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Chapter 2
The "Crisis in the Gulf" and the
Mainstream Media
In
early August 1990, the "crisis in the Gulf" threatened the political
economy and order of the Middle East and the United States quickly responded
with the threat of military force. In this chapter, I discuss how the
mainstream media constructed "the crisis in the Gulf" through
analysis of the primary frames, images, and discourse by which the crisis was
presented to the public; I put the phrase in parentheses to highlight that the
crisis was a media construct, as was "Saddam Hussein,"
"Iraq," "Arabs," and "the Middle East." That is,
most people had no direct experience or knowledge of these phenomena so their
pictures of the Gulf crisis was a product of the Bush administration discourse
and the media frames through which the crisis was constructed. My argument is
that the mainstream media helped promote the military solution through its
framing of the crisis, through its omissions, and through the ways that they
were manipulated and controlled by the Bush administration and Pentagon to
manufacture consent to its policies.
2.1 The Media and Hegemony
Ruling
elites use the mainstream media to promote their own agendas and to advance
their own interests. I explored a classic case of media manipulation in section
1.1 whereby the Bush administration leaked disinformation to the press to
legitimate sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia and to mobilize public support
for this action. Once the Bush administration announced that it had sent a huge
number of troops to Saudi Arabia on August 7, the mainstream media applauded
these actions and became a conduit for mobilizing support for U.S. policy. For
weeks, only a few dissenting voices were heard in the mainstream media, and no
significant debate took place over the validity and dangerous consequences of
the initial U.S. military response to the Iraqi invasion. During the first
three months of the crisis, TV coverage, in particular, favorably portrayed all
U.S. policy actions, presented the U.S. military intervention in an extremely
positive light, and privileged those voices seeking a military solution to the
conflict.
As
the U.S. military juggernaut occupied Saudi Arabia, television commentators
spoke of the inevitability of war and of the necessity for a military solution.
For example, on ABC's "Nightline" on August 20, correspondent Forrest
Sawyer indicated that he believed that the United States was moving toward a
military resolution of the crisis. ABC reported on August 21, after citing a 75
percent approval rating for Bush, that "Americans appear to be rallying
around the president and to support military action"; later in the same
broadcast ABC cited French President Mitterrand claiming that "Saddam
Hussein has led the world to a war mentality from which it will be hard to get
out." On August 23, NBC Pentagon correspondent Fred Francis reported that
the Pentagon had promised the Saudis that they would not leave Saudi Arabia and
allow Saddam Hussein to remain in place and that unless he pulled out of Kuwait
immediately, there would be war in three to six weeks.
When
the Iraqis began floating diplomatic initiatives on August 12, they were shot
down one by one by the Bush administration, which was inexorably orchestrating
the march to war (see 1.2). The media rarely criticized the Bush
administration's failure to negotiate a diplomatic settlement to the crisis in
the Gulf and served to cover over their relentless progress toward a military
solution. In fact, the mainstream media consistently privileged whatever
strategy the Bush administration favored and were little more than public
relations managers for the White House and Pentagon. On the other hand, there
was eventually some debate precisely because of differences in ruling circles
and the public concerning the advisability of a war in the Middle East. Many
members of the political establishment had grave doubts concerning the wisdom
of getting involved in the turbulent politics of the region and there were many
economic sectors that were concerned that a war in the Gulf would harm their
interests. From the early days of the crisis, there were frequent and intense
discussions in the mainstream media concerning the impact on the economy of a
Gulf war and many sectors of the economy were indeed harmed by the crisis and
war, including the travel industry, the automobile industry, retail and
consumer goods industries, and the housing industry. Many economists feared
that the rising oil prices and uncertainty concerning war would induce a
recession, which eventually occurred, and the stock and commodity markets were
jittery and erratic throughout the crisis and war.
In
addition, there was great concern in the public over the wisdom of getting
involved in a Middle East war. Memories of the Vietnam debacle were still
strong and there was a reluctance among sectors of the public to support a
military solution to the crisis. There was also a strong peace movement that
organized during the crisis which consisted of veterans of the 1960s antiwar
movement, members of the antinuclear, environmental, feminist, and other social
movements opposed to war, and members of a younger generation who themselves
did not want to be involved in war. While this antiwar movement was rarely seen
or heard from in the mainstream media, it was well-organized, large, and vocal
and had at least some influence on public opinion (see Paley 1991 and and Cagan
1992).
In
view of the division of opinion over the proper response to the crisis in the
Gulf, I believe that it is better to utilize a hegemony model of the media
which explains media discourse as articulating positions within or against an
established hegemony, or as an attempt to establish hegemony within society.
Thus, rather than seeing the media as instruments of the state or business
which are merely used to manipulate individuals to support the state or the
established economic system, it is better to analyze how the media function
within varying struggles for hegemony. Different groups and social forces are
constantly struggling for hegemony within society in order to control the
direction, policies, and future of the society. During the 1950s, a
conservative hegemony formed in the United States during the cold war and a
period of relative affluence and social conformity. This hegemony was
challenged by Kennedy liberalism in the 1960s and then by a variety of
countercultural and social movements the same decade. The 1970s was a period of
contestation between liberal and conservative forces with the marginalization
of more radical forces. The elimination of Nixon during the Watergate affair
and 1976 victory of Jimmie Carter suggested an uneasy liberal hegemony during
the era.
From
the 1980s to the present, however, a conservative hegemony has been in place,
though it has been and continues to be contested (see 10.5 on the latter point
and for the historical analysis of hegemony in the U.S. presented here see
Kellner 1990 and Kellner and Ryan 1988; Ferguson and Rogers [1984] analyze
which particular corporate forces, groups, and institutions supported the
opposing political factions during the 1970s and early 1980s). Yet U.S. society
continues to be divided, contested, and full of contradictions which makes
possible the space for critical discourse and oppositional politics. The advantages
of a hegemony model over an instrumental model are that it recognizes
contradictions within ruling elites, between ruling groups and the public,
between professional journalistic ethics and serving the interests of corporate
elites, and between genuine information and mere propaganda (see Kellner 1990,
pp. 16-20 and Chapter 3). The hegemony model also represents society and
culture as a contested terrain and depicts various social groups and movements
struggling for power, rather than seeing society merely as a site of
manipulation and domination (though, as this book will document, such
manipulation of the public does obviously occur).
From
this perspective, the Gulf war was a hegemonic project organized around the use
of military force to resolve political conflicts and to assert U.S. interests
in a "New World Order" with the U.S. as the world's sole superpower.
Such a project would highlight the importance of the military for U.S. foreign
policy in which the U.S. would use its military might to become the policeman
of the world. This project was supported by Bush, Scowcroft, Gates, and many in
the U.S. military and would promote the continuation of a National Security
State (see 1.3). Bush's Gulf war policies were able to enlist the support of
old Cold Warriors looking for new enemies, as well as military-industrial
complex interests, big oil, banking and finance, and other interests directly
served by a strong U.S. role in the Middle East and other hot spots of the
world. Since an aggressive interventionist policy and war in the Gulf was
opposed by powerful forces, it was crucial that the Bush administration enlist
mainstream media support in establishing a Gulf war as a hegemonic project and,
as I argue in this chapter, they were on the whole successful.
Not
all mainstream media voices supported without reservation the Bush
administration policies, however, and critical discourses that appeared during
the crisis in the Gulf can be explained through conflicts within society over
the viability of a military solution. There were structural reasons concerning
the ownership and nature of the corporate media which help explain why the
mainstream media tended to support the military solution. As Scott Henson
argued, the interlocking connections between the military and television
networks are striking: General Electric (GE), which owns NBC, derived $9
billion of its $54.5 billion in revenues from military contracts in 1989 (while
NBC only provided $3.4 billion in revenue). Lee and Solomon (1991, p. xvii)
pointed out that GE "designed, manufactured or supplied parts or
maintenance for nearly every major weapon system employed by the U.S. during
the Gulf war--including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth
bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system.
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 salary."
Many
GE board members sit on the boards of other corporate media like the Washington
Post and are connected with U.S. government agencies and oil corporations
as well. ABC's board of directors is involved with oil companies and the
defense industries, and CBS also has connections with big oil and the defense
industries (see Henson 1991 and the charts compiled by Doug Henwood in Kellner
1990, pp. 83-87). Hence, there were strong corporate forces connected to the
"Big Three" TV networks which would benefit from a war in the Middle
East. Consequently, when the networks were boosting military technology, a
military solution to the crisis, and U.S. intervention to promote corporate
interests, they were acting in the interests of the corporate elite who
controlled the networks. Indeed, we shall see that there were many examples of
blatant bias in favor of corporate interests during the coverage of the Gulf
war that have once again compromised the mainstream media's functions of
providing accurate and unbiased information to make a working democracy
possible.
In
addition, the mainstream media tend to support administrations whose political
policies and agendas correspond to their own interests. During the Reagan
administration, the networks were extremely uncritical of Reagan and his
policies in part because they supported his tax program, his deregulation, and
his lax enforcement of antitrust policies which allowed the networks to merge
with big corporations and which tremendously benefitted them economically (see
Kellner 1990 for documentation). For similar reasons, the corporate sector has
largely supported Bush, though if his economic policies fail and a viable
alternative emerges, they may abandon him (see 10.5).
Furthermore,
the discourses of the state are usually privileged by television news in
particular, especially in times of crisis. The press and broadcast media
journalists regularly get their news and information from official sources and
thus attempt to maintain good personal relations with their sources. Thomas
Friedman of the New York Times plays tennis with U.S. Secretary of State
James Baker, receives frequent leaks of information and briefings from high
State Department officials, and is considered an important source of State
Department thinking on various issues. George Bush invites reporters to go
jogging or walking with him and plays tennis with ABC White House correspondent
Britt Hume; Bush and his staff often favor sympathetic reporters like Hume with
information or interviews. John McWethy of ABC news has had close links with
the Reagan and Bush administrations and all of the Pentagon correspondents
depend on inside connections for information and perspective, and thus are
easily manipulated by their sources.
If
reporters turn on their sources, or are too critical of official policies, they
disrupt their connections and lose important conduits of information.
Furthermore, as a matter of convention, the mainstream news media usually
always include views from the current administration and present administration
positions as fully and sympathetically as possible. During times of crisis,
especially with late-breaking stories, the media are especially dependent on
official sources which are thus able to manipulate and control the agenda. If
the public, as in the case of the crisis in the Gulf, tends to support official
policy, this is another incentive for the mainstream media to privilege the
views of the administration in power, for going against popular policies could
lead to loss of audience and revenue. Conversely, if administration policies
are unpopular, the media may gain audiences (and thus revenues) by criticizing
these policies, which provides structural economic reasons for occasional
critical discourse.
In
fact, it is another convention of mainstream media coverage that they usually
cite the opinion of leaders of the opposing political party. If the Democratic
leadership agrees with Republican policies, as frequently happened during the
past decade, then the hegemonic policies or ideas are strengthened. Yet if
there is significant establishment opposition to administration policies, there
is usually someone in a high position who on or off record will provide
information or critical opinions to journalists who may choose to go with
oppositional views and information embarrassing to the established
administration. In the highly competitive world of the mainstream media, there
are also rewards for breaking stories and for presenting novel or challenging
views as well as official ones. While on the whole the ethos of investigative
and oppositional reporting, which had a brief vogue even within the mainstream
media during the 1970s, has been on the decline, there are still some
journalists who follow the ethic of balance, objectivity, presenting various
sides of a story, and even articulating views or information that may oppose
official policies and spokespeople.
Hegemony
thus involves conflict, opposition, and shifting configurations of power and
ideology. The media do not construct hegemony through imposing a
one-dimensional, dominant, shared set of ideas which are then absorbed by a
passive public. U.S. society itself is divided into competing groups,
ideologies, and political agendas which play themselves out in the media.
Hegemony is constructed when a coalition of social groups imposes its agenda on
the public and it attains dominance. Since most people get their ideas and
opinions through the mainstream media it is a crucial site of hegemony. But
hegemony is usually contested and hegemony shifts, develops, and mobilizes
opinion according to the vicissitudes of the situation.
During
the crisis in the Gulf and the Gulf war, the Bush administration achieved
hegemony by successfully carrying out its war policy and selling it to the
public. Although there was opposition to Bush administration policies, this
opposition was marginalized in the mainstream media and ultimately silenced. In
the following sections, I analyze how the Bush administration constructed
hegemony for its military adventure by shaping the discourses, frames, and
images through which the crisis was interpreted and ultimately accepted by the
public. The media aided in the construction of Bush administration and Pentagon
hegemony through transmitting its positions and discourses and through omission
of what issues it did not discuss and what alternatives to the war policy it
did not pose. I argue that during this fateful episode of world history, the
mainstream media in the United States failed to serve the public by providing a
wide range of opinion on issues of great importance during the crisis in the
Gulf. In particular, they failed to inform the public concerning what was at
stake in the crisis, what the consequences of war would be, what alternatives
there were to a military solution to the crisis, and who would primarily
benefit from a Gulf war (see 1.4 below for further discussion). Yet the fact
that there was occasional questioning of Bush administration and Pentagon
policies within the mainstream media, which I draw on in this book, indicates
that there were divisions within the policy establishment and public over the
wisdom of U.S. Gulf policy. However, as I shall indicate in the following
sections, the mainstream media framed their coverage of the crisis in ways that
supported Bush administration policies and that thus helped mobilize support
for the Gulf war.
Frames,
Images, and the Construction of the Enemy
The
media mobilize public opinion according to frames through which they present
events and individuals. The frames utilized to present possible U.S. military
intervention or war involved producing an image of the enemy. As Sam Keen puts
it, "In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to
death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to
actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology" (1986, p. 10). From
the outset of the crisis in the Gulf, the media employed the frame of popular
culture that portrays conflict as a battle between good and evil.1
Saddam Hussein quickly became the villain in this scenario with the media
vilifying the Iraqi leader as a madman, a Hitler, and worse, while whipping up
anti-Iraqi war fever. Saddam was described by Mary McGrory (see 1.1 above) as a "beast" (Washington
Post, Aug. 7, 1990) and a "monster" that "Bush may have to
destroy" (Newsweek Oct. 20, 1990, and Sept. 3, 1990). George Will
called Saddam "more virulent" than Mussolini and then increased
Hussein's evil by using the Saddam-as-Hitler metaphor in his syndicated
columns. New York Times editorialist A. M. Rosenthal regularly attacked
Hussein as "barbarous" and "an evil dreamer of death" (Aug.
