Triumph Of The Image

The Media's War In The Persian Gulf, A Global Perspective

Hamid Mowlana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429983078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique du Moyen-Orient

THE TRIUMPH OF IMAGE over reality and reason is the theme of this book. New communication technologies have made possible the transportation of images and words in real time to hundreds of millions of people around the world. We thought we witnessed the Gulf War as we sat, mesmerized by the imagery. But the studies from the many countries assembled for this book suggest that it was not the war in the Persian Gulf that we witnessed but rather imagery orchestrated to convey a sense of triumph and thus to achieve results that reality and reason could never have achieved. The book offers contributions from thirty-five authors in eighteen countries, including short samplings from the media of several regions. The authors explore the social, economic, and political context of media coverage in their countries, the domination of one image in most of them, and the struggle for alternative perspectives. The authors probe the dynamics of image-making and pose some challenges for the future as well as provide us with a unique glimpse of how the world outside of the United States (as well as many Americans) viewed the war in the Persian Gulf and how the dynamics of image-making and information control operate. Triumph of the Image will be useful to scholars and students in communications and mass media, international relations, political science, cultural studies, propaganda, censorship, and contemporary history as well as to the general public.

Part One
Image and Reality

Chapter One
A Third-World War: A Political Economy of the Persian Gulf War and the New World Order

Andre Gunder Frank

THE GULF WAR may be termed a Third-World War in two senses of this phrase: First, this war aligned the rich North, the rich oil emirates or kingdoms, and some bribed regional oligarchies against a poor Third World country. In that sense, the Gulf War was a Third-World War by the North against the South. It was massively so perceived throughout the Third-World South, not only in Arab and Muslim countries but also elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Second, the Gulf War may mark the brutal beginning of the Third World War, following on the First and Second World Wars. Not only was the tonnage of bombs dropped on Iraq of world war proportions, but also the Gulf War and the new world order it was meant to launch signified the renewed recourse by a worldwide "coalition of allies" to mass destruction of infrastructure and mass annihilation of human beings. Moreover, in so doing the allies, led by the United States, clearly signaled their threat to build the new world order on repeated recourse to military force and annihilation against any other recalcitrant country or peoples— as long as they are poor and weak and in the Third-World South.

With the conclusion of the cold war, the Third-World War is to be fought, not between East and West or West and West, but between North and South. Since the Second World War, West-West wars have been obviated, and the East-West cold war has been fought out in regional hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, and other parts of the Third World. Now, West-West cold conflicts are also to be transmuted, as in the Gulf War against Iraq, into the ever-existing North-South conflict and into a Third-World War at the expense of Third World peoples on Third World soil.

This chapter examines the Gulf War and the new world order in this global context. It also concentrates on the political economic motives, actions, and their consequences of the major actors in the unfolding of this tragic drama.

False Western Pretexts for War in the Gulf

The violation of international law through the invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq under the presidency of Saddam Hussein is beyond dispute. But the allegation that the purpose of the Gulf War was to protect the "principle" of world order, international law, and the Charter of the United Nations from lawless might-is-right violation is a lie. