The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [87]
All for What?
One might have thought that the American people, in the years that followed the war, would have debated that question. Saddam Hussein, whom President George Bush dubbed “Hitler revisited,” remained in power. Much of the moral rationale for liberating Kuwait from the Iraqis also proved bogus. A high-profile story and set of photographs about Iraqi soldiers destroying incubators in Kuwait hospitals and leaving babies to die, for instance, turned out to have been planted by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Later determined to have been greatly exaggerated if not completely false, that and other horror stories were key factors in gaining public support for the war. They were fed to the media by an American public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton (headed by Bush’s former chief of staff), which the Kuwaitis paid $11.5 million.5
To this day there has been little national discussion of the possibility that the American people were duped by publicists who recognized that we “would be more likely to fight because of atrocity stories than because one feudal fiefdom was invaded by another,” as Arthur Rowse, a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, put it. (Among other brutalities following the war, hundreds of Palestinians in Kuwait disappeared and many were tortured in retaliation for Yasir Arafat’s support of Iraq. Kuwaiti authorities eventually drove 400,000 Palestinians out of the country.)6
Many Americans probably still retain a falsely sunny picture of the war experience for American troops as well. In fact, as the Department of Defense noted in a report released four years after the war:
U.S. troops entered a bleak, physically demanding desert environment, where they were crowded into warehouses, storage buildings and tents with little personal privacy and few amenities. No one knew that coalition forces eventually would win a quick war with relatively few battle casualties. Consequently, most troops did not fight a “four-day war” but spent months isolated in the desert, under constant stress, concerned about their survival and their family’s well-being at home, and uncertain about when they would return home.
They also had to deal with propaganda from Iraq about its willingness to use biological warfare, as well as gossip among the troops about medications given to them by their own superiors to protect them from desert conditions and possible chemical warfare.7
If the realities of the Gulf War itself were not major topics for public discussion, however, Gulf War Syndrome—which surely resulted in part from those wartime conditions—was abundantly debated. Legions of presidential commissions, committees of Congress, Pentagon officials, panels of scientists, and veterans groups held hearings, conducted studies, released reports, and set up web sites. Thousands of news stories and commentaries appeared in the media, relaying a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes about sick veterans, illustrated with photos of them in wheelchairs or beside their deformed children.8
Some of the widely quoted anecdotes were subsequently discredited, including those from Michael Adcock, the first vet whose death was widely attributed to GWS. He said he came down with lymphoma in the Gulf—a medical improbability, since Adcock died within months of his return home, and lymphomas take years to develop. Yet throughout the 1990s activists and their supporters in Congress and the media continually disseminated tales about infirmities caused by service in the Gulf.9
Some of these people seemed to catch a bug of their own that disabled their crap detectors. Consider, for example, J. R. Moehringer of the Los Angeles Times. A journalist who has won awards for excellent reporting on other topics, he waxed melodramatic in a piece in 1995. “He has a Purple Heart. It lies beneath a ragged line in the middle of his chest,”