9, 1990). The New York Post described Hussein as "a bloodthirsty
megalomaniac" and headlined tabloid fashion the epithet "UP
YOURS!" when word emerged on August 7 that Bush was sending troops to
Saudi Arabia. The New Republic doctored a Time Magazine cover
photo on Saddam to make him appear more like Hitler by shortening his mustache.
The Saddam-as-Hitler metaphor, of course, would be one of the dominant images
of the crisis and war. According to a study by the Gannett Foundation, there
were 1,170 examples in the print media and television of linking Saddam Hussein
with Hitler (see LaMay, et al. 1991, p. 42).2
Cartoonists had a field day presenting
images of a demonized Saddam Hussein and television resorted to cartoon
techniques itself as when a NBC "war game" simulation on August 8,
1990, had a U.S. colonel pretending to be Hussein and threatening, "I'll
hang a hostage every day!" The media eagerly reported all of Hussein's
alleged and actual crimes (suddenly focusing on actions and events that had
gone unreported when Saddam was a U.S. ally, such as his use of chemical
weapons against Kurdish rebels in his own country). There was even speculation
on Iraq's plans for future terrorism when no current atrocities were on hand
(see Christian Science Monitor, September 21, 1990) and countless TV
segments on Iraqi terrorism, which, along with chemical weapons, were oft-repeated
threats that never materialized.
Saddam's
negative image was forged by a combination of rhetoric, popular culture
demonology, and Manichean metaphysics that presented the Gulf crisis as a
struggle between good and evil. The "naked aggression" of the Iraqi
leader was continually denounced by the Bush administration, and from the
beginning Bush demonized Hussein and personalized and simplified the conflict
as that between the "good" U.S.-led coalition and "evil"
Iraqis. In Michael Rogin's view, the United States regularly constructs
political enemies "by the inflation, stigmatization, and demonization of
political foes" (1987, p. xiii). The effect of the demonization of Saddam
Hussein was to promote a climate in which the necessity to take decisive military
action to eliminate him was privileged. The mainstream media endlessly repeated
stories of Hussein's brutality and made countless reports on Iraqi chemical
weapons, its potential nuclear capacity, and its ability to mobilize terrorist
attacks on the United States and its allies. TV networks broadcast news
segments about radio stations playing records that simulated rock classics with
new lyrics vilifying Saddam and about T-shirts with vicious images of Saddam
Hussein and the Iraqis. It is as if U.S. popular and political culture needed
demonized enemies to ensure its sense of its own goodness and the media
responded with the demonology of the Iraqi dictator.
Generally
speaking, the United States is perpetually "in search of enemies," to
use John Stockwell's phrase,3 and constructs enemies with propaganda
campaigns that paint some leaders, or countries, as absolute villains, while
painting other leaders, who may be just as bad, or worse, as
"allies." Indeed, the attack on Hussein was especially hypocritical
as the United States and other "allied" powers had built up Hussein's
military machine with almost unlimited military equipment and sided with him in
the Iran/Iraq war. The caricature of Hussein and the Iraqis, however, was
one-sided and hyperbolic, substituting cliché and image for analysis and
debate. Hussein is a brutal dictator, but he is also a pragmatist with a
history of cutting deals with the West. His Baath party did torture and murder
its opponents, but it also produced one of the best welfare states in the
Middle East, was one of the few states in the region to give rights to women,
and utilized its oil resources to provide social programs as well as weapons.
Some Iraqis tortured and murdered Kuwaitis, but many were themselves drafted
into the military and opposed the regime and invasion of Kuwait--as would be
perfectly clear at the end of the war by scrutinizing the pitiful, surrendering
Iraqi conscripts.
The
Bush administration and media personalized the crisis as the result of the
actions of one man, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president who was identified with
his country throughout the war. Richard Keeble (forthcoming) points out that
during the Iran/Iraq war, the media invariably referred to "Baghdad"
and "Iraq" as the agents in the war, but during the Gulf crisis and
war the dominant mode of reference was to "Saddam Hussein," who was
presented as the sole agent of all Iraqi actions, thus collapsing Iraq into
Saddam. This was misleading and dishonest as the Iraqi people were themselves
victims of Saddam Hussein and his regime, but the media images of the evil
Hussein reduced the Iraqis to an evil essence embodied in the Iraqi leader. Yet
constructing Saddam Hussein as an absolute villain, as a demon who is so
threatening and violent that he must be destroyed and eradicated, precluded
negotiations and a diplomatic solution. One could not sensibly talk with such a
villain or seek common ground or a diplomatic solution. Instead, one must
exterminate such evil to restore stability and order in the universe. This
vision appears in Hollywood movies and popular television entertainment and
structured the political discourses and dominant media frames of the U.S.
intervention into the complex politics of the Middle East.
Mainstream media
coverage of the crisis in the Gulf tended to personalize the crisis as a
conflict between George Bush and Saddam Hussein. Although Hussein was presented
in purely negative terms, Bush's actions, by contrast, were praised as
"decisive," "brilliant," and "masterly." On
August 7, CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl spoke of Bush's "unique"
diplomatic style, and the same day in the New York Times Maureen Dowd
flatteringly portrayed Bush as a man of decisive action. A few days later, the Times
dubbed Bush "the leader of all countries" (Aug. 12, 1991, editorial).
U.S. motives were described as good and pure, as when the Times
pontificated that U.S. politicians "appeal to high moral values and the
lessons of history....[D]eep down the United States understands that many of
its partners are in the coalition only because of a coincidence of interests,
not because they share a common sense of moral purpose" (Sept. 23, 1990).
Few questions were raised concerning more base U.S. motives like the desire to
control the flow of oil and petrodollars, to establish a permanent military
presence in the area, to discipline Third World countries that refuse to submit
to U.S. hegemony, or the domestic political motivations of Bush and the
military (see 1.3 and 2.5). Instead, the United States was presented as the
good protector of small countries against vicious bullies, while countries like
Germany and Japan, which had reservations about pursuing a military solution to
the crisis, were presented as weak and lacking in resolve.
Although
the Iraqis were portrayed as brutish bullies, Bush and the United States were
presented as strong and honorable defenders of international law and order. Newsweek
proclaimed that "the president's grand plan for the post-cold war world
can be summed up simply: Stop International Bullies" (Sept. 3, 1990). Many
newspapers and TV commentators praised the United States as the only superpower
able to stand up against aggression and enforce international law. Such fulsome
praise overlooked the fact that Bush and the United States recently violated
international law during the Panama invasion. Moreover, U.S. allies in the
multinational coalition included Syria, which seized parts of Lebanon in the
1980s; Turkey, which invaded Cyprus, seizing half of the island; Morocco, which
invaded Somalia; and, on the sidelines, Israel, which held Arab lands seized in
several wars. Double standards, however, were necessary to frame the conflict
as a simple struggle between good and evil.
In
sexual terms, the narrative of the Gulf war was that Saddam/Iraq were raping
Kuwait, refused to pull out, and must be destroyed, with the United States
threatening to "cut it off and kill it," to employ General Powell's
brutal but accurate phrase. The Bush administration and media also played on
sexual and racial fears in constructing their image of Saddam Hussein. The
rhetoric of Iraqi "rape" and "penetration" was employed
from the beginning of the crisis throughout the war.4 The media
demonized Saddam's Big Gun and chemical weapons, as well as his missiles that
could hit Cairo and Tel Aviv. His very name was mispronounced as Sad-dam,
evoking sadism and damnation, and Sod-dom, evoking sodomy. Bush constantly
referred to Hussein as "Saad'm"--a mispronunciation evoking Satan,
damnation, and Sodom. Using both racist and sexual rhetoric, Bush claimed that
the United States went to war against the "dark chaos" of a
"brutal dictator" who followed the "law of the jungle" and
"systematically raped" a "peaceful neighbor" (quoted in
Joel Bleifuss, "The First Stone," In These Times, March 20-26,
1991, p. 4). Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz asked rhetorically if you
would "let a man like that get his hands on what are essentially the
world's vital organs?" (Bleifuss 1991, p. 4).
Throughout
U.S. history, vengeance for rape--especially the rape of white women by men of
color--has been used to legitimate U.S. imperialist adventures and military
action. Captivity-drama narratives of white women captured and raped by Native
Americans were a standard genre of colonial literature, and during the
Spanish-American war, the Hearst newspapers popularized the story of Spanish
kidnapping of an upper-class and light-skinned Cuban woman as a pretext for
U.S. intervention. John Gottlieb reminded us in The Progressive that:
"Bush not only used rape as a justification for the war against Iraq, but
also...cited the sexual assault of an American officer's wife by a Panamanian
soldier as a reason for invading that country, and...used the rape of a white
woman by black convict Willie Horton to attack Michael Dukakis in 1988"
(April 1991, p. 39).
The
demonization of Hussein and the Iraqis was also orchestrated by their alleged
possession of exotic weapons (none of which actually materialized in the Gulf
war). There was perhaps as much coverage of Iraqi chemical weapons as any
single topic during the crisis and war. On August 8, the television networks
reported that the Iraqis were loading chemical weapons onto planes en route to
Kuwait and that there would thus be Iraqi chemical weapons in the field.
Henceforth, there were countless segments on Iraqi chemical weapons, the need
for protective gear and antidotes, and the absolutely evil nature of the
weapons. As it turned out, the Iraqis never used these weapons, in part because
they did not have adequate protection against them and in part because they
feared U.S. retaliation with even worse weapons. In fact, the Iraqis had never
used chemical weapons in close combat with an opposing army, yet the military
and the media constantly emphasized the danger from an Iraqi chemical weapons
attack. Such constant evocation of Iraqi threats and atrocities intensified the
demonization of the "enemy" and produced a fearful mood which
prepared the public for war and ultimately the destruction of the Iraqis.
When
the Iraqis began holding foreign nationals in Iraq and Kuwait as hostages in
the middle of August, this story became the major focus of the crisis for some
months. The Gannett Foundation found that the term "human shields"
was referred to 2,588 times in broadcast and print media from August 1, 1990,
to February 28, 1991, second only to Vietnam with 7,279 mentions (LaMay, et
al., p. 42). Almost every night television networks broadcast ritualistic
reports depicting the plight of the hostages, negotiations for their release,
the suffering of hostages' relatives, and the happy homecoming of those
released. The nightly horror stories of returning "hostages"
tearfully describing the barbaric actions inflicted on foreigners in Kuwait by
the Iraqis provided images of innocent Americans suffering at the hands of the
savage Arabs. The hostage stories personalized the crisis and provided figures
of identification for U.S. audiences. Hostages were featured guests on talk
shows and were interviewed in some depth for the TV news presentations. The
hostage dramas presented morality tales depicting the Iraqis as evil hostage
takers and the Americans and other foreign hostages as innocent victims. This
scenario also replayed the primal captivity drama, one of the mainstays of U.S.
popular literature that began with Indian captivity narratives and continued
through media coverage of the Iran hostage crisis (see Slotkin 1973 on the
captivity narrative).
The
Baby Incubator Atrocity and the Hill and Knowlton PR Campaign
But
perhaps the most outrageous propaganda ploy by the Bush administration and the
Kuwaiti government concerned fallacious stories about Iraqi atrocities in
Kuwait. In October 1990, a tearful teenage girl testified to the House Human
Rights Caucus that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers remove fifteen babies from
incubators and had seen them left to die on the floor of the hospital. The
girl's identity was not revealed, supposedly to protect her family from
reprisals. This baby-killing story helped mobilize support for U.S. military
action, much as Bush's Willie Horton ads had helped him win the presidency by
playing on primal emotions. Bush mentioned the story six times in one month
alone and eight times in forty-four days; Vice-President Dan Quayle frequently
referred to it, as did Schwarzkopf and other military spokespeople. Seven U.S.
Senators cited the story in speeches supporting the January 12 resolution
authorizing war.
In
a January 6, 1992, Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, however, John
MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's magazine, revealed that the
unidentified congressional witness was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
to the U.S. The girl had been brought to testify to Congress by the PR firm
Hill and Knowlton, who had coached her and helped organize the Congressional
Human Rights hearings. In addition, Craig Fuller, Bush's former chief of staff
when he was vice-president and a Bush loyalist, was president of Hill and
Knowlton and was involved with the PR campaign. In addition, Robert Gray, who
had served as co-chair of Reagan's inaugural committee in 1981, worked on the
Free Kuwait account (Miller 1992). Thus it is likely that together the U.S. and
Kuwaiti government developed a propaganda campaign to manipulate the American people
into accepting the Gulf war. According to reports, the Kuwaiti account was one
of the most expensive PR campaigns in history, costing $5.6 million from the
period from August 20 to November 10; eventually it was estimated that the
total account was $11 million (see Ruffini 1991, p. 22, and Rowse 1991, p. 20).
Hill and Knowlton organized a photo exhibition of Iraqi atrocities displayed at
the UN and the U.S. Congress and widely shown on television; assisted Kuwaiti
refugees in telling stories of torture; lobbied Congress; and prepared video
and print material for the media. There were also reportedly six other U.S. PR
firms working for the Kuwaitis (Rowse, 1991).
On
January 17, 1992, ABC's "20/20" disclosed that a "doctor"
who testified that he had "buried fourteen newborn babies that had been
taken from their incubators by the soldiers" was also lying. The doctor
was a dentist who later admitted that he had never examined the babies and had
no way of knowing how they died, nor did Amnesty International which published
a report based on this testimony (Amnesty International later retracted the
report, that had been frequently cited by Bush and other members of his
administration). ABC also disclosed that Hill and Knowlton had commissioned a
"focus group" survey, which gathers groups of people together to find
out what stirs or angers them. The focus group responded strongly to the Iraqi
baby atrocity stories and so Hill and Knowlton featured this in their PR
campaigns for the Free Kuwait group.
Furthermore,
reporter Morgan Strong revealed that Hill and Knowlton also used the wife of
Kuwait's Minister of Planning who was "herself a well-known TV personality
in Kuwait" in the UN hearings (TV Guide, Feb. 22, 1992, p. 12). The
woman, Fatima Fahed, appeared just as the UN was debating the use of force to
expel Iraq from Kuwait and she provided "harrowing details of Iraqi
atrocities inside her country." Fahed claimed that her information was
firsthand, stating, "Such stories...I personally have experienced."
But Strong claims that when the woman was interviewed before the UN appearance,
"she told me that she had no firsthand knowledge of the events she
was describing" (1992, p. 13). After her Hill and Knowlton coaching,
however, her story changed.
