The Gulf War: Eight Myths
“From the outset, it should be emphasized that Iraq’s invasion and occupation of
Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein’s refusal to back down in the face of a strong
international consensus against such aggression, was the root cause of the conflict.
The question is not whether the United States’ public statements and justifications
about the war were accurate”
Myth One: Upholding Principles:
The war was about principles: about freedom, about the right of self-determination,
about international law, about enforcing United Nations resolutions, democracy.
In 1974, Morocco invaded Western Sahara as in the Gulf crisis, a powerful, autocratic
Arab country invading a small, resource-rich Arab neighbor. The Moroccans forced
most Western Saharans out of their country, into exile in the desert, with horrific
human consequences.
In 1974, Indonesia invaded the tiny island nation of East Timor.
Turkey has continued its illegal occupation of the northern third of Cyprus
Israel continues to occupy much of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan
Heights
U.S. insisted on the restoration of the corrupt and despotic Sabah dynasty in Kuwait
The United Nations has taken action on all of these issues, condemning these
invasions and calling for an immediate withdrawal of foreign forces.
Results: All five countires—Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey, Israel and Kuwait are US
allies. They collectively receive billions of dollars annually in unrestricted military
and economic aid from the United States government. As a result, most Arabs—even
those who opposed Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait—saw the Gulf War not as an act
of principle but as an act of imperialism. Arabs are bemused by the irony that the
United States went to war in defense of monarchy and continues to support other
corrupt and autocratic monarchies in the region and call this a war of principles.
Myth Two: Hussein as Hitler
Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, ready to take over the Middle East and the world
with a huge potential for evil.
Washington’s knowledge of his human rights abuses and his war of aggression
against Iran, the violation of international prohibitions against the use of chemical
weapons were overlooked as long as he was politically useful. When his usefulness
lapsed, Washington portrayed Hussein as some kind of monster.
Washington was never able to produce any evidence to support its contention that Iraq
was preparing an imminent invasion of Saudi Arabia. Though such an action by the
Iraqis cannot be ruled out, it appears extremely unlikely
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No territorial claims against Saudi Arabia,
Iraqi troops dug in to fortified defensive positions immediately
upon entering Kuwait,
Iraq’s troops did not move into Saudi Arabia, despite the lack of
sufficient Western forces to produce a credible deterrent.
Satellite footage of the area from that critical period soon after the
Iraqis seized Kuwait, shows no evidence of Iraqi troops massing on
the border with Saudi Arabia.
Iraq only increased its number of troops in Kuwait only after allied
forces arrived.
Iraq did not have industrial capacity, the self-sustaining economy,
the domestic arms industry, the population base, the coherent
ideology or political mobilization, the powerful allies, or any of the
necessary components for large-scale military conquest
The cover of the New Republic magazine used a photograph of Saddam Hussein
airbrushed in such a way that his long moustache was significantly shortened to make
him look more like Adolf Hitler. Just like the photograph has altered so was the
arquement that Saddam was another Hitler
Myth Three: Iraq as a Nuclear Threat
Saddam Hussein was on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. Reports indicated
that Iraqis would have an offensive nuclear capability within just months and needed
to be stopped.
This rhetoric surfaced a few months before the start of the US military campaign ,
when public opinion polls first indicated that this was the one reason that most
Americans felt could justify a military attack against Iraq.
Saddam Hussein had for some time been calling for a nuclear-free zone in all of the
Middle East
Unlike Israel and Pakistan, Iraq had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and
had opened its nuclear sites to international inspection teams.
To assert that Iraq would suddenly start threatening its neighbors with nuclear
weapons was simply a scare tactic. To believe otherwise would be an admission that
nuclear deterrence—the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy for decades—is a lie.
Myth Four: Ending Saddam Hussein’s Power
The war was fought to get rid of a dictator—Saddam Hussein
President Bush urged the people of Iraq to rise up against their dictator, yet the U.S.
did nothing to support the postwar rebellion and stood by while thousands of Iraqi
Kurds, Shiites, and others were slaughtered. In the cease-fire agreement at the end of
the war, the U.S. made a conscious decision to exclude helicopter gunships from the
ban on Iraqi military air traffic, even though these were the very weapons that proved
so decisive in crushing the rebellions.
