From:
intraphase@gmail.com
Reminds me of this old song
Jesus Jones - Right Here Right Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MznHdJReoeo
[]
Back to slagging King George I & King George II
Unpublishable War Photo
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/08/corpse/61bde04cf.jpg
George Herbert Walker Bush and the Myth of the ‘Good’ Gulf War
Posted on December 6, 2018 by Yves Smith
Yves here. We’ve attempted to be restrained in countering the Bush hagiography, since even though there is a great deal not to like about Bush the
Senior’s actions and the revisionist history about them, it still seems a bit
mean-sprirted to
criticize him so close to his funeral (as in the timing of the pushback can backfire).
Having said that, this is a measured yet devastating piece due to its level of factual support. Nevertheless, two more tidbits. The casus belli for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was that Kuwait was pumping more than what Iraq thought was Kuwait’s fair
share out of an oil field to which both countries had access. I believe Iraq complained first to Kuwait, which didn’t change what it was doing, and then to the US, which was sympathetic.
And Bush the Senior was put up to the invasion. From the 1992 New York Times review of George Bush’s War By Jean Edward Smith:
The author writes that when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met with Mr. Bush at the Aspen Institute in Colorado on Aug. 3, 1990, she told him, “Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly.” For Mrs. Thatcher, the Iraq-Kuwait crisis was the
Falkland Islands all over again. She considered the British military adventure there her finest hour; it also helped her at home politically. Speaking of Mrs.
Thatcher’s effect upon Mr. Bush, one of her senior advisers told The Guardian, “The Prime
Minister performed a successful backbone transplant.
By Nora Eisenberg, whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, Tikkun, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Guardian UK. Originally published at Alternet
This story draws on articles about the 1991 Gulf War that the author wrote for AlterNet that drew on the writer’s extensive research for her 2008 novel, “When You Come Home” (Curbstone)– which chronicles the lives of young veterans returning home
from Desert Storm.
President George Herbert Walker Bush considered the 1991 Gulf War his highest achievement, a signature moment in world history, and for nearly three decades mainstream media have agreed. On the occasion of his death, they are sticking to the story. The
New York Times obituary praised him for the “global coalition” he assembled
to “eject Iraqi invaders from Kuwait, sending hundreds of thousands of troops
in a triumphant military campaign.” A Washington Post article on Bush 41’s
legacy in the
Middle East explains that the World War II fighter pilot “came to view Saddam
as similar to Adolf Hitler, a madman who seized neighboring Kuwait and could plunge the world into conflict if he continued into Saudi Arabia.” And thus “Bush rallied
together a coalition of nations” to curb the dictator’s power. Yes, Desert
Storm lasted only 43 days with only 148 U.S. fatalities in battle, a third from
friendly fire. But that’s about the only truth in the official history of the late
President’s Gulf War. The evidence that has mounted over the years tells a very different story. The Gulf War of Bush the Father was as sinister and destructive as that of his son.
1. The Persian Gulf War had been in the planning for years before the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait
As legal scholar Francis Boyle has documented, soon after the 1988 termination of the 8 year Iraq-Iran War, the Pentagon began planning the destruction of Iraq. In October 1990, Colin Powell referred to a new military plan for Iraq developed the year
before.
In early 1990, General Schwarzkopf told the Senate Armed Services Committee of this new military strategy in the Gulf and to protect U.S. access to and control over Gulf oil in the event of regional conflicts, and after the war, he
referred to eighteen
months of planning for the campaign as Commander of the U.S. Central Command. During January of 1990, massive quantities of United States weapons, equipment,
and supplies were sent to Saudi Arabia in order to prepare for the war against Iraq.
2. The Bush 41 administration gave Saddam a green light to Invade Kuwait, then used it as an excuse for invading Iraq
Much debate surrounds the true content of the meeting between Saddam Hussein and Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, 1990. But Glaspie’s own cable, released by WikiLeaks almost a decade ago and long available at the Bush Library and on the website of
none other than Margaret Thatcher, paints a picture of a government with a two-faced foreign policy. Saddam complains that “certain circles” in the U.S. government were antagonistic to Iraq and Glaspie agrees, though with confidence and apparent
sincerity she assures him of the “friendship” and “non-confrontational”
agenda of the President and Secretary of State. In another follow-up cable four
days later, Glaspie reports on her July 28 meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, in
which he complains of the U.S.’s increasingly provocative actions and Glaspie
herself seems increasingly frustrated. She writes that it is important not to hit Iraq with “bolts out of the blue” such as cessation of U.S. exports, which has come as a
surprise even to her. In both cables, it’s now clear, Glaspie was presenting the official friendly position of the George W H Bush administration, just as behind the scenes, government hawks were preparing a war.
In her July 29 cable, Glaspie offers the State Department advice on handling the matter, including keeping a low profile and reminding colleagues as she had
Saddam in the earlier meeting that “we have never taken substantive positions
on inter-OPEC or
Arab border disputes”— which was the matter at hand. In her earlier cable, Glaspie wrote that Saddam made clear that “if Iraq is publicly humiliated by the United States it will have no choice but to ‘respond,’ however illogical or self-
destructive that would prove.” She advises the State Department not to make him lose face.
Glaspie was not the only official to express this laissez-faire position. On July 26, at a Washington press conference, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutweiler was asked by a journalist if the U.S. had sent any diplomatic protest to Iraq for
putting 30,000 troops on the border with Kuwait. “I’m entirely unaware of any such protest,” Tutweiler replied. On July 31, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs John Kelly testified to Congress that the “United States has no
commitment to defend Kuwait, and the U.S. has no intention of defending Kuwait if it is attacked by Iraq.”