Strong
also tells of how a tape from inside Kuwait, edited by Hill and Knowlton,
"purported to show peaceful Kuwaiti demonstrators being fired upon by the
occupying Iraqi troops." But Strong had interviewed a Kuwaiti refugee who
was present at the demonstration who "said that no demonstrators were
injured, and that gunshots captured on tape were, in fact, those of Iraqi
troops firing on nearby resistance fighters, who had fired first at the
Iraqis" (Strong 1992, p. 13). So video too was manipulated by the PR firm
working with the Kuwaiti government, Bush Administration, and Congress. Hill
and Knowlton's behavior led some members of the industry to complain that,
"There's a wide-spread feeling within the industry that Hill and Knowlton
has brought some discredit on our industry." The firm is also under
investigation for its role in covering over the criminal activities of the Bank
of Credit and Commerce International (see the discussion in Gary Emmons,
"Did PR firm invent Gulf War stories?" In These Times, Jan.
22, 1992, p. 2).
In
addition, MacArthur revealed that Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), co-chairperson of
the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, has a close relation with Hill and
Knowlton who provide low-rent office space for the Caucus and contribute money
to a foundation that fronts for the Caucus and to Lantos' election campaign.
Moreover, Citizens for a Free Kuwait, largely funded by the Kuwaiti government,
gave $50,000 to Lantos' foundation. Hill and Knowlton also represent Turkey and
Indonesia, two countries with dismal human rights records, and they "were
notably absent from the foundation's 1991 list of human rights concerns"
(MacArthur, 1991, p. A17). Lantos defended concealing the identity of the
witnesses and his financial arrangements with Hill and Knowlton and Citizens
for a Free Kuwait, though in an editorial shortly thereafter the New York
Times said that Lantos' "behavior warrants a searching inquiry by the
House Ethics Committee" (Jan. 17, 1992, p. A20).
At
the time of the Hill and Knowlton Kuwaiti propaganda campaign, the majority of
the public in the United States was against a military intervention in the
Middle East and Congress was also tending against the military option. Hill and
Knowlton's campaign, however, helped turn things around, mobilizing public
opinion in favor of the use of military force against Iraq. Two of the primal
images employed by the campaign were the Iraqi "rape" of Kuwait and
the baby atrocity story. Rape and the murder of babies are two primal images of
evil, that have often been employed in propaganda campaigns. For instance,
World War I propaganda campaigns often featured stories or images of German
rape and murder of babies (see Figure 2.2). In particular, British and U.S.
propaganda teams produced copious atrocity stories of the dasdardly deeds of
German "Huns" against innocent Belgiums during World War I; these
atrocity stories helped mobilize an indifferent and isolationist American
public to support U.S. entry into the war against Germany (Jowett and O'Donnell
1992 and Miller 1992).
Following
the model of the World War I "rape of Belgium" campaign, Hill and
Knowlton discerned that the rape metaphor was powerful and carried through a
"rape of Kuwait" campaign replete with a book (Sasson 1991),
newspaper articles, packaged videos, pictures, press releases, news
conferences, and demonstrations. There were frequent media events such as
National Free Kuwait Day, National Prayer Day (for Kuwait's liberation), and
National Student Information Day; local events were also organized (see Miller
1992 for a detailed account of the campaign).
Bush,
Schwarzkopf, and the media pundits used the rape metaphor continually and also
repeatedly disseminated the baby atrocity story. On November 28, for instance,
the television networks transmitted images of the UN testimony and focused on
the killing of premature babies by the Iraqis who had allegedly taken away
their incubators (the incubators were found in Kuwaiti hospitals after the war
and medical personnel there denied that the Iraqis had killed the premature
babies; see 10.1 for further details). The UN "testimony" was
accompanied by a photo exhibition of torture victims and other exhibits staged
just before the UN was to vote on whether to legitimate the use of military force
if Iraq did not withdraw from Kuwait by January 15; the exhibition was set up
again for the benefit of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 8 as it
prepared to vote on Bush's request to Congress for a resolution authorizing the
use of force against Iraq.
This
baby atrocity story was, therefore, a classic propaganda campaign to
manufacture consent for the Bush administration policies. It was part of an
elaborate web of deception, disinformation, and Big Lies to sell the war to the
public. It revealed the U.S. president and vice-president and the top U.S.
military leaders to be propagandists who did not hesitate to repeat Big Lies
over and over in order to win support for the war effort. The media which
repeated these lies without skepticism or inquiry also revealed itself to be a
shameless instrument of U.S. propaganda. Such lying polluted political
discourse and continued the trend toward the politics of lying that has been a
recurrent feature of U.S. politics in recent years.
Technology,
Troops, Race, and Gender
In
their coverage of the largest U.S. military intervention since Vietnam, the
mainstream corporate media concentrated much of their focus on the logistics of
the operation and its impact on families at the home front rather than on
whether or not the deployment was a good idea and where it might lead. For the
first weeks of the deployment, there was almost no discussion of whether Iraq
really planned to invade Saudi Arabia, whether the situation required the
massive U.S. troop deployment to stop Iraqi aggression, or, crucially, whether
the U.S. force was primarily a defensive or an offensive force. In general, the
media repeated endlessly the rationalizations offered by the Bush
administration for its successive military deployments. In the early days of the crisis, the
mainstream media dramatized the Iraqi threats to Saudi Arabian and other Gulf
State oil fields, which legitimated the U.S. military presence and the economic
blockade of Iraq. Instead of analyzing what was at stake in the U.S. troop
deployment, night after night the details of the U.S. military deployment were
discussed. TV reports centered on desert maneuvers and the depiction of shiny
and powerful new high-tech weapons. These positive images of the U.S.
deployment were contrasted with frequent news reports warning against Iraqi
chemical weapons and the one million strong, experienced, well‑armed, and
highly trained Iraqi military forces. The numerous military experts and media
commentators never questioned these figures, though now there are good reasons
to doubt these claims concerning the Iraqi military (see 9.3).
Against
the "evil" Hussein and threatening Iraqis, the media thus posed
images of the "good" American soldier and powerful U.S. technology.
In the nightly repetition of these positive images of U.S. troops valiantly
protecting a foreign country from aggression, the need for a strong military
was repeatedly pounded into the public's psyche. "Desert dispatches"
from troops in the front allowed young men and women to send greetings home.
These images of wholesome young Americans in the desert to fight an evil and
dangerous enemy bonded the American people with the troops and helped create
positive feelings about the patriotic troops in the field. The audience was also
able to identify with the plight of the troops through the frequent episodes on
TV news which dealt with the calling up of reservatists to serve in the Gulf,
ranging from working class, to middle class, to professional groups with whom
the audience could identify and empathize.
Likewise,
the frequent images of planes, tanks, artillery, and more exotic high-tech
items provided splendid images of U.S. military technology. In this context, it
should be noted that the U.S. intervention took place in the context of debate
over the cutting back of the budget of the military and CIA, and defenders of
these institutions used the crisis in the Gulf to support their arguments
against military cutbacks. For
instance, Congress killed the B-2 bomber before the invasion; within days,
Congress reinstated the funding (sanity ultimately reigned, however, and the
aircraft was canceled in January 1992). The images of the military hardware and
troop deployment thus functioned as advertisements for a strong military and
prepared the public for the rigors of all‑out war while building support
for the U.S.intervention and Middle East policies. The U.S. military could not
have asked for better advertisements or PR. While the military prepared for war
in the Middle East, urged on by hawks like Henry Kissinger, William Safire, and
columnists and editorialists in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post,
The New York Times, and National Review, the media built up a
consensus for Bush administration positions, no matter how dangerous and
potentially catastrophic.
In
addition to the promilitary rhetoric, television provided racist imagery and
discourses to position the public against the Iraqis.6 Repeated
images of Saddam Hussein, of mobs of Arabs demonstrating and shouting anti-U.S.
slogans, and repeated associations of rich, corrupt Arabs with oil ‑‑
and other Arab leaders with terrorism ‑‑ provided a negative set of
Arab images. Television coverage of the frequent Arab conferences during
September and October, which sought Arab solutions to the problem, almost
always focused on the more radical Arab leaders and featured scenes of Arab
anti‑American demonstrations where U.S. flags were ritualistically
burned. When Secretary of State Baker visited Syria, for instance, to recruit
Syrian support and troops for the anti‑Iraq mobilization, the television
networks stressed the links between Syria and terrorism and employed negative
stereotypes of Arabs.
Although
the United States was presumably intervening on behalf of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia
and included Arab allies in its coalition, TV coverage frequently associated
Arabs with terrorism, anti‑American flag burning demonstrations, and oil.
Other images portrayed Arabs as premodern nomads, wandering about in the vast
Middle East deserts, and thus as utterly different from "civilized"
Westerners. Throughout the crisis, the dichotomy between foreign and
uncivilized Arabs and civilized Westerners was drawn upon, thus replicating the
racist discourse analyzed by Edward Said (1978), which founded western ideology
on a distinction between the civilized and rational West and the barbaric and
irrational Orient.
To
be sure, there were also several TV news reports dealing with racist
stereotypes of Arabs and anti‑Arab images in the United States, but these
segments invariably featured Hollywood film images of Arabs and neglected
analysis of the range of standard TV images of Arabs, how they were framed, and
with what they were associated on TV news and entertainment. Consequently,
while television pointed to the perniciousness of anti-Arab violence in the
United States and elsewhere during the crisis in the Gulf and then the ground
war, it never disclosed its own complicity in anti-Arab racist imagery.
The
presentation of race and U.S. troops was highly delicate as a large percentage
of the U.S. forces serving in the Gulf were people of color; 23 percent of the
U.S. military as of June 1990 were black, while the total minority percentage
was 32.3 percent (Ronald Brownstein, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 6, 1990,
pp. 1 and 3). It was later reported by the New York Times that 33
percent of enlisted military women and 21 percent of enlisted men serving in
the Gulf were black while 47 percent of active-duty enlisted personnel were
black women and 29 percent were black men; it was also estimated that 30-35
percent of those on the frontline, who would be the first to be killed, were
non-Caucasian. Although some black opponents of the war made this point,
generally television avoided the question of the military and race. The media
mainstream ignored discussing, however, the hypocrisy of the Bush
administration, which attempted to remove federal scholarship programs based on
race and vetoes a civil rights bill at a time when a disproportionate amount of
people of color were risking their lives for their country in the deserts of
Saudi Arabia.
TV
images of the military and their families pointed to the cohabitation of
traditionalist images of gender and the family with more liberal images (which
also, as we shall see, had an ideological function).7 On one hand,
the construction of gender of U.S. military families was extremely
conventional, with the male soldiers going off to war, while the wife and
children stayed behind. This frame reproduced the conservative division between
the public sphere as the domain of male activity with the private sphere
reserved for women. The frame also privileged the sexist picture of men as
active and virile and women as passive and helpless. Constant pictures of wives
breaking into tears as their men marched stoicly to war reinforced this
traditional picture, as did the juxtapositions of the men active in the desert
while the women at home sought help from psychiatric counselors or support
groups. As Enloe pointed out (1990), the fusion of images of
"womenandchildren" as released hostages or domestic victims on the
home front reinforced images of women as helpless and dependent.
Yet
the media also fixated on the new "women warriors" sent to the Gulf. Newsweek
featured a September 10, 1990 cover story on women and the military, as did People
magazine (September 10, 1990). As the crisis proceeded, images of women troops
appeared ever more frequently in the TV news coverage. These images also helped
with military recruitment by presenting exciting images of work in a foreign
country. The images of women in the military also replicate the images of women
warriors, which have been popularized in film and television since the
volunteer army allowed women to join. In addition, images of U.S. women in the
desert were often juxtaposed with pictures of Arab women in veils, thus
presenting pictures of "modern," "progressive" customs
contrasted to "backward," "reactionary" regimes that
continue to oppress women. Such a juxtaposition legitimated U.S. intervention
in the region as a progressive force. This contrast was highlighted in
mid-November, when Saudi women protested a ban on their driving automobiles
with a "drive-in" during which they defiantly drove autos in Saudi
cities. The Saudi women were harshly criticized by the regime and in some cases
fired from their jobs; the U.S. media focused on the story for several days,
contrasting the plight of Saudi women with U.S. women soldiers driving jeeps
and participating actively in military life--presenting the message that the
United States was bringing a progressive "modern" influence into
backward Saudi Arabia.
The
whole television coverage of the Persian Gulf war was detrimental to women
through the constant bombardment of images of male culture and masculine
values. Supporters of the war, from George Bush and Norman Schwarzkopf to
troops in the desert and their supporters at home, constantly talked about
"kicking ass," and when the war started, rarely has brute violence
been so positively portrayed. Feminists argue that war culture helps validate
brutality, which ultimately promotes violence against women (Roach 1991) and,
one might add, people of color. Pilots watched porn movies before their bombing
runs, thus fusing sex and violence. Throughout the Gulf war, military images
and discourse totally dominated television programming and in general promoted
a war culture that is primarily a male culture, thus devaluing women. Women
were positioned as either devoted wives, serving as cheerleaders for the
military, or women warriors--hardly an attractive array of gender ideals.
Although many women actively opposed the war, they were for the most part
excluded from media discourse (see Roach 1991 and Paley 1991 for
documentation).
Consequently,
war culture simultaneously promotes sexism and militarism. War culture devalues
women, but by legitimating violence it brutalizes the whole culture, thus
contributing to the militarization of U.S. society (see 10.5). The Gulf war was
thus an important and dangerous cultural event, as well as a military one,
promoting a military culture that had been discredited since Vietnam and had
been on the defensive. Indeed, the project of winning a decisive war and the
validation of the military as an important part of U.S. society was part of
what the Gulf war was all about, and TV was decisive in producing precisely the
images and discourses that would promote the military after a long period in
which they had been discredited and on the sidelines of U.S. society.
The
Absence of Critical Voices
During
the first days of the U.S. intervention in early August, there were some
critical voices in the press. Conservative columnists Roland Evans and Robert
Novak attacked the rhetorical "Overkill on Saddam" in the August 8, 1990,
Washington Post and cited Bush's lack of outrage when his "old
Chinese friends" murdered students in Tiananmen Square. The August 9 Washington
Post carried a critical overview of the media demonization of "Saddam
Hussein: Monster in the Making" by Marjorie Williams. The Los Angeles
Times ran a critique of Bush's war policy by radical Alexander Cockburn on
August 6 and by conservative Tom Bethell on August 8. The "CBS Evening
News" broadcast reports from Jordan on August 6 and 7 that ran interviews
providing the Arab point of view--earning them an attack by warmongering Washington
Post columnist Jim Hoagland on August 8. Four Arab-Americans were allowed
on the "MacNeil/Lehrer News
Hour" on August 7, though the next night the guests were almost all pro-Bush
administration conservatives.
