Demonizing an enemy to unite the people against a common foe is the oldest trick in the tyrant's book. From the medieval Church, the State learned how to inflame us into "witch-hunts" against our fellow citizens who dare to question the patriotic creed. Borrowing cliches from the Bible, politicians convince us to accept willingly the slaughter of our only-begotten sons as a "sacrifice" upon the "altar of freedom". And editorial writers teach us to cheer when our armies rain death and destruction on the peoples of foreign lands -- just as Sunday-school preachers taught us to root for the Israelites when they smote and destroyed the Canaanites.
But the spell of war-fever can be broken when a picture or an article slips past the censor to reveal the human face of our Enemy, and the inhumanity of our leaders. Thirty years ago, uncontrolled words and images from overseas depicting burned and screaming Enemy children fleeing the napalm dropped by our own soldiers caused riots in America's streets, and brought our glorious crusade against the Vietnamese communists to an ignominious end.
Our leaders determined not to let this happen again. The next time they needed to mount a war, they took a few lessons from the new religion of Capitalism. The Gulf War was packaged and marketed to us with all the hip sophistication of a corporate ad campaign. They gave it a brand name, "Desert Storm"; they caricatured the enemy as a blustering cartoon villain; they promoted their weapons as video-game "smart bombs" which would supposedly blow up targets with very little "collateral damage" (the new euphemism for civilian casualties).
Since the buyouts and restructurings of the 1980's, most of America's newspapers and TV stations have been controlled by less than a half-dozen corporations, many of which are themselves integral parts of the military-industrial complex. At the time of "Desert Storm", for example, NBC was owned by General Electric, one of the world's largest military contractors, and ABC was owned by Capital Cities Communications, a company founded by William Casey -- Reagan's head of the CIA. The few reporters and cameramen who escaped their military tour busses and managed to document the horrors actually being committed against Iraqi civilians and soldiers were censored -- sometimes even fired -- by their own editors back home. A handful of these reports and images surfaced, however, mostly in the alternative press; and a few of us heretics and subversives who were exposed to them did what we could to preserve them from being tossed down the Orwellian memory hole.
We have uploaded here some of the photos of which *Diuvei was able to make copies during the Gulf War.
Source: CovertAction, No. 37 (Summer 1991), p. 34, Associated Press. Original caption: "Iraqi mother pleads for release of her son taken away by Kuwaitis."
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Source: CovertAction, No. 37 (Summer 1991), p. 27, Associated Press.
A scene from the so-called "Turkey Shoot" in the last days of the war. Thousands of fleeing Iraqi soldiers -- most of them conscripts hastily drafted into the regular army -- created a massive traffic jam on the road to Basra. American bombers incinerated them en masse in their cars, trucks, and personnel carriers. We ourselves know an American Gulf War veteran who told us his unit was under orders to shoot without question any Iraqi soldiers who tried to surrender. These and many other cold-blooded violations of the Geneva Convention by the US military command went uncriticized and mostly unreported by the American press.
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Source: San Jose Mercury News, Monday, January 28, 1991, pg. A1. Accompanying lead sentence: "Television-guided precision missiles knocked out key valves and pipes at a sabotaged Kuwaiti oil terminal, stemming the torrent of oil pouring into the Persian Gulf, the U.S. military announced Sunday."
No one seemed to question the contradiction between the image of clean efficiency painted by military press releases and the actual photos and video footage of huge quantities of oil pollution pouring into the sky and sea after these bombings.
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Source: CovertAction, No. 37 (Summer 1991), p. 29, Associated Press.
The military-industrial complex used -- or, much evidence shows, engineered -- the Gulf War as an opportunity to field-test and advertise its latest wares. As the "Gulf War syndrome" afflicting so many returned vets reminds us, soldiers in modern warfare are treated merely as guinea pigs for today's high-tech, high-profit war machine.
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