Fifteen years earlier, after goading the Kurds into an armed uprising with the promise
of military support, the U.S., as part of an agreement with the Baghdad government
for a territorial compromise (Algiers Agreement on Shatt al Arab) favorable to Iran,
abandoned the Kurds precipitously; thousands were slaughtered.
Washington has never opposed Saddam when his repression is exclusively internal or
his aggression is directed toward U.S. adversaries.
Myth Five: The Only Option
Military force was the only way to deal with Saddam Hussein’s invasion.
Days immediately following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Arab leaders were very close
to convincing Iraq to withdraw.
Unilateral demands are not negotiations. American specialists on the negotiation
process felt that the United States wanted a war, given that Washington gave the
Iraqis no opportunity to save face. One needs to declare some kind of victory, if only
a 2% victory. There were a number of ways the United States could have negotiated
an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and met other legitimate security concerns short of
declaring war. Minor boundary adjustments or an internationally supervised
referendum on the future of the Kuwaiti monarchy could have been proposed and
pursued, but were not.
In the middle of the war, in late February, the Iraqis agreed to withdraw from Kuwait
prior to the launching of the ground war, accepting the Soviet peace proposal in full.
UN sanctions, which were working. The CIA estimated that UN sanctions blocked
90% of Iraqi imports and 97% of Iraqi exports; no country can survive very long
under those conditions. Such a rate of compliance vastly exceeds that of the postwar
sanctions regime.
The CIA predicted that Iraq would be forced out of Kuwait by sanctions alone within
six months.
Myth Six: Protects U.S. Interests
The war was vital to United States economic and political interests
See point 2
Only a small percentage of oil consumed by Americans comes from the Middle East.
The Europeans and Japanese are far more dependent on Persian Gulf exports, but they
were far less eager to go to war over Kuwait.
Perhaps it is no accident that the first president to get the U.S. into a major Middle
Eastern war was also a former oil company executive.
Despite the Gulf War, the postwar sanctions, the ongoing U.S. military presence in the
Middle East, and the support of Israel and autocratic Arab regimes, individual
Americans and U.S. interests as a whole are more threatened in the Middle East than
ever before. This raises the ironic dilemma: in the quest for greater American security
in the Middle East, has the United States not made itself more insecure?
Myth Seven: The Multinational Force
US was part of a multinational force. An mpressive unity in the world community in
terms of opposition to Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait.
The prewar sanctions were almost universally respected.
United States received lukewarm support from the UN Security Council essentially
through bribery.
- China: the U.S. dropped trade sanctions and approved new loans.
- Soviet support: U.S. ensured that the repression in the Baltic
republics and Cacucus region were not discussed at the Paris Peace
Conference.
- Colombia and Zairewere increased aid and extensions of loans.
However, the military forces were overwhelmingly American,
Myth Eight: Ethical Considerations Not Essential
Ethical considerations should not play a part in evaluating the war. Americans were
told repeatedly, “we did this to Saddam, we did that to Saddam” Emphasis on
collotaral damage and “smart bombs”.
It is the people of Iraq who died in great numbers, with most estimates in the range of
100,000 to 175,000.
It should be noted that even the so-called “smart bombs” had at most a 60% accuracy
rate. Americans did not see any footage of the 40% that missed their targets,
sometimes by miles.
Americans were told that U.S. pilots made a good faith effort to avoid women and
children. But does that mean that adult men are expendable? Most of Saddam
Hussein’s forces were conscripts; many were even his opponents. In fact, Saddam
deliberately placed on the front lines a disproportionate number of Kurds, Assyrian
Christians, Shiites, and other groups traditionally opposed to his leadership.
The result is that more opponents of the Iraqi government were slaughtered in six
weeks of U.S. attacks than during the previous twenty years of Saddam Hussein’s
repression.
United Nations mandate to use force only referred to the liberation of Kuwait. Yet the
United States bombed virtually all of Iraq, including targets unrelated to the
occupation.
Conclusions
The fact that so many Arabs supported Saddam is not due to the racist notion that
there is something inherent in Islamic culture that predisposes Arabs to support
autocrats. Rather it is a very deep-seated feeling of a people who have repeatedly been
subjected to foreign domination and have found a symbol of resistance in Saddam
Hussein. Thus, there was real concern, both in the Middle East and beyond, that the
United States was using Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as an excuse to exert a long-desired
military, political, and economic hegemony in the region.