The
few criticisms voiced on the television networks during the first weeks of the
deployment concerned the timing of Bush's intervention; families of hostages
wished he'd given them time to get out before sending in U.S. troops. For the
most part, the only critical voices allowed on television specifically
concerning the deployment were Arabs in the United States, Egypt, Jordan, and
other countries where television networks stationed crews‑‑and
their criticisms were sometimes framed, or perceived, as "anti‑American"
hostility rather than rational arguments. One of the few critiques of Bush's
military response from a major political source on the television networks
during the first several weeks involved ABC reporter Cokie Roberts citing
former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's questioning of whether the magnitude
of the U.S. response was in line with the degree of U.S. interests
("Sunday Morning with David Brinkley," August 26, 1990); soon after,
however, Kirkpatrick reverted to her usual militarism and by November was
calling for a military solution.
During
the early weeks of the crisis, the dominant debate in the media concerned
whether the United States should begin bombing Iraq immediately to destroy
their military and eliminate Saddam Hussein or continue with the UN-sanctioned
economic blockade, which might produce a long deadlock and indefinite
deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. On August 19, for instance, in a
syndicated column, Henry Kissinger argued that it would be a disaster to get
U.S. troops bogged down in the Middle East desert and urged a "surgical
strike" against Iraq ‑‑ a position that he repeated on an
August 24 CNN panel and continued to defend in the following months. Similar military solutions were urged
on August 27 in a New York Times Op‑Ed piece by William Safire and
this was the line advocated by editorialists in the Wall Street Journal
and National Review, and by many Israelis, military "experts,"
and pundits who appeared on talk shows and wrote editorial "opinion"
pieces.
Zbigniew
Brzezinksi argued on television and in the August 16 Washington Post and
August 27 Newsweek for the economic blockade strategy, "to slowly
strangle them." He wrote: "My greatest fear about the ongoing crisis
is that it could get out of hand. The way it has been played in the media, and
even by some officials, will create a mass hysteria." Brzezinski was
almost alone in advocating a "moderate" approach during the first
several weeks of coverage, against those who wanted to begin the bombing. By
late August, however, the war hysteria subsided somewhat and finally talk of
possible negotiated settlement to the crisis, or of a long-term stalemate,
began appearing during the weekend
of August 25‑26 ‑‑ a moderate discourse denounced by Safire
in the New York Times as the "new pacificism" (Aug. 27, 1990
Op-Ed column).
Thus,
the major debate visible on television during the first month of the crisis was
between the "stranglers" (who advocated sanctions) and the
"butchers" (who advocated immediate military action), thus ignoring
the question of whether it was a good idea for the United States to send so
many troops to the region in the first place. There were, to be sure, Op-Ed
pieces in the major newspapers warning about the dangers of the U.S.
intervention and a Gulf war, but these views rarely appeared on television.
Moreover, the dominant critical discourse found in the corporate media in the
early weeks of the crisis was from the right. In addition to Brzezinski's and
Kirkpatrick's misgivings, conservative columnists Evans and Novak warned
against portraying "Saddam Hussein as a Hitlerite madman thirsting for
world conquest [which] endows the Iraqi strongman with powers he does not
possess" rather than presenting him as a rational individual with whom the
United States must and can deal. Patrick Buchanan and other right-wing
commentators on CNN warned against the costs of war and criticized those who
promoted the military solution.8
The
right-wing critique of the U.S. military buildup provided further evidence of
splits within the Right in the United States. While Kissinger, some core
spokespeople for the military-industrial complex, and key members of the
Bush administration urged a
military solution, other conservatives argued that the benefit would not equal
the costs. This split replicated the division between traditionalist
isolationist conservatives and more interventionist ones. The isolationists
represented sectors whose interests would be harmed by war and the potentially
higher oil prices if the war dragged on, which would fuel inflation, while the
interventionists tended to represent military-industrial and other interests
that would benefit from war (though some interventionists were also, no doubt,
primarily hardcore macho militarists who represented no specific economic
interests but incarnated a military mentality).
No
significant antiwar voices were allowed on the mainstream media during the
first months of the troop build-up in Saudi Arabia and there was almost no
criticism of Bush's deployment by the supine Democrats, pointing once again to
the profound crisis of liberalism in the United States (Kellner 1990). The few
images of antiwar demonstrators in the U.S. that appeared during the first
months of the U.S. intervention utilized similar frames, coding antiwar
demonstrators as Arabs, as irrational opponents of U.S. policies. U.S.
demonstrators were portrayed as an unruly mob of long-haired outsiders; their
discourse was rarely allowed and coverage focused instead on slogans, or images
of marching crowds, with media voice-overs supplying the context. Major newspapers and newsmagazines also
failed to cover the burgeoning antiwar movement. Thus, just as the media
constructed a negative image in the 1960s of antiwar protestors as irrational,
anti-American, and unruly, so too did the networks frame the emerging antiwar
movement of the 1990s in predominantly negative terms.
There
was consequently little significant debate in the mainstream media from the
time that Bush first sent troops to Saudi Arabia on August 8, 1990, and little
criticism of his policies. A study
by the media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) indicated
that during the first five months of TV coverage of the crisis in the Gulf, ABC
devoted only 0.7 percent of its total gulf coverage to opposition to the
military buildup. CBS allowed 0.8 percent, while NBC devoted 1.5 percent, a
hearty 13.3 minutes to all stories about protests, antiwar organizations,
conscientious objectors, religious dissenters, and the like. Consequently, of the 2,855 minutes of
TV coverage of the Gulf crisis from August 8 to January 3, FAIR claimed that
only 29 minutes, roughly 1 percent, dealt with popular opposition to the U.S.
military intervention in the Gulf.9
Not
only was the large antiwar movement ignored, but "[n]one of the foreign
policy experts associated with the peace movement--such as Edward Said, Noam
Chomsky, or the scholars of the Institute for Policy Studies--appeared on any
nightly news program" (FAIR 1991, press release). Instead media
"experts" came from conservative think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
with the centrist Brookings Institute providing "the 'left' boundary of
debate." Moreover, not only
were most TV commentators conservative and pro-Pentagon, but they were
overwhelmingly white and male. FAIR indicated that caucasians made up 98
percent of "Nightline's" guests and 87 percent of "MacNeil/Lehrer's";
the proportion of women was the same proportion as people of color. A Times-Mirror
poll, however, that was recorded in
September 1990 and January 1991 discovered "pluralities of the
public saying they wished to hear more about the views of Americans who oppose
sending forces to the Gulf" (Special Times-Mirror News Interest
Index, January 31, 1991). Furthermore, the voices of troops who were alarmed at
their deployment in the Saudi desert and who objected to primitive living
conditions there were silenced, in part by Pentagon restrictions on press
coverage, in part by a press corps unable or unwilling to search for dissenting
voices.
Thus,
the TV debate on the crisis of the Gulf was marked by an absence of critical
voices and vigorous debate. While the country at large was deeply divided and
serious debates went on all over the country, this debate was largely absent in
the mainstream media, especially television. Indeed, TV failed to adhere to
even the most basic journalistic standards and provided by and large a
one-sided, highly biased range of voices that favored the Bush administration's
war policy. Once again, television failed to vigorously debate issues of
national importance and thus contributed to the continuing decline of democracy
in the United States.
2.2 Media Pools and Pentagon Control
From
the beginning of the U.S. deployment, the press was prohibited from having
direct access to the troops. Journalists were instead organized by the military
into pools that were taken to sites selected by the military itself, and then
reporters were allowed only to interview troops with their military
"minders" present.10
Laird Anderson, a journalism professor with experience in both the press
and military, stated: "These rules are terribly restrictive. If I were a
reporter in Saudi Arabia, I would not want to be in the hands of an Army public
information officer. They are conservative by nature and their answer to any
request will be 'No.' As the old saying goes, truth will be the first casualty"
(cited in Contra Costa Times, Jan. 18, 1991). Press and video coverage were also subject to censorship, so
that, in effect, the military tightly controlled press coverage of the U.S.
military deployment in the Gulf and then the action in the Gulf war.
Consequently,
no independent access to the troops was allowed and reporters were only able to
visit troops when escorted by public affairs officers. The president of CBS
News, Eric Ober, wrote in the Wall Street Journal (Jan. 17, 1991):
"As journalists, we need to seek out the story and relay it to the public.
If we interview a soldier, we want to obtain frank, unpackaged responses that
give people a better feel for the story at the front. But if Bob Simon, CBS
News' veteran war correspondent, interviews the soldier with a military escort
by his side, will the soldier really tell the truth? Will we really find out
what is happening in the desert? I have to conclude that the answer is
no." Yet CBS and the other mainstream media submitted to the pool system,
encouraging William Kovach, curator of Harvard's Nieman Foundation, to note:
"Since 1970, the military has worked on plans [to control the press during
a war]. I blame the press for not making as careful plans as the military"
(cited in Nan Levinson, Index on Censorship, April/May 1991, p. 27).
Reporters
without escort who ventured out on their own were detained or told to leave
upon arrival at bases some were even roughed up (see Fialka 1992). During the
war, credentials were lifted if reporters broke the rules of the pool system; New
York Times reporter Chris Hedges had his credentials temporarily lifted for
interviewing Saudi shopkeepers fifty miles from the Kuwaiti border (Schanberg
1991). Reporters were not allowed to forward their material until it had been
subjected to "security review," in other words, military censorship.
Such control of press coverage was
unprecedented in the history of U.S. warfare. Historically, journalists have
been allowed direct access to combat troops and sites, and frontline reporting
was distinguished during World War II and Vietnam (see Knightly 1975). The
military organized the pool system, however, because they perceived that
reporting had been too critical in Vietnam, and they blamed the press for
helping erode public support for the war. Following the example of British
censorship of the press during the Falkland Islands/Malvinas war, the United
States controlled press access during the Grenada invasion and instituted the
pool system during the Panama invasion. The pool system allowed the U.S.
military to keep the press completely away from the battle action in Panama
during the decisive first day of the invasion and to keep most of the press
interned on a U.S. military base during the next days. Because the press was prevented
from discerning the extent of civilian deaths and the destructiveness of the
invasion, the military used this strategy of information management as the
model employed during the Gulf war.
Although
the press was unable to adequately cover the Panama invasion, failing to get
any pictures of U.S. destruction of Panamanian barrios that purportedly
supported Noriega or of the Panamanians killed by the invasion, they generally
went along with the restrictions and capitulated as well to the pool system during
the crisis in the Gulf and then the Gulf war. On January 10, a New York-based
public law firm, the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a federal lawsuit
against the Pentagon in an effort to overturn press restrictions. Filed on
behalf of The Nation, The Village Voice, The Progressive, and other
alternative media and progressive journalists, the suit claimed that military
"escorts engaged in arbitrary censorship of interviews, photography, and
altered the activities of soldiers when reporters come into their presence, not
for security reasons, but to ensure favorable coverage of their military
presence" (cited in Anderson 1991, p. 23). In addition to First Amendment
arguments, the suit held that the press pools organized and controlled by the
military provided preferential treatment of select news organizations; indeed,
the New York Times was only assigned one reporter to the pools while the
military newspaper Stars and Stripes was awarded several. The military
paid travel expenses and facilitated visa arrangements for some correspondents,
"anticipated to favor the U.S. military," while the French were
excluded completely from the pools, leading to a protest and threatened lawsuit
from Agence Presse de France.
The
major media outlets, however, neither joined the suit, nor adequately covered
it, and the war started and finished without any real challenge to the pool
system. After the war, U.S. District Judge Leonard Sand dismissed the suit on
April 17, claiming that the issues were "too abstract and conjectural"
and that the suit was irrelevant because the war was over. As we shall see in
the following chapters, the pool system worked to manage the news flow during
the Gulf war and to ensure support for the Bush administration policies.
When
the Pentagon suggested giving the major news organizations more time in the
field in October, General Schwarzkopf vetoed the suggestion (New York Times,
May 5, 1991, p. A8) and the military tightly controlled both access and content
of the news in one of the most thoroughgoing exercises in news management and
the manufacture of public opinion in U.S. history. During the crisis in the Gulf, there were thus few
reports of dissenting soldiers or critics of the war. An article in the
December 9, 1990, Washington Post, however, suggested that a large
number of troops expressed "reservations over U.S. involvement in what
they see as an internal Arab conflict." When President Bush visited the troops in Saudi Arabia on
Thanksgiving Day, "a truckload of soldiers drove past television cameras
and shouted to reporters, 'We're not supposed to be here! This isn't our war!
Why are we over here?'" An
Army lieutenant told the Post that "this is not worth one American
losing his life. If they [Iraqis]
were threatening us, I'd be ready to lay down my life in a minute--but this is
different."
Consequently,
although there was a pointed debate among the U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia
concerning the wisdom of their deployment, the U.S. public was not allowed to
hear this debate. Any information that might have raised questions concerning
Bush administration policy was considered off limits. Reporters critical of the
deployment were not given access to top military brass or allowed to join the
pools, while compliant reporters were rewarded with pool assignments and
interviews. In particular, the Pentagon favored local reporters sympathetic to
the military, allowing them access to troops from their region to write puff
pieces that positively portrayed the troop deployment (see the Progressive,
Feb. 1991, pp. 25ff.). As the New York Times put it: "The military,
assuming that correspondents from the small-town press would write sympathetic
articles, provided free transportation to Saudi Arabia and special access to
servicemen and women from their areas. Aides also analyzed articles written by
other reporters to determine their interests and to screen out interview
requests from those likely to focus on mistakes by the military" (May 5,
1991, p. A8).
Clearly
the military was concerned primarily with its image and with avoiding criticism
rather than with legitimate national security concerns. Thus, reporters who
were critical of U.S. policy found themselves without access to sources or
sites. For two months, New York Times reporter James LeMoyne requested
an interview with General Schwarzkopf, but his request was denied because his
articles "were not 'liked'" by the U.S. military (New York Times,
Feb. 17, 1991). Lemoyne had written a story that included quotes from soldiers
who criticized President Bush and "emotionally questioned the purpose of
their being sent to fight and perhaps die in Saudi Arabia." LeMoyne was
later told that "all hell broke loose" after the article was
published, and senior commanders chastised the soldiers who had expressed
critical views. After the LeMoyne story, for "six weeks almost all print
news reporters were denied visits to Army units," though television
personalities like NBC weatherman Willard Scott and sports announcer O. J.
Simpson were given free access to the troops because they did not "cause
problems" (New York Times, Feb. 17, 1991).