Two days later, on August 2, when Saddam’s troops entered Kuwait, he had no reason to believe that the U.S. would come to Kuwait’s defense with a half-million troops. Or that when he tried to negotiate a dignified retreat though Arab leaders, the U.S.
would refuse to talk, as James Ridgeway chronicles in his January 1991 Village
Voice articles.
By Sunday, August 5, Bush was in, announcing after a weekend at Camp David, “This will not stand.” On August 6, Cheney received approval from the Saudis for a large U.S. deployment. Giddy from his invasion of Panama, he was raring to go.
3. The Bush 41 Administration dis-informed congress and the public to drum up support for an unpopular war and bribed and bamboozled other countries
If the CIA, the Pentagon, and by summer’s end the President and Secretary of State were fixed on a war with Iraq, during the fall of 1990, the American public and Congress were not. To change that, the week after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Kuwaiti
government, disguising itself as “Citizens for a Free Kuwait,” hired the global PR firm of Hill & Knowlton to win Americans’ hearts and minds.
It is important to note that Craig Fuller, a close friend of George H.W. Bush and his chief of staff when he was vice president, was in charge of Hill & Knowlton’s Washington office. For $11.8 million, Fuller and more than 100 H&K executives across
the country oversaw the selling of the war.
They organized public rallies, provided pro-war speakers, lobbied politicians, developed and distributed information kits and news releases, including scores of video news releases shown by stations and networks as if they were bona fide
journalism and
not paid-for propaganda.
H&K’s research arm, the Wirthlin Group, conducted daily polls to identify the
messages and language that would resonate most with Americans. In the 1992 Emmy
award-winning Canadian Broadcasting Corp. documentary “To Sell a War,” a Wirthlin
executive explained that their research had determined the most emotionally moving message to be “Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be
stopped.”
To fit the bill, H&K concocted stories, including one told by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah, to another H&K concoction, the House Human Rights Caucus looking to pass as a congressional committee. According to the caucus, Nayirah’s full name
would remain secret in order to deter the Iraqis from punishing her family in occupied Kuwait. The girl wept as she testified before the caucus, apparently still shaken by the atrocity she witnessed as a volunteer in a Kuwait City hospital, where Iraqi
soldiers charged into the hospital room with babies in incubators and tossed the “babies on the cold floor to die.”
During the three months between Nayirah’s testimony and the start of the war,
the story of babies tossed from their incubators stunned Americans. Bush told the story, and television anchors and talk-show hosts recycled it for days. It was read into the
congressional record as fact and discussed at the U.N. General Assembly.
The fact that Nayirah was a Kuwaiti royal and the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and that she had never volunteered in any hospital, it
was too late. The war had already begun.
Another likely concoction was top-secret satellite images that the Pentagon claimed to have of 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks on the Kuwait-Saudi border, visible proof that Saddam would be advancing soon on Saudi Arabia. Yet the St. Petersburg
Times acquired two commercial Russian satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, that showed no Iraqi troops near the Saudi border, and the scientific experts whom the Times hired could identify nothing but sand at the supposed location
of the advancing army.
But the St. Petersburg Times story evaporated, and the Pentagon’s story stuck. When Bush addressed a joint session of Congress on Sept. 11, 1990, he reported that developments in the Gulf were “as significant as they were tragic”: Iraqi troops and
tanks had moved to the south “to threaten Saudi Arabia.”
Under U.S. pressure, United Nations Security Council adopted unprecedented resolutions allowing nations to use “all means necessary” for their enforcement. The U.S. won Security Council votes by forgiving huge loans, recognizing dictatorships
diplomatically, agreeing to sell arms, and more. Boyle identifies specific violations and subversions of the U.N. Charter in these activities, most importantly the mandate to negotiate peaceful resolutions to international disputes. And, according to
Boyle, in its decision to go to war and in its conduct of the war itself, the U.S. perpetrated a Nuremberg Crime against Peace. As James Baker has often admitted, winning allies for the first Gulf War in 1991 involved “cajoling, extracting, threatening
and occasionally buying votes.”
4. The 1991 Gulf War’s stated goal of ejecting Iraqi troops from Kuwait quickly revealed itself as an all-out effort to destroy Iraq
The war’s stated intention was to remove Iraq’s presence from Kuwait. But quickly, that intention changed to destroying Iraq. The air and missile attack of Iraq continued for 42 days, dropping more bombs in that brief period than bombs in all wars in
history combined. Iraqi aircraft and anti-aircraft or anti-missile ground fire offered no resistance. The aerial and missile bombardment in a matter of hours destroyed most military communications and over the course of the next few weeks attacked Iraqi
soldiers who were unable to secure food, water, and equipment due to this breakdown. Some 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died, according to General Schwarzkopf, most of whom were incapable of fighting.
Mosques, homes, schools, hospitals markets, commercial and business districts, factories, office buildings, vehicles on highways, bridges, and roads were common targets. Though estimates of civilian deaths during the war range from 25,000 to over 100,000,
all count children at above 50% of the immediate casualties. And after 6 weeks, the most sophisticated of Arab states was in ruins.
By most accounts, at least one hundred thousand people died soon after the war from dehydration, dysentery, malnutrition, starvation, and illnesses, from contaminated water, starvation, and exposure to impure water, hunger, cold, and
shock. In the period
between the end of Desert Storm and the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the degraded environment and sanctions led to the death of an estimated million more, half of them children. Medicines, food, baby formula—these were among the essentials kept
from the Iraqi people in the initial and ensuing stages of the war against Iraq. And they were among the essentials that sanctions under both Bush Presidents and Clinton kept from the Iraqi people, constituting Nuremberg Crimes Against Humanity and the
Crime of Genocide under international and U.S. law, according to legal scholars.
5. Under Bush 41, a system of censorship hid the true nature of the war and its
aftermath from the public
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