, perhaps `a Kuwaiti island or minor border adjustments.'(August 22). Anything short of capitulation to U.S. force is unacceptable, whatever the consequences.” Noam Chomsky, “Oppose the war: the gulf crisis,” Z Magazine, 4:2, Feb. 1991, p. 50. 151 . Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Verso, N.Y., 1991, pp. 207-208. See also AP wire services, January 14, 1990. 152 . Terence Hunt, (AP) “U.S. rejects peace plan; war effort to continue,” The News-Journal, Daytona Beach Fla., Feb. 22, 1991, p. 1. 153 . The New York Times reported that although they were “initially suspicious” of the Soviets, Bush and Co. “have come to see [Gorbachev's] initiative more as an attempt to juggle several competing interests than [as] a sinister plot.” The Soviet strategy, while falling short of “a Cold War scheme,” was “...to enhance Moscow's status in the Arab world, position [their] country for a role in the postwar gulf settlement and demonstrate to Soviet hard-liners that Kremlin foreign policy has not become an extension of American foreign policy...” Thomas Friedman, “No subterfuge is perceived behind Soviet peace moves,” The New York Times, February 23, 1991, p. A5. 154 . Michael Gordon, “The seven-day strategy: Bush timetable seeks to humble Hussein while diminishing army's fighting ability,” The New York Times, Feb. 23, 1991, p. A1. 155 . Cited in Robin Andersen, “The press, the public, and the new world order,” Media Development, October, 1991, p. 20. 156 . Andersen, “The press...” p. 20. 53 Truth as the First Casualty
157 . (From wire services) “Saddam's time running out as Bush orders noon pullout,” The News-Journal, Daytona Beach, Fla, February 23, 1991, p. A1. 158 . William Thorsell, “The gulf war: For once, the good guys got almost everything right,” p. D6. 159 . For my discussion of the Geneva Conventions and conventional and customary laws of war, I have relied upon American University law professor Robert Kogod, “The Legal Regime Governing the Conduct of Air Warfare,” in Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., pp. 27-64. Professor Kogod points out that Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, dated June 1977, supplements the four 1949 Conventions “to provide more effective protection to the civilian population” in international conflicts. Although Iraq, the U.S. and others are not signatories of Protocol I, many of its provisions “reaffirm, clarify or otherwise codify pre-existing customary-law restraints...and thus, are binding on all nations regardless of ratification.” 160 . This is taken from Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, Article 48. In addition it was contained in U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2444, adopted by unanimous vote on December 18, 1969. 161 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 20, 348, 385. 162 . At least some of these atrocities no doubt happened, as did atrocities in Kuwait both before and after the Iraqi occupation. 163 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 16. 164 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 12. 165 . Ramsey Clark, “A War Crime,” The Nation, 252:9, March 11, 1991, p. 309. 166 . Adrienne Jones, “The Iraqi outcasts of Canada,” The Globe and Mail, September 28, 1991, p. D3. 167 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths... p. 93. See also Rick Atkinson and Ann Devroy, “Bush `sceptical' air power can prevail alone in Gulf,” The Washington Post, February 6, 1991. 168 . Reuters, Feb. 5, 1991. Cited in Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths... p. 94. 169 . Cox News Service, “At least 146,000 killed in gulf war,” The Globe and Mail, May 30, 1991, p. A16. 170 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 11. 171 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 10. 172 . (New York Times Wire Service) “War, strife tripled Iraq child mortality, study says,” The Globe and Mail, October 22, 1991, p. A2. 