Some
television reporters also found themselves blacklisted. ABC's John Laurence was
refused access to the troops after he had helped produce a segment detailing
heat and sand problems with equipment in the desert and describing ammunition
shortages. Laurence had previously angered the military in Vietnam when
"CBS Reports" aired his footage of soldiers refusing orders in 1970.
Cutting off access to critical reporters obviously has the effect of inhibiting
reporters to criticize the military, knowing that henceforth their access will
be restricted.
Howell
Raines, the bureau chief of the New York Times in Washington, claimed:
"The Bush administration managed to prevent us from doing our jobs to an
unprecedented extent." He claimed that the military betrayed the media,
promising that the restrictions would be temporary and then keeping them in
effect throughout the war. "We were had!" Raines exclaimed. "In our
discussions with the administration we went over everything from a practical
point of view--visas, transport, etc. The pools were not going to be more than
a temporary measure. Everything was steeped in the atmosphere of a 'gentleman's
agreement.'" But just before Christmas, he wrote, the Pentagon sent out a
seven-page list of restrictions about which the press's representatives had not
been consulted. They protested, some changes were made, but in January, the
media were faced with a new document, presented as an ultimatum. "My
colleagues and I discussed the idea of a legal action against the
Pentagon," Raines noted. "Then, all of a sudden, the war began"
(cited in Chantal de Rudder, Le Nouvel Observateur, No. 1387, June 6,
1991).
Hence,
the military was ultimately able to control the flow of information coming from
the press in the field by allowing access only to those favorable to the
military and by exercising a security review of reports and video produced by
the pools. This latter practice amounted to blatant censorship that attempted
to block all critical commentary coming out of Saudi Arabia. A
"Nightline" episode on press control showed public affairs escorts
breaking in and cutting off discussion between the press and the soldiers on
the front when topics were broached that the military did not want to see
discussed. When an Air Force reservist from Michigan, Sgt. Dick Runels, sent
his local paper letters detailing the poor living and sanitary conditions in
the desert and questioning the U.S. mission in the Middle East, Bay Voice
editor Tom Stanton said that military authorities found out about the letters
and reprimanded Runels, saying that his letters would be censored in the future
(United Press International, Nov. 30, 1990). During the war itself, as I shall
report later, there were many other examples of press censorship by the
military.
In
addition, television controlled and censored antiwar advertisements. Alex
Molnar, a University of Wisconsin professor and father of a twenty-one-year old
stationed in Saudi Arabia, founded a Military Families Support Network.
Molnar's poignant letter, protesting the troop buildup, was published in the New
York Times on August 23 on the Op-Ed page, but CNN and all three networks
turned down a thirty-second commercial paid for by Molnar's group. CNN and ABC
and CBS affiliates also turned down a paid antiwar ad produced by the Los
Angeles chapter of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, although some NBC
stations and smaller affiliates ran the ad. However, pro-war commercials,
sponsored by the Coalition for America at Risk and Free Kuwait group, were
shown on many local stations (Clarkson, In These Times, Jan. 30, 1991,
and Ruffini 1991, p. 22).
The
lack of any critical voices in the mainstream media during the first weeks of
the crisis disclosed the timidity, narrowness, and fundamental subservience of
the mainstream media, especially the television networks, in the United States.
The broadcast media are afraid to go against a perceived popular consensus, to
alienate people, or to take unpopular stands because they are afraid of losing
viewers and thus profits. Because U.S. military actions have characteristically
been supported by the majority of the people, at least in their early stages,
television is extremely reluctant to criticize potentially popular military
actions. The broadcast media also rely on a narrow range of established and
safe commentators and are not likely to reach out to new and controversial
voices in a period of national crisis.
The
TV networks usually wait until a major political figure or established
"expert" speaks against a specific policy and that view gains certain
credibility as marked by opinion polls or publication in "respected"
newspapers or journals.
Unfortunately, the crisis of democracy in the United States is such that
the leadership of the Democratic party has largely supported the conservative
policies of the past decade and so the party leaders are extremely cautious and
slow to criticize foreign policy actions, especially potentially popular
military actions. The crisis of
liberalism is so deep in the United States that establishment liberals are
afraid of being called "wimps," or "soft" on foreign
aggression and thus often support policies that their better instincts should
lead them to oppose. Consequently, the only criticisms of a major U.S. military
intervention that appeared on network television during the first weeks of the
Gulf crisis came from hawks like Kirkpatrick and Brzezinski. On the other hand,
it is not certain if no mainstream opposition was to be found11 or
whether television simply ignored any voices that would interrupt the
manufacture of public support for the U.S. intervention.
In
any case, promilitary discourse dominated the corporate media during the first
crucial weeks of the U.S. build-up and many media voices subtly or not urged
military solutions to the crisis: Some of the hawks argued that only an all‑out
war against Iraq would solve the crisis, while others suggested that it would
be a long-term disaster if Saddam Hussein was allowed to survive, thus implying
that the only real solution to the crisis was to remove him from power. The
media privileging of military solutions and whipping up of war fever was so
extreme that even some of its own representatives began noticing it. On an
August 26 "David Brinkley Show," for example, Sam Donaldson
complained of war hysteria in the media, the repeated emphasis on the
inevitability of war, and the failure to stress the need for negotiation and
peaceful settlement. The next day on "Nightline," however, Donaldson
announced that the "war psychosis that was gripping Washington has
eased." Thus, from late August into the following weeks of the crisis,
some media voices began indicating that the economic blockade of Iraq, international
pressure, and negotiations might be able to get Iraq out of Kuwait and that it
would not be necessary to fight a war to resolve the crisis.
2.3
CNN's "Crisis in the Gulf"
Yet,
in some quarters aggressive militarism continued to be the norm. A new nightly
program appeared, CNN's "Crisis in the Gulf," which quickly became
the most jingoistic and militarist program during the first months of the
confrontation. The Gulf war brought CNN into international prominence,
producing higher name recognition, ratings, and advertising revenues. CNN, the
creation of Atlanta entrepreneur Ted Turner, began service ten years before as
the first cable news channel on the air twenty-four hours per day. Within a
decade, it had developed the largest news operation in the world with a staff
of 125, compared to 60 to 80 in the major networks, and with news bureaus
throughout the world. In particular, CNN had established itself in the Middle
East with news bureaus and broadcast outlets connected to the United States via
satellite feed and was thus well-positioned to provide coverage of the crisis
in the Gulf and then the Gulf war.
CNN's
"Crisis in the Gulf" program began as a half-hour segment on August
13 and four days later was expanded to an hour, preempting CNN's prime‑time
news program for news on the Middle East crisis and its domestic and
international ramifications. Although, at first, coanchors Bernard Shaw in
Washington and Jonathan Mann in Cairo offered more perspectives on the Gulf
crisis than the "Big Three" networks, the program soon degenerated
into outright military propaganda. By September, the program opened with
dramatic musical chimes and titles showing pictures of U.S. troops marching
across the desert, following by images of Saddam Hussein and George Bush, the
two archetypical enemies, and then images of Arabs, the desert, and oil, the
symbols of the Middle East. These iconic images personalized the conflict as a
confrontation between Bush and Hussein, projected cliched images of Arabs and the
Middle East (oil, camels, desert--an exotic Otherness to the West), and
glorified the U.S. troops as the martial music chimed in the background to
dramatize the U.S. military intervention as the good U.S. warriors marched in
to solve the crisis.
The
news segments featured the key events of the day concerning the crisis,
celebratory stories of U.S. troops in the Middle East, martial music between
segments, and statistical tidbits before and after the advertising breaks
posing trivia questions concerning the military intervention or citing
statistics like the number of foreign nationals being held hostage within Iraq
or Kuwait. The military images,
music, statistics, and news stories were punctuated with discussions, usually
dominated by hard-line right-wingers, on such issues as U.S. military
responses, the possibilities of terrorism, and other predominantly military
elements of the crisis. The program often closed with images of Saddam Hussein
and Iraqi soldiers marching to military music, leaving the spectator with a
notion of the threat to "the American way of life" posed by the Iraqi
army.
But
it was the constant flow of positive military images on CNN's "Crisis in
the Gulf" and the extremely positive images of the U.S. troop deployment
that was most supportive of the military option to the crisis. Night after
night, CNN, and the other networks as well, broadcast an incessant flow of
pictures of troops, airplanes, ships, tanks, and military equipment, with
interview after interview of the troops and their military spokespeople.
Footage of the U.S. military was frequently supplemented on CNN by footage from
the British and other allies' military establishments, resulting in seemingly
endless images of military hardware and personnel. Interviews with the U.S.
soldiers "humanized" the coverage, picturing "our boys"
(and some military women as well) as innocent and heroic protectors against
Arab greed and aggression. And the segments of families of the troops on the
home front, suffering from divided families, or economic hardship (especially
for reservists), created bonds and sympathy between the military families and
the public that ultimately was an important component of the construction of
public support for the U.S. policies during the war itself.
Lee
and Solomon (1991) have discussed the propensity of the mainstream media to use
"we" in such a way to identify the media spokesperson with the
government or military and both this form of discourse and the use of
"our" ("our troops," "our country") were very
frequent in the crisis in the Gulf and Gulf war TV coverage. The military
"experts" almost always used the term "we" to describe U.S.
military policies or action, and this was perfectly appropriate as they
actually identified totally with the military and were no more than propaganda
experts speaking on behalf of the Pentagon. TV "journalists" such as
Barbara Walters, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather also used "we" and
"our" to bind themselves to the military and the nation. "We"
and "our" also binds the audience into an intimate relation with the
troops and nurtures a sense of shared national purpose (and dangers, once the
war started). In this way, the military was identified with the nation and the
TV audience was fused into a unitary bond with the United States and its (our)
troops. The media thus became propaganda organs for the military state to
ensure that "we" support "our" troops--and consequently
submit to the policies of the Bush administration and Pentagon.
Further,
the audience was prepared daily throughout the crisis for the rigors of war.
From September through January, there were frequent TV network presentations of
possible scenarios for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and all‑out war in the
region. During the weekend of September 15‑16, there were reports on Air
Force General Michael Dugan's claim that only an aggressive air war against
Iraq would succeed in getting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Time
magazine published a report in the same period citing a State Department
official saying: "If we are serious about going beyond getting Saddam out
of Kuwait‑‑and we are damn serious about it‑‑then war
is just about inevitable" (cited in In These Times, Sept. 26, 1990,
p. 4). Dugan was fired for telling reporters that Saddam Hussein's government
and key Iraqi installations were targeted for bombing--all of which turned out
to be true.
Yet
General Dugan merely said in public what administration officials were saying
in private and even ultrahawk Pat Buchanan attacked the "clowns" who
were calling for bombing Iraq (CNN "Crossfire," Sept. 13, 1990). Two
weeks later, an aide of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney indicated that the United
States was planning a massive invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein and
that casualties were estimated to be over 20,000 U.S. troops and hundreds of
thousands of Arabs (International Herald Tribune, Sept. 28, 1990, p. 1).
Other estimates indicated that the casualties would be even higher, but there
was little discussion of the extent of the casualties in the mainstream media or
speculation of what would really happen in an all-out war (see the analysis by
James Bennet in Sifrey and Cerf 1991, pp. 355-367).
War scenarios, however, continued to be
leaked to the media, and CNN and the other networks willingly broadcast them: During
the weekend of September 22‑23, there were reports, with diagrams,
charting the course of a U.S. invasion and all‑out war. Such reports
possibly created the impression that war was inevitable and helped prepare the
public for the coming campaign against Iraq. Indeed, the constant projection of
war scenarios could have created a desire for war to resolve the situation or
to relieve the tension built up by the frenzied reporting which, especially in
CNN's "Crisis in the Gulf," merged reports, military statistics,
speculation, music, and images of war into a nightly spectacle that normalized,
and perhaps created a desire for, war.
Thus, CNN's nightly "Crisis in the
Gulf" report was especially hawkish, privileging promilitary discourses
and imagery. The main emphasis of the coverage was on U.S. troop deployment,
and military spokespeople were the most frequent commentators. Although some exmilitary officials
warned against the dangers of war and urged a peaceful solution, the overall
tone of the nightly report was highly militaristic and chauvinist. Although Ted
Turner used his Turner broadcasting networks during the cold war with the
Soviet Union to plead the case of détente, friendly relations with the
U.S.S.R., world peace, nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, and other
worthy issues, during the Gulf crisis CNN was little more than a propaganda
organ for the military, promoting almost without exception U.S. military
intervention in the Middle East and a military solution to the crisis.
Yet
CNN also presented more Arab points of view and a broader range of commentary
than the other networks, in part because they had opened bureaus throughout the
Middle East and in part because they had so much air time to fill, as their
twenty-four hour news operation focused almost exclusively on the Gulf crisis
and war from early August through mid-March. Exceptions to the hegemonic
military discourse in the CNN nightly broadcast included appearances by former
Attorney General Ramsey Clark and a conservative opposing the U.S. intervention
on CNN's "Crossfire" on September 13, though the "liberal"
Michael Kingsley replied in response to Clark's alleged "pacificism"
that on this one he was in agreement with rightist Pat Buchanan. The other
break with militarist discourse during the first two months of the CNN
"Crisis in the Gulf" came on September 27‑28 when a two‑part
program "Waging Peace" brought together individuals to discuss
possible peaceful resolutions to the crisis. By October, the coverage was somewhat
more balanced and an October 25, "Special Assignment: The Invasion
Files" featured military
experts discussing the difficulties of desert warfare and in some cases arguing
against the military option.
2.4 Omissions, Silences, and Unasked
Questions
When
the U.S. policy turned from a defensive posture to an aggressive one, after
Bush doubled the number of troops sent to the Gulf in mid-November, the media
dramatized Iraqi brutality toward Kuwait and alleged mistreatment of U.S. and
foreign hostages. On the other hand, there was for the first time a debate over
U.S. Gulf policy after Bush, arguably, turned the Desert Shield into a Desert
Sword aimed at Saddam Hussein and Iraq. From November through January, coverage
veered back and forth from discourses suggesting the inevitability of war or
positively urging an immediate military solution to cautionary warnings about
the dangers of war and the desirability of a diplomatic solution. Efforts of
Mitterrand and Soviet leaders to mediate the crisis and to seek a diplomatic
solution were widely covered, as were continuing hawk discourses and arguments
that only a military intervention could get Iraq out of Kuwait. Members of the
U.S. Congress began speaking out against the administration policy and Congress
held hearings on the war that were usually televised in their entirety by the
congressional C-SPAN channels and covered by CNN and more sporadically by the
three mainstream networks. The Big Three TV networks failed, however, to
present any special reports on the hearings or to interrupt their daily
commercial programming as they often did during the Vietnam war in the 1960s
and the Watergate hearings in the 1970s.
In
the Senate hearings on U.S. Middle East policy in late November, Sam Nunn,
chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee holding the hearings, noted in his
opening statement: "The question is whether military action is wise at
this time and in our own national interest. Is it in our vital interest to
liberate Kuwait through military action by a largely American military
force?" (New York Times, Nov. 28, 1990, p. A8). A number of
witnesses from previous administrations advised against military action in the
immediate future but did not raise many of the crucial economic, ecological,
political, and military questions concerning what would actually happen in a
Middle East war. Although the witnesses and senators made some good arguments
about the dangers of a war in the Middle East, they failed to ask many of the
key and hard questions concerning the dangers of the military option that I
shall pose in this section.
Furthermore,
the mainstream media failed to adequately cover the hearings and debate the key
issues of war and peace. A study by Malek and Leidig (1991) concluded that the
week of November 25 to December 1 "saw coverage of congressional dissent
in the press largely replaced or overshadowed by news which supported the
Administration's position. Sources from the State Department, the Defense
Department, and the Central intelligence Agency led the discussion. Headlines
reflecting official policy objectives dominated the scene, while editorials
favored the Administration's opinion" (p. 18).
One
of the key issues that a nation faces is the choice between war and peace to
resolve difficult crises threatening its national interests. When a nation is
confronted with a challenge to economic interests and international law, such
as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, basically there are two ways to resolve the
crisis: war or diplomacy. For the mainstream media, however, the options were
reduced to waiting for sanctions to work or going to war immediately. There was
never any real push for a diplomatic solution to the crisis evident in the
mainstream media which sharply restricted the terms of debate; nor did key
congressional leaders push for a diplomatic solution urging instead the
sanctions option. Furthermore, there was never a serious debate in the media
concerning precisely what U.S. interests and political principles were at stake
in the crisis in the Gulf; nor was there adequate discussion of what was
involved concerning the competing options for getting Iraq to withdraw from
Kuwait. A democratic social order would necessarily engage in intense debate
concerning precisely what was at stake in the crisis in the Gulf and whether a
military or a diplomatic resolution to the crisis was preferable. Reflecting on
the media's failure to adequately debate the issue of war and peace, Ruffini
wrote: "[D]uring the months when the Bush administration was maneuvering
us relentlessly from economic sanctions and the defense of Saudi Arabia toward
the crushing of Iraq's military power and probably ground warfare, the mighty
American press refused a fair hearing to the case for peace. With some notable
exceptions, the media chose to ignore clear and early signs that the
administration was preparing for a full-scale war against Iraq--and when that
prospect could not be denied, helped make it appear to be inevitable through
the business-as-usual transmission of the war whoops of the
administration" (1991, p. 21). Ruffini also reported: "Of the 25
largest U.S. newspapers...only one--the Rocky Mountain News in
Denver--has argued for the most part against military action even as a last
resort to dislodge Saddam Hussein's troops from Kuwait" (1991, p. 22).
Although
before and after the outbreak of the Gulf war, it was argued repeatedly that
"the use of force was inevitable," in fact, nothing in history is
inevitable. Such a dubious doctrine conceals the U.S. blocking of any
possibility of a negotiated settlement and its active promotion of the rush to
war. The argument of the Bush administration against diplomacy was that
"aggression should not be rewarded." This argument, however, was
hypocritical, obtuse, and beside the point. The U.S. and its coalition had been
engaging systematically in aggression for decades and to follow such a rigorous
and absolutist principle in the case of Iraq, while disregarding the aggression
of the United States, Israel, Syria, Turkey, or other countries in the alliance
against Iraq, is hypocritical, a perfect instance of the double standard
discourse that marked the Bush administration and media Gulf policy from the
beginning. In fact, the phrase "we will not reward aggression" was really
a code word for "we refuse any diplomatic solution" and thus lacked
cognitive and moral content. Furthermore, one could have engaged in a
diplomatic process that did not reward Iraq, but which made it possible for
them to leave Kuwait with a bare minimum of facesaving. There is significant
evidence that such a course could have worked, but it was never pursued by the
Bush administration.
The
Failure of Contexualization
The
media generally fail to adequately contexualize historical events, tending to
simplistic explanations which omit complexity and history. Failure to
adequately contextualize the Gulf crisis, I submit, contributed to the eventual
military resolution of the crisis and intensified the crisis of democracy. To
begin, the mainstream media did not discuss how it was that U.S. policy toward
Iraq created the crisis in the first place. As noted in Chapter 1, the United
States tilted toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war and helped build up Saddam
Hussein's military machine, continuing to give Iraq economic aid and material
used to build up the Iraqi military right up to the invasion of Kuwait. There
was no discussion about how failures of U.S. policy had contributed to the
crisis nor how the U.S. intervention and a subsequent war would be in the
interests of the Bush administration and Pentagon.
Crucially,
there was a failure to contextualize the Gulf crisis within a broader Middle
East frame. Obviously, the crisis in the Gulf was related to the political
economy of oil in the region, the division between rich and poor Arab nations,
and the complex inter-Arab relations as well as the U.S. relation to the region
and the complex web of relations between the U.S., Iraq, and Kuwait. Further,
the crisis in the Gulf also concerned the relations between Iraq, Syria, Egypt,
and Iran and their battles for hegemony in the region. In addition, relations
between Israel and the Arab states, as well as the Palestinian Intifada for an
independent Palestinian state, were involved. The crisis was influenced by the
conflicting pan-Arab ideologies contrasted with Islamic fundamentalist ones and
by combinations of these tendencies in several countries. The Middle East was
thus a complex cauldron of seething rivalries with competing interests,
ideologies, and power struggles (the articles in Bennis and Moushabeck 1991 and
Bresheeth and Yuval-Davis 1991 help clarify this context). The situation was
intensified by the vast oil resources of the region and its extreme
militarization. Indeed, the U.S. contributed heavily to the arming of the
Middle East, which had become one of the most militarized regions of the world
(see Tilly 1991, pp. 38-40).
Instead
of attempting to clarify this complexity, the media constructed a highly
simplistic narrative: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait; he wouldn't leave; and war
was necessary. This narrative leaves out the crucial fact that the United
States and the other Western coalition powers built up the military machine of
the Iraqis; that Kuwait and Iraq had an extremely complex and conflictual
relation; and that U.S. policy had long asserted its interests in controlling
the flow of Gulf oil and in maintaining a military presence in the region. It
failed to clarify why Saddam Hussein refused to leave Kuwait and why it was in
the interests of George Bush and the U.S. military to have a war.
Thus,
there was no context to understand the crisis and no Big Picture or overview of
the issues involved. In some ways, what was not shown or discussed in the
mainstream media was as significant as what was portrayed. There was almost
nothing in the mainstream media on the geopolitical history of the Middle East
region where the confrontation was occurring: there was little discussion of
the history of the borders in the region or of the complex relations between colonial
powers and Arab states, between Israel and the Arab states, or between the Arab
states themselves. The media also avoided analysis of the history of U.S.
involvement in the region, the precise nature of U.S. interests in oil
production, the political economy of oil, and the relations between U.S. oil
companies and the governments of the region. Nor was the question raised as to
why the United States reacted so aggressively to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,
while accepting the earlier Iraqi invasion of Iran, the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon, Syrian and Israeli occupations of Lebanon, and Israeli occupation of
land claimed by the Palestinians and others. Although there were many Israelis
and their supporters on the media daily attacking Iraq and calling for a
military solution to the crisis, there
was no discussion of why Israel was promoting the military option and
why it was in their interest to do so. And there was almost no discussion of
the interesting parallels between the U.S. invasion of Panama and the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait.
The
only attempt to contextualize the events by the major networks during the
crisis in the Gulf was an ABC special, "A Line in the Sand" (Sept.
11, 1990). Note that the title of
this program parrots Bush's own phrase denoting his resolve that U.S. forces
would draw "a line in the sand" to protect U.S. interests in the
region. The program glossed over
the complex geopolitical history of the Middle East in moments, without
addressing the issues that I posed above. Peter Jennings mentioned in passing
that the borders of the states involved in the crisis were imposed by Britain
earlier in the century, but he provided no real historical analysis. Jennings
constantly mentioned that "geography is important" as he walked on a
simulated map, from one country to another, an imperial televisual colossus of
the West stomping on Middle Eastern countries, but he seemed unaware that
history was also important.
Jennings
ended his special, moreover, on a disturbingly hawkish note. After mentioning
the spectrum of possible resolutions to the crisis, ranging from U.S. air
strikes to peaceful negotiations, he claimed that the "worst option of
all" might be for Saddam Hussein to withdraw intact to Iraq, preserving
his military machine, chemical weapons, and potential nuclear weapons for
future mischief in the area. Jennings's implication was that it would be better
to take the route of eliminating Hussein completely; thus he implicitly made
the argument for a U.S. military attack on Iraq.
The
ABC special did present some interesting information in a historical montage of
the 1990 events that led up to the Iraqi invasion and put some (no doubt
warranted) blame on Bush administration officials for failing to give Saddam
Hussein clear signals before his invasion that the United States would
resolutely oppose his intervention into Iraq. Articles in the New York Times
and some television newscasts took similar positions, pointing out that State
Department officials and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, indicated
that the U.S. had no treaties with Kuwait and no position on the disputes
between Iraq and Kuwait (see 1.1). The ABC program and subsequent newspaper
stories suggested that the Bush administration thus might have given the green light
to the Iraqis to invade Kuwait--promoting speculation that the U.S. might have
suckered Saddam Hussein into invading, precisely to deploy the show of force of
the U.S. military and to reassert the U.S. claim to military superpower status.12
Although
the mainstream media positively presented the diplomatic moves toward a
peaceful resolution of the crisis in early December, for months the corporate
media failed to criticize Bush's obvious reluctance to negotiate a peaceful
diplomatic solution to the crisis. It was obvious that the Bush administration
was doing everything possible to block any negotiated settlement (see 1.2), but
there was no major analysis of the reluctance of the Bush administration to
negotiate a peaceful solution nor was there discussion of the reasons that the
military option was in the interests of the Bush administration and Pentagon
(see 1.3). Whereas a Newsweek poll on October 29 indicated that 69
percent of Americans thought that "President Bush should pay more
attention to a diplomatic solution to the crisis," the mainstream media
rarely criticized his refusal to negotiate and usually legitimized his
unwillingness to directly seek a diplomatic solution with the Iraqis (see 1.2).
Instead, the corporate media reproduced the Bush administration rationale for
its policies and thus contributed to the march toward war.
In
addition, there was little questioning of the Bush administration's claim that
it was its hard line that forced Saddam Hussein to accept proposed negotiations
between the countries and Iraq's subsequent agreement to release all foreign
hostages in early December. There are, however, strong arguments that it was
precisely the growing opposition to his bellicose Middle East Policy by the
U.S. public that forced Bush to agree to negotiations. In light of the later
public support for the war it is useful to recall that before and after the
November 29 UN resolution that legitimized force as a potential resolution to
the crisis, Bush's approval rating for his handling of the crisis was falling
dramatically. This drop was in part due to the emerging antiwar movement that
television finally recognized by December and presented some sympathetic
reports of the opposition to administration policies. The release of foreign
hostages by the Iraqis in December shifted the network focus from military to
diplomatic solutions, but during the stalemate in the talks during December and
January, the networks swung back and forth between military and diplomatic
solutions to the crisis.
And
yet the anti-Iraq propaganda was so developed in the mainstream media that even
Saddam Hussein's stated willingness to negotiate with the United States and his
surprising offer to release all foreign hostages was portrayed negatively. The December 1 NBC newscast used
soldiers and a mother of a soldier about to go to the Middle East to express
skepticism whether Saddam Hussein could be trusted and whether one could
negotiate with him. Sgt. Brian Callum stated: "I'm skeptical if Saddam
Hussein will budge an inch." Interestingly, the identical clip was aired
the same night on the CNN "Crisis in the Gulf" report, raising
questions if the U.S. military was staging seemingly spontaneous
soldier-in-the-field reactions. On the other hand, such response did not need
to be rehearsed because the media had created such a negative image of Saddam
Hussein that people naturally and spontaneously thought the worst of him and
mistrusted all gestures, however promising. Both the NBC and CNN reports on
December 1, however, continued to present Bush's moves favorably and failed to
ask why Bush had taken so long to consider diplomatic negotiations with Iraq
(which, in retrospect, appear as a smokescreen to appease domestic fears of war
and antiwar public opinion).
The
Nuclear Threat, Congressional Debate, and Media Blindspots
During the weeks preceding the war
itself, the Bush administration attempted to deflect attention from the growing
concern about the advisability of war by producing stronger reasons why war
might be necessary. "Focus group" interviews and a New York Times
poll indicated that U.S. citizens were most disturbed by reports that Iraq
might possess a nuclear weapons capacity. During Bush's Thanksgiving visit to
the U.S. troops in the Saudi desert, he dramatized the dangers of Saddam
Hussein having a nuclear capacity as a justification to fight and eliminate
him. This argument was repeated over the Thanksgiving weekend by Secretary of
Defense Dick Cheney and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. According to
them, recent intelligence information revealed that Saddam Hussein might have a
nuclear capacity within one year, dramatizing again the dangers of the Iraqi
president and implicitly supporting the need to totally eliminate him and his
military capacity through decisive military action.
For
some days, the television networks failed to question the claim advanced by the
Bush administration concerning Iraq's nuclear capability. Despite a New York
Times Op-Ed piece on November 27 by Richard Rhodes concerning "Bush's
Atomic Red Herring," which stated that "[e]xpert estimates put Iraqi
acquisition of a limited nuclear arsenal at least 10 years away,"13
and despite reports from experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency that
the small amount of nuclear fuel possessed was not being used in a nuclear
weapons program (New York Times, Nov. 28, 1990), the television networks
and other mainstream media outlets continued to use the argument that Iraq's
possession of a nuclear weapons capacity was a compelling argument to destroy
Saddam Hussein immediately in an all-out military invasion. This argument was
suggested by William Safire in a November 26, 1990, New York Times Op-Ed
column, was repeated by Wolf Blitzer in a November 27 CNN report, and
frequently appeared as a rationale for war expressed by those on talk shows or
"person in the street" interview segments. When the reports
questioning Iraq's nuclear capability started gaining attention, the Bush
administration put out a statement saying that the International Atomic Agency
report that doubted such a capacity was false and that doubt was aired on CNN
on November 28, 1990.