173 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 83. 174 . Tony Horwitz, “Iraqi economy battered into free fall,” The Globe and Mail, July 16, 1991, p. A1. 175 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 84. See also The New York Times, February 16, 1991. 176 . Barton Gellman, “Allied air war struck broadly in Iraq,” The Washington Post, June 23, 1991. 177 . Middle East Watch, Needless Deaths..., p. 11. 178 . Patrick Tyler, “Bush links end of trading ban to Hussein exit,” The New York Times, May 21, 1991, p. A1. 179 . See Jim Winter, “Media broom sweeps clean,” The Toronto Star, January 24, 1991, p. A27; Jim Winter, “Gulf war distracting voters from other
54 Common Cents
woes,” The Windsor Star, January 29, 1991, p. A7. 180 . Gannett Foundation Report, “The Media at War: The Press and the Persian Gulf Conflict,” Gannett Foundation Media Center, Columbia University, N.Y., June 1991, p. xi. The foundation changed its name in July 1991 to “The Freedom Forum.” 181 . Richard Rohmer, “Editors still angry at Pentagon's war censorship,” The Windsor Star, July 8, 1991, p. A7. 182 . Stan Cunningham, “War causing media to take hard look at itself,” The Windsor Star, January 25, 1991, p. A7. 183 . See Klaus Pohl, “Few facts and fewer scruples,” The Globe and Mail, January 22, 1991, p. A15. 184 . Marjorie Nichols, “TV's myopic eye fails to tell truth about war,” The Ottawa Citizen, January 19, 1991. Nichols has since died of cancer. 185 . Fred Bruning, “The other casualties of the Gulf War,” Maclean's, March 18, 1991, p. 15. 186 . This follows one of the tenets of the media propaganda model devised by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent. 187 . Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 135. 188 . Herman and Chomsky, p. 299. 189 . Richard Ericson, Pat Baranek, Janet Chan, Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1987, p. 351. 190 . These comments are based primarily on the excellent work by Ericson et al., cited above, but also on the sociology of news literature by authors such as Edward J. Epstein, David Altheide, Gaye Tuchman, Herbert Gans, the Glasgow University Media Group, Todd Gitlin, and others, as well as personal observations as a media source over the past decade. 191 . On the pretext of objectivity, see Michael Schudson, Discovering The News, Basic, N.Y., 1978, and W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, Longman, N.Y., 2nd Edition, 1988. 192 . Marc Cooper and Lawrence Soley, “All the Right Sources,” Mother Jones, February/March 1990, pp. 20+. 193 . Cited in Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, Carol Publishing Group, N.Y., 1991, p. 27. The study was conducted for FAIR by Boston College sociologists William Hoynes and David Croteau. Mention of the Moral Majority brings to mind a favourite bumper sticker: “The Moral Majority is neither.” 194 . John Miller, “Rethinking old Methods,” Content magazine, September/October 1990, pp. 24+. 195 . See Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Verso, N.Y., 1991, p. 149. Chomsky picks apart the U.S. involvement in Panama. The UN Security Council resolution condemned the ransacking by U.S. troops of the residence of the Nicaraguan ambassador to Panama. The vote was 13-1, with Britain abstaining. Another UN resolution condemned the U.S. trade sanctions and embargo on Panama, with only the U.S. and Israel opposed (p. 159). Even The Globe and Mail editorially condemned “the shallow, boosterish U.S. media” with their “chilling indifference to the fate of innocent Panamanians who have been victimized by this successful little military deployment.” Editorial, The Globe and Mail, January 3, 1990. 196 . Marc Cooper and Lawrence Soley, “TV's favourite think tanks,” Mother Jones, March 1990, p. 26. The information about AEI comes from the News Shapers study, by the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, 1990. 55 Truth as the First Casualty
197 . Stefan Halper, “The politics of discontent,” The Globe and Mail, December 2, 1991, p. A15. See also Stefan Halper, “No time to be giving away the store,” The Globe and Mail, September 3, 1991, p. A17. The Globe does identify Halper's previous connections, which at least has the advantage of being above-board. 198 . Ericson et al., p.17. 199 . These examples are my own. For a general discussion of common sense, see Ericson et al., p.17; also Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, p. 93. 200 . Stuart Hall, “Culture, the Media and the `Ideological Effect,'” in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott, Mass Communication and Society, Sage, London, 1979, pp. 343-344. 201 . Ericson et al., p. 346. 202 . Ericson et al., p. 363. 203 . Among the sentences meted out to people accused of collaborating with the Iraqi occupiers of Kuwait by its returning government, was a 15-year term to a man who wore a T-shirt with Saddam Hussein's picture on it. No other accusations were introduced at his martial law trial. The term was to be followed by deportation. Two brothers whose only evident crime was to fashion key chains with fobs made of bullets, were sentenced to 12 years in prison, followed by deportation. Stories surfaced of “brutal recrimination” by the Government of the Kuwaiti Emir, Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah. George Bush was said to have issued a “mild rebuke implicit in White House and State Department statements...” See Edward Gargan, “Kuwaitis defend treatment of convicted collaborators,” The New York Times, May 21, 1991, p. A6; Patrick Tyler, “Bush urges Kuwait to hold fair trials for the suspects,” The New York Times, May 21, 1991, p. A6. 204 . George Lakoff, “Metaphor & war,” East Bay Express, February 22, 1991. 205 . Linda Hossie, “Kuwaiti residents tortured, murdered, rights group says,” The Globe and Mail, October 18, 1991, p. A16. 206 . Evidently this moniker dates back to a Newsweek cover story in 1987, titled, “Fighting the `Wimp Factor.' Bush was “apoplectic,” snubbing Newsweek for almost a year, until their representatives finally met with him to negotiate a truce. Bush fumed for 45 minutes. “He said that he was personally offended and that his family had been hurt, his daughter had cried...” Morris Wolfe, “The wimp as a factor in the gulf war,” The Globe and Mail, March 14, 1991, p. C1. In his forthcoming book, George Bush's War, University of Toronto political scientist Jean Smith noted that “Some believed that Bush...was proving to himself that he could stand up to Saddam...he was not a wimp.” (Forthcoming, Fitzhenry and Whiteside. From Jean Smith, “George Bush's war: a storm with a silver lining,” The Globe and Mail, January 16, 1992, p. A15.) 207 . Maureen Dowd, “War introduces nation to a tougher Bush,” The New York Times, March 2, 1991, p. A1. 208 . Robin Toner, “Bush's luck in war confers an aura of invincibility in `92,” The New York Times, February 27, 1991, p. A1. 209 . Jean Smith, “George Bush's War...” p. A15. 210 . Simon Bromley, “Crisis in the Gulf,” Capital & Class, Summer, 1991, p. 11. 211 . Bromley, “Crisis in the Gulf,” p. 12. 212 . Mehran Nakhjavani, “Saudis reaping benefits of void in Persian Gulf oil,” The Windsor Star, August 1, 1991, p. A11. 213 . Tom Riddell, “The gulf war and the U.S. economy,” Z Magazine, 4:3,
56 Common Cents
March, 1991, pp. 63-64. 214 . Bromley, “Crisis in the Gulf,” p. 13. 215 . Reuters, “Gulf war was a waste, French ex-minister says,” The Globe and Mail, January 20, 1992, p. A10. 216 . Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Beacon Press, Boston, 3rd Edition, 1990, p.11; also Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources, Carol Publishing Group, N.Y., 1991. 217 . Lee and Solomon, Unreliable Sources, p. xviii. At least in the case of the Patriot missile, the high praise may not have been warranted, as we saw under the opening section on Military Censorship. 218 . The first quote about media economic interests is taken from Robert Hackett, News and Dissent: The Press and the Politics of Peace in Canada, Ablex, New York, 1991, p. 62. The Pentagon Papers exposed American military strategy in Vietnam. The above assertion comes from Richard Bunce, Television in the Corporate Interest, Praeger, N.Y., 1976, chapter 6. 219 . Tom Riddell, “The gulf war and the U.S. economy,” pp. 65-66. These figures will be disputed. The Pentagon predicted, for example, that the war would cost from $58 to $77 billion for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, 1990. Thus, the Bush Administration asked Congress for $15 billion, “plus the use of all $51 billion” pledged in aid from other countries, on February 22. This differs considerably from Riddell's figure of $41.5 billion pledged. (AP), “Pentagon predicts war to cost up to $77 billion this year,” The News-Journal, (Daytona) February 22, 1991, p. 16A. See also Andy Pasztor, Alan Murray (The Wall Street Journal) “U.S. could profit on gulf war, report says,” The Globe and Mail, March 26, 1991, p. A16. This reports estimates from the U.S. Congress, for the $54 billion and $45 billion figures used. 220 . Steve Lohr, “U.S. Corporations win Kuwait rebuilding jobs,” The New York Times, February 28, 1991, p. A11. 221 . Steve Lohr, “U.S. Corporations...” p. A11. 222 . Steve Lohr, “U.S. Corporations...” p. A11. The Canadian Government and corporations also scrambled to “cash in” on an estimated $100 billion rebuilding of Kuwait. International Trade Minister John Crosbie set up a private sector advisory group to coordinate efforts. See Ian Austen, “Canada could cash in on rebuilding Kuwait,” The Windsor Star, March 9, 1991, p. A6. 223 . Cited in Parker Payson, “Figure it out,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 1991, p. 55. 224 . CP (Montreal) “Gulf war lucrative for Canadian firms,” The Windsor Star, February 22, 1992, p. A16. 225 . “Pentagon predicts war to cost up to $77 billion this year,” p. 16A. 226 . Chomsky, “'What we say goes...” p.58. 227 . Associated Press, “U.S. tops in supplying Third World weaponry,” The Toronto Star, August 12, 1991, p. A3. 228 . Marcus Gee, “A weapon with `cachet,'” The Globe and Mail, January 15, 1992, p. A1. 229 . Colin Gordon, “Thicker Than Oil,” Z Magazine, 4:4, April 1991, p.30. 230 . Edward Herman, “War's Bright Future,” Z Magazine, 4:5, May 1991, p.10. 231 . For a detailed analysis, see Noam Chomsky, “What we say goes: the Middle East in the new world order,” Z Magazine, 4:5, May 1991, pp. 49-64. By “thwarting Iraqi democracy” I am referring to U.S. efforts prior to August 2, 1990, to arm Hussein and prop up his dictatorship, rather than allowing the people of Iraq 57 Truth as the First Casualty
to overthrow him. 232 . Editorial, “A leader for some seasons,” The New York Times, April 9, 1991, p. A10. 233 . William Safire, “Level the killing field,” The Globe and Mail, April 2, 1991, p. A15. 234 . Reuters, “Winter closing in on Kurdish refugees,” The Globe and Mail, December 7, 1991, A15. 235 . William Safire, “Level the killing field,” p. A15. 236 . Editorial, “Sensible Restraint on Panama,” The New York Times, p. A30, October 5, 1989. 237 . “Bush, Under Fire, Defends Role in Panama Crisis,” The New York Times, October 7, 1989. 238 . These arguments have been elaborated by Noam Chomsky, using case studies from around the world. See for example, Deterring Democracy. 239 . Patrick Tyler, NY Times News Service, “Pressure mounts to topple Hussein,” The Globe and Mail, December 2, 1991, p. A9. 240 . New York Times Wire Service, “Saudis urging covert action to topple Hussein, officials say,” The Globe and Mail, January 20, 1992, p. A10. 241 . [From The Economist] “Behind the Bluster, another shot at Saddam Hussein?” The Globe and Mail, January 27, 1992, p. A13. 242 . See Michael Posner, “Let's give the New World Order an even break,” The Globe and Mail, May 21, 1991, p. A15; Jim Hoagland (Washington Post), “Iran poised to become Mideast strongman?” The Windsor Star, January 16, 1992, p. A7.