Eventually,
some media critique appeared that addressed the Bush administration's claim
that Iraq was close to producing a nuclear bomb. The December 1 "Larry
King Live" program featured a discussion between nuclear weapons expert
Richard Rhodes, who argued that the nuclear threat was a red herring, and a
prowar advocate from the Heritage Foundation, David Silverstein, who argued
that the Iraqi nuclear threat was immediate and real. Silverstein violently
attacked Saddam Hussein, the Soviet Union, and Palestianians, disclosing the
venom and aggression that the media was unleashing. The "MacNeil/Lehrer
News Hour" and "Nightline" also had shows during the first week
of December that questioned whether Iraq could develop a nuclear capability in
the immediate future. In the face of this questioning, the Bush administration
backed away from this rationale, at least for the moment.
In
January, the Senate resumed hearings in which a series of expert witnesses
urged restraint and the continuation of sanctions rather than the use of
military force to resolve the crisis. Two former heads of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and seven former secretaries of defense argued in the hearings that it
would be preferable to pursue the policy of sanctions rather than exert the
military option. Henry Kissinger and other die-hard militarists who continued
to call for a military solution were the exceptions. The media finally began
circulating these antiwar discourses, and Bush acted quickly to stem criticism
and to help deflate the increasing questioning of his policies by promising
negotiations. He announced a meeting
between James Baker and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva on January
9.
Yet,
despite rising opposition to Bush's war policy and signs of peace negotiations
in December and January, no peaceful solution to the crisis resulted. The
negotiations had stalled by mid-December and the Bush administration never
really seriously engaged in direct diplomacy with Iraq to seek a peaceful
resolution to the crisis. Although Ted Koppel's "Nightline" had
planned to air a "town meeting" on December 7, with an impressive
array of antiwar speakers, the program was "postponed" after Bush
proclaimed a willingness to negotiate with the Iraqis. No negotiations
resulted, though the Bush administration continued to insist that it had
"gone the extra mile" to seek a negotiated settlement, that it had
"left no stone unturned" in the search for peace, and that the Iraqis
simply refused to negotiate. In fact, the Bush administration did everything
possible to undermine serious negotiations, leading some in the alternative
media to speculate that they actively sought the military option.14
In
any case, the television networks and mainstream media simultaneously failed to
adequately discuss why the United States had committed so many troops and
resources to the Gulf, and transmitted little serious criticism of the Bush
administration policy. There was inadequate analysis of the enormous expenses
incurred by the U.S. military intervention and the impact of this spending on a
faltering U.S. economy, which might not have been able to stand such excessive
strain on its resources. There was little or no analysis questioning the timing
of Bush's intervention during an era when the federal deficit, the savings and
loan scandal, and possible collapse of the financial system, linked with
growing recession, might require a scapegoat and diversion from the economic
woes that threatened to become greater as time went on. Nor were the immediate
political advantages to Bush and the Republican party from a military
intervention discussed (i.e., the inevitable rush of patriotism that boosted
the president's popularity ratings, the advantages to incumbents and hawks in
the 1992 election if Bush was able to triumph in a Gulf war, and the
downplaying of domestic issues, potentially damaging to Bush and the
Republicans, in favor of focus on foreign politics and a Gulf war).
Consequently,
the media failed completely to offer anything like an analysis of why it was in
Bush's immediate political interests to undertake a vast military adventure
which would certainly unleash political turmoil throughout the region,
disrupting the political ecology of the Middle East, just as it was certain to
wreak havoc on the environment. Nor did the mainstream media point out that
Bush was a longtime champion of the military-industrial complex and National Security
State, and that his actions during the crisis strongly promoted the interests
of these institutions.
Indeed, the Gulf intervention by the
United States was primarily in the interests of those groups whose
representatives were crucial in encouraging Bush to undertake such a risky
adventure. Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, his assistant,
ex-CIA Deputy Director Robert Gates (now CIA director), Secretary of Defense
Dick Cheney, and others in Bush's war team were all ardent defenders of the
military-industrial complex and argued consistently for a military solution to
the crisis in the Gulf. But the mainstream media failed to discuss how it was
the military-industrial complex that would benefit enormously by the Gulf
crisis and war, providing the defense industries the possibility of gleefully
looking forward to immense profits just when they feared sharp cutbacks.15 On August 6, the Los Angeles Times
reported that "in a single stroke, Saddam Hussein's foray of tanks and
troops has blunted the momentum in Congress toward making deep cuts in the
American military establishment and has redrawn the debate about the shape and
size of the nation's future military force. Since Iraq's troops marched into
Kuwait City, Saddam Hussein's actions saved the B-2 on the Senate floor and
rescued a pair of Navy battleships from going into mothballs." On the eve
of the crisis of the Gulf, there was intense pressure to cut back the military
budget to produce a "peace dividend" for increased domestic programs
that would cut into the profits of the military-industrial establishment. In
fact, a former member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers was told in
mid-October, "We owe Saddam a favor. He saved us from the peace
dividend" (New York Times, Oct. 16, 1990).
Yet there was little analysis in the
mainstream media of the specific political and economic interests in the United
States who would benefit from and which were promoting such expensive and
dangerous involvement in the region. Oil corporations benefitted tremendously
from the crisis; Lewis Lapham told of a Texas oilman buying bottles of
champagne in a restaurant and reading aloud a telegram that he'd just sent to
Saddam Hussein: "Warm congratulations on your well-earned victory. Every
good wish for your continued success" (in Sifrey and Cerf 1991, p. 460).
Bush and his family had oil interests in the region, and Brent Scowcroft was
connected with both oil and defense interests.16 Although there was
discussion of the role of oil in motivating the U.S. troop deployment, there
was little in the corporate media on the history of U.S. dependency on Middle
East oil. The mainstream media ignored the fact that during the Carter
administration, the U.S. drastically reduced dependency and attempted to develop
a coherent energy policy, but under Reagan and Bush the United States increased
dependency on foreign oil supplies and ceased developing an energy policy.
There was little analysis of how the Republican administrations first sought
cheap oil prices at the expense of oil dependency, leaving price and supply to
the "magic of the marketplace," and then sought higher oil prices to
benefit the U.S. oil industry (see Cleaver 1991). Nor was there much discussion
of the fact that by 1990 the United States exported about 25 percent of its oil
from the Middle East or that the dependency figure had been down to about 7
percent by the end of the Carter Presidency.
There was also inadequate discussion
pointing out that it is mostly Western Europe and Japan that were directly
dependent on Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil (the United States was only receiving about
5 percent of its oil from these two countries), or that the U.S. has been
reduced to a mercenary force supplying troops and weapons to intervene on
behalf of its capitalist allies. There was almost nothing in the mainstream
media on the need to develop sane energy alternatives, and what discussion of
this issue there was focused on the need to rethink the nuclear energy option
and to loosen restrictions on oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas
(rather than on the need to develop solar energy or renewable and ecologically
safe energy alternatives). Instead, the corporate media took advantage of the
crisis to promote the failing nuclear energy industry and also urged the
loosening of environmental
restrictions on oil production.17
Other
blindspots in the media and Congress concerned the actual consequences of a
Middle East war and the few speculations were rather tentative and limited. In
a New York Times article on "Iraq's Aim: High Toll for G.I.s,"
Patrick Tyler outlined some of Iraq's military strategy (Nov. 27, 1990, p. A8)
but failed to analyze what might actually happen in a war. A New York Times
Op-Ed piece by Anthony Lewis took on the rightist arguments that democracy was
hindering Bush in his attempt to intimidate Saddam Hussein into unilaterally
withdrawing from Kuwait (Nov. 26, 1990). Lewis asked: "How would a war be
fought? How many American casualties
could be expected? What vital U.S.
interests would be vindicated?
What would be the consequences of a war? How stable would pro-Western Arab governments prove to
be? Might Israel be
threatened?" Although Lewis raised these questions, little effort was
exerted in the mainstream media to seriously discuss them.
Crucially,
almost nothing was explored on the political and ecological effects on the
region if there actually was a war. There was little discussion of the economic
consequences and potential environmental holocaust that would ensue if the
Kuwaiti, Iraqi, or Saudi oil fields were bombed or set on fire. The Iraqis
claimed that they had mined the Kuwaiti oil fields and would set them on fire
if attacked, thus causing an environmental disaster--an event that came to
pass, though, as we shall see, its origins were more complex than the media let
on (see 5.3). Enviromentalists argued before the war that such fires would be
difficult to put out and that pollution from the burning oil would be extremely
lethal and would cause tremendous environmental damage. Although there was an
international environmental conference in London to discuss the environmental
effects of a Gulf war in early January, CNN only managed a brief report on the
conference, which suggested that there might be an ecological catastrophe from
the soot and smoke resulting from a thousand burning oil wells in Kuwait and
that the fires might produce a "nuclear winter" effect, blocking out
the sun, lowering temperatures, and wreaking havoc with global weather
patterns. It was also suggested that oil spills in the Gulf would be many times
worse than the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. However, The New York Times
and most mainstream news sources neglected this story completely.18
The
political instability of the Middle East that might result after an all-out war
was rarely discussed. Although there was some criticism of Secretary of State
James Baker's visit with Syria's President Assad and some speculation that
Syria might invade and take over parts of Iraq after a Gulf war, little
attention was given to the turmoil that might emerge in the region during the
eruption of major warfare--upheaval evident in Iraq immediately after the end
of the ground war. There was almost nothing on a possible Israeli response to a
U.S.-led war against Iraq. Would
Israel enter the war with its chemical and nuclear weapons against Iraq, and
might Iraq attack Israel? If so, how would Israel respond and what impact would
Israel's response have on the U.S.-led coalition? Would Israel utilize the
confusion to produce a final solution to the Palestinian question and use the
state of emergency to drive Palestianians and Arabs out of the West Bank and
out of Israel entirely? Would
Syria or Iran attack their enemy Iraq and seize territory? How would the various
Arab regimes survive such chaos?
Might there not be a reaction against the regimes that sided with the
United States, resulting in mass upheaval and the overthrow of regimes involved
in the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq? How would U.S. interests be served in
such turmoil?
Furthermore,
given the absence of critical Arab voices in the mainstream media, there was no
discussion of how Arabs perceived the coming war and how it would impact on the
Arab world. Obviously, the crisis had divided the Arab world and some sectors
wanted the U.S.-led coalition to forcibly expel Iraq from Kuwait. Many other
Arabs, however, feared that a war would seriously disrupt the political ecology
of the region and would be a disaster for the Arab world--as it arguably was. In
fact, neither the Bush administration nor voices in the media really
articulated any vision for a post-war Iraq or what would happen to the region
after the war during the crisis in the Gulf. It was not clear how the United
States envisaged driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait. It was not certain if the
Iraqis would flee if attacked, as happened, or if it would be a bloodbath with
house-to-house fighting in Kuwait City. If the U.S.-led coalition succeeded in
driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait, it was unclear if the goal was to eliminate
Saddam Hussein and his regime or merely a large part of his army. The U.S. had
not publicly connected with any Iraqi opposition groups and if Saddam Hussein
was overthrown or eliminated by U.S. military action, there was no indication
of which forces in Iraq could form a government. Indeed, both the Bush
administration and the media neglected the democratic Iraqi opposition, failing
to discuss the positions of oppositional Iraqi forces on the issues of war,
peace, and democratization in Iraq (Chomsky 1991).
Thus,
it was not clear what sort of societies could be created out of the rubble if
an all-out war destroyed most of the oil, cities, industrial capacity, people,
and resources of Iraq and Kuwait. Consequently, neither the Bush administration
nor anyone urging military action expressed what sort of a postwar order they
envisaged in the Middle East. Although some (i.e., Admiral William Crowe in the
November 28 Senate hearing) speculated that anti-American backlash throughout
the region might haunt and threaten U.S. interests in the region for decades,
there was little discussion of how the United States would guarantee oil
supplies, maintain peace and order, and provide stability to a region that has
been wracked with instability and seemingly unsolvable problems for decades.
It
was not TV alone that failed to adequately discuss the issues of war and peace.
Although the December 10, 1990, Time magazine cover story was titled
"What Would War Be Like," the story itself did not raise the
questions concerning the impact of a war on oil supplies, the potential
ecological crisis, and the question of a postwar order in the region. Newsweek,
in its December 10, 1990, issue, also featured a discussion of Bush's
"Plan for All-Out War," but failed as well to raise the key
questions. Furthermore, Time's
coverage omitted even a mention of the Senate Armed Service Committee hearings
that overwhelmingly warned against the military option; because this event was
of crucial importance, Time's failure to cover it provides a clear
indication of the extent to which key corporate media privileged the military
discourse.
Even
when important congressional hearings took place during the last weeks of the
crisis, the networks for the most part ignored these debates, taking at most a
snippet from the day's testimony in their evening news programs. There were
almost no in-depth discussions concerning the hearings on talk shows, no news
specials to highlight their importance, and no extended analysis of the
hearings in the weekly newsmagazines. By contrast, interviews with released
hostages during the same period were a frequent feature of the mainstream
media. This preference clearly indicated the extent to which human interest
stories are privileged over political debate in commercial corporate media,
which are primarily dedicated to ratings, profits, and promoting the interests
of the corporate class.
Finally,
there was little discussion of the ways that the United States manipulated the
UN to sanction the use of force against Iraq.19 In mobilizing
support for its resolution, the U.S. bribed, bullied, and coerced members of
the Security Council to support the use of force and publicly punished those
who refused to submit to its will. The U.S. paid off all the countries who had
key votes in the Security Council with massive loans or debt forgiveness,
threatening punishment for those who did not go along. When Yemen, for
instance, refused to support the U.S. resolution authorizing the use of
military force against Iraq, its Ambassador was informed that this would be
"the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast." Three days later, the
U.S. eliminated its $70 million aid package to Yemen, "one of the poorest
countries in the region" (Bennis 1991, p. 7). This action violated the
charter and spirit of the UN which was supposed to be dedicated to peacefully
resolving conflicts, to using diplomacy to resolve conflicts.
Many
key issues were therefore not posed or adequately discussed before the war
broke out and one could argue that inadequate debate of the issues of war and
peace in the mainstream media might have been decisive in pushing the country
into the Gulf war. The lack of an adequate critical discussion in the media
regarding its Gulf policy enabled the Bush administration to prepare for
eventual war and triumph by giving it time to slowly but inexorably build up
the U.S. war machine and military strategy. The mainstream media aided Bush by
employing the forms of popular culture to demonize Saddam Hussein and the
Iraqis, by glorifying U.S. troops and technology, and by submitting to the pool
system that allowed the military to control images and information. Saddam
Hussein was presented so negatively and the massive U.S. troop deployment so
positively that the only logical solution to the crisis was decisive military
action and unquestioning support for the U.S. troops. The nightly images of the
U.S. troops in the desert bonded viewers to the soldiers and created a basis of
support. One could also argue that the use of the Saddam-as-Hitler theme and
the demonization of the Iraqis especially prejudiced the public against a
negotiated, diplomatic solution. Obviously, one cannot negotiate with a Hitler
who is such a threat to the peace of the world that he must be destroyed.
Thus
the extremely negative framing of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis helped rule out
a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the crisis by conditioning significant
segments of the public to support war. In addition, the constant war talk created
a climate in which only military action could resolve the crisis. The media's
representation of the confrontation as a struggle between good and evil, with
the evil Saddam Hussein unwilling to negotiate and threatening the allies,
produced tension and the need for a resolution that war itself could best
provide. Consequently, the mainstream media failed to meet their democratic
responsibilities of providing a wide range of opinion on issues of public
importance and informing the public concerning contemporary events. Because
democracy requires a separation of powers and an independent media, the
combination of the Bush administration, military, and media all pushing for war
undermined the democratic system of checks and balances, failed to discuss issues
of key importance, did not adequately inform the public, and thus intensified
the crisis of democracy in the United States.
***
On
November 28, the United States passed a UN resolution authorizing the use of
force if the Iraqis did not unilaterally withdraw from Kuwait by January 15. On
January 12, Congress narrowly approved the UN resolution authorizing force to
resolve the crisis. The momentum toward military confrontation then escalated
rapidly, creating a situation in which war could erupt at any minute when Iraq
did not accept the U.S./UN January 15 ultimatum. Headline stories in the
January 15 New York Times reported that "U.S. and Iraq Prepare for
War as Tonight's Deadline Nears; Diplomacy Remains Fruitless. Early Attack
Seen" [put in block boldface caps]. Other front-page stories were
headlined: "Final Iraqi Preparations Indicate Hussein Wants War, Officials
Say," next to a story headlined: "Iraqi Parliament Votes to Defy
U.S." Another story noted in headlines on page 1: "On the Verge of
War, G.I.'s Are Anxious." On Wednesday, January 16, war was indeed to
come.
Notes
1.
On the Manichean frames of U.S. popular culture, see Jewett and Lawrence 1988
who describe the way that popular culture replicates the metaphysics of the
ancient Manichean Christian sect that portrayed human existence as a struggle
between good and evil. See also Rogin (1987) who analyzes how Reagan
manipulated these frames and used political demonization to manufacture consent
to his policies; political demonization involves the rhetorical construction of
political opponents as demons who threaten the existing order. Both of these
studies were influenced by Slotkin (1973) who analyzed the theme of
regeneration through violence in American culture and the role of captivity
dramas in which the capture of white women by people of color was utilized to
justify extermination of colonized people--a theme utilized in the rape
discourse of the Gulf war, as I shall note below.
2.
To compare Hussein to Hitler and the Iraqis to Germany presupposes a false
analogy in terms of the military threat to the region and the world from the
Iraqi army--whose threat was hyped up from the beginning. Iraq's 17 million
population can hardly compare with Germany's 70 million and its military could
hardly be compared with Hitler's military machine, which was the most powerful
in the world in the 1930s. Nor could Iraq, which depends on oil for over 95
percent of its exports, be compared with an industrial powerhouse like Germany.
Such comparisons also trivialize the holocaust and Hitler's wave of aggression
in Europe. The Hitler metaphor also serves to cover over the fact that the
Middle East was, in fact, colonized by Western powers, which drew the
borderlines of the region. Such decontextualization, hyperbolic metaphor, and
sloppy argumentation would, however, characterize the discourse of the Gulf
war.
3.
See Stockwell 1978 and 1991 on the U.S. search for enemies to legitimate an
aggressive foreign policy and national security state and Keen 1986 on the
construction of political enemies. Popular biographies of Saddam Hussein were
also villainizing him in hyperbolic terms; see Miller and Mylroie 1990 and
Sciolino 1991. For more scholarly and balanced critical studies of Hussein, see
Karsh and Rautsi 1991; Henderson 1991; and Darwish and Alexander 1991.
4.
The rhetoric of "rape" was encouraged by the Free Kuwait group and
their U.S. public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, which I discuss below. One
of the first books on the crisis was titled The Rape of Kuwait and was
funded and distributed by the Kuwaiti government (see Sasson 1991). There was,
however, a double standard operative in which the Iraqi intervention into
Kuwait was characterized as "rape" and "naked aggression"
(i.e., sexual crimes), whereas the U.S. military intervention into Saudi Arabia
was described as a totally justified undertaking to protect U.S. interests and
the "American way of life." Ann Norton noted the sexual innuendoes in
the media discourse constructing Saddam Hussein in a November 26 Teach-In at
the University of Texas and suggested that this discourse presented him as a
sexual monster and threat, and thus as abnormal. In contrast, she continued,
Bush's "incursion" into Panama was presented as "normal,"
as consensual intercourse whereby the territory solicited the U.S. incursion,
accepting its penetration, even though several barrios were largely destroyed
and much damage was suffered.
5.
The initial media coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and U.S. intervention
in Saudi Arabia validates the argument of Herman and Chomsky (1988) that the
corporate media tend to picture adversaries of the U.S. as evil while
overlooking crimes of U.S. allies. Although Saddam Hussein was a U.S. ally in
his war against Iran and the recipient of U.S. aid and arms sales, he was
presented positively and his crimes were ignored; when he became U.S. enemy
number one, his every evil deed was magnified. Likewise, when the United States
invaded Panama, its actions were defended by the same corporate media that
later attacked Iraq for similar aggression. See the documentation of media bias
toward the Bush administration during the Panama invasion in Kellner 1990;
Chomsky 1990; Lee and Solomon 1991, pp. 316-317; and Mark Cook and Jeff Cohen, "The
Media Go to War: How Television Sold the Panama Invasion," Extra!,
Jan./Feb. 1990.
6.
For criticism of the bias against Arabs and Islam in U.S. media presentations,
see Said 1981; on the anti-Arab stereotypes that dominate U.S. popular culture,
see Shaheen 1984.
7.
For feminist analysis of the media presentation of the Gulf crisis and war that
I draw upon, see Enloe 1990 and Roach 1991.
8.
Buchanan was attacked by A. M. Rosenthal in the New York Times Op-Ed
page for claiming that Israel, its supporters, and U.S. hawks were leading the
country to war (Sept. 14, 1990). Rosenthal accused Buchanan of anti‑Semitism,
which might be seen as a legitimate charge in view of Buchanan's record of
defending ex-Nazis, but such an attack suppressed the issue of what the Israeli
policy actually was and what influence it actually exerted on U.S. policymakers
and public opinion leaders like Rosenthal. After this controversy, Buchanan
disappeared from his CNN "CrossFire" post for a brief period, but
soon returned; Rosenthal went to Israel during November to make sure that he
continued to accurately portray the Israeli point of view in his Op-Ed pieces.
9.
Studies by FAIR (1990) document that such discussion shows as ABC's
"Nightline" and the PBS's "The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour"
characteristically contain only a small range of views from establishment
sources, drawing on the same small pool of white conservative males from
conservative Washington "think tanks" and former government
officials. FAIR also argued that PBS features only conservative talk shows,
with no liberal or left alternatives. An initial FAIR study of the Gulf crisis
revealed that once again "Nightline" and "MacNeil/Lehrer"
drew on the usual small pool of "experts": Not one critic of the U.S.
military intervention appeared on either program during the first month of the
crisis; about half of the guests were current or former government officials
and two-thirds of these were Republican; almost all were white males. See Extra!
(Nov.-Dec. 1990), p. 4.
10.
On the pool system, see the articles by Ruffini 1991; Schanberg 1991; Browne
1991; LaMay, et al., 1991; and Anderson 1991. See also the articles in the Columbia
Journalism Review, Mar./Apr. 1991, pp. 23-29; Index on Censorship,
Apr./May 1991; Le monde diplomatique, May 1991, pp. 11-18; and the New
York Times, May 5 and 6, 1991.
11.
Jesse Jackson managed to get to Iraq for an interview with Saddam Hussein,
which won him a few minutes of airtime to criticize the U.S. intervention,
though he later complained: "Since [the invasion of Kuwait on August 2] I
have talked with Saddam Hussein for six hours, two hours on tape. Longer than
any American. I met with Tariq Aziz for almost ten hours. I took the first
group of journalists into Kuwait, negotiated for the release of hostages. And
when we got back, there was not one serious interview by a network. A
categorical rejection. Now why is there no interest in what we saw, observed,
and got on tape?" (Columbia Journalism Review, Mar./Apr. 1991, p.
28). One of the few critiques by members of Congress during the first month of
the crisis was that of Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D.-Tex) who blamed the U.S.
government and banks for funding much of Hussein's military buildup and who
called for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East (Austin
American‑Statesman, Aug. 4, 1990, pp. 1A and 4A). Later, during the
Gulf war itself, he produced a resolution to impeach Bush, but this, too, was
ignored by the mainstream media.
12.
The position that the United States manipulated Iraq into thinking that it
would not oppose its invasion of Kuwait is argued in Agee 1990; Emery 1991; and
Frank 1991 (see 1.1). It should be noted, however, that ABC did devote more
stories to diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis than the other networks.
According to an analysis in the Tyndall Report, during the 45 days before the
UN deadline, ABC had 23 reports on diplomacy compared to 13 for CBS and 11 for
NBC; during the war itself, ABC featured 18 reports on attempted diplomatic
resolutions of the war compared to 9 for CBS and 3 for the military-industrial
network, NBC, which apparently favors war over peace, weapons over diplomacy.
13.
Rhodes is author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer
Prize in 1988. In the Senate hearings, James Schlesinger also stated that the
Iraqis probably wouldn't have the nuclear capacity for five to ten years (New York Times,
November 30, 1990, p. 1) and this view was held by others as well (see The
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March 1991, pp. 16ff.). During the war,
General Schwarzkopf and his minions would claim repeatedly that they had
destroyed Iraq's nuclear capability with their bombing campaign; after the war,
however, there were conflicting stories as to the extent of Iraq's nuclear
capability and whether it had or had not been eliminated.
14.
See Z Magazine, January 1991, pp. 3 and 56; The Nation, Sept. 10,
1990, pp. 223ff., and Dec. 24, 1990, pp. 1ff; In These Times, Nov. 21,
1990, pp. 1 and 14; and The Progressive, January 1991, pp. 8ff. The
New Yorker featured a sharp analysis of how the nation was
"sleep-walking toward war" in its "Talk of the Town" column
of December 10, 1990, p. 43. These and other publications correctly discerned
that Bush was proceeding to war, but the mainstream media either failed to note
this or urged him to do so.
15.
See 1.3. In September, In These Times reports, there was a meeting in
Milwaukee of military contractors called by the Procurement Institute; when its
cochairman Jim Roberts opened the meeting with the words: "Thank you,
Saddam Hussein!" the crowd reportedly cheered (November 21, 1990, p. 5).
Manfred Sadlowski, who publishes Military Technology, headlined an
editorial in the October issue "Well Done, Saddam!" Villains like
Saddam, he observes, have "a very useful function" in that they
provide the justification for not reducing military spending "without the
need for too much propaganda effort by our governments." "At the very
moment," Sadlowski noted, "when too many people were beginning to
label our armed forces as useless relics of the long past Cold War age, we have
suddenly found...a new mission for them." (cited in the Sydney Morning
Herald, Oct. 9, 1990). On August 19, the Los Angeles Times reported
that the proposed sale of 24 F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia could earn the
McDonnell-Douglas corporation an estimated $1.2 billion." Indeed, it was estimated that deals
were cut with the Saudis in August 1990 for the purchase of over $40 billion
dollars worth of military equipment, the largest single package in history.
Although there were frequent news reports about the increased defense spending
and occasional discussion of the costs of the intervention, there was little or
no analysis in the mainstream media of the way that this was primarily
benefiting the military-industrial complex.
16.
Curiously, Bush's Zapata Oil company had operated in Kuwait in the 1960s. On
the Bush family oil connections in the region, see the discussion in Chapter 1
and sources in Note 26; Scowcroft was on the board of Santa Fe International, a
subsidiary of the Kuwait Petroleum Company from 1984-1986 (see Extra!,
May 1991, p. 16). For more on Scowcroft, see 10.2.
17.
See New York Times editorial pages for August 7 and 9, which argued for
reconsidering the nuclear option and loosening energy restrictions; this
position was also frequently presented on NBC. Alternative media, by contrast,
argued that the Persian Gulf crisis dramatized the need for energy conservation
and renewable energy sources and energy independence so that the U.S. would not
depend on Middle East oil to run its economy. See David Moberg, "Hussein's Moves Raise Energy
Security Questions" (In These Times, August 15-28, 1990, p. 2) and
Dwight Holing, "America's Energy Plan: Missing in Action" (The
Amicus Journal, Winter 1991). It may be worth noting that oilman George
Bush removed environmental restrictions on oil drilling and signed an executive
order removing the necessity of the Pentagon to produce an environmental impact
report on their actions and policies--a point that I shall draw on later. Thus
Bush unleashed a war on the environment at the same time that he carried out a
war against Iraq.
18.
Once again it was the alternative and local press that stressed the
environmental dangers from a Gulf war. See Joni Seager, "Tigris, Tigris,
Burning Bright: Is the Middle Eastern Desert a Wasteland?... No, But It Will
Be," Village Voice, December 25, 1990, and Glennda Chui,
"Desert Wounds: The Environment Could Also Become a Casualty of War,"
San Jose Mercury News, January 15, 1991. On the day that Bush began
bombing Baghdad, the New York Times published a story indicating that
military scientists had concluded that a Gulf war would not constitute a threat
to the environment of the Persian Gulf region (January 16, 1991, p. C3).
19.
Likewise, during and after the war, there was little discussion of how the
United States blocked calls in the United Nations for a ceasefire and a
diplomatic settlement to the war. Although some argued that the passing of the
UN resolutions against Iraq showed the positive potential of the organization
as a force for global peace, others argued that the U.S. shamelessly
manipulated it, turning an organization dedicated to peace into a body that
legitimated a brutal war. For documentation of the U.S. abuse of the UN, see
Phyllis Bennis, "Bush's Tool and Victim." CovertAction Information
Bulletin, Number 37 (Summer 1991) and Barbara Rogers, "Wanted: A New
Policy for the United Nations," in Brittain 1991, pp. 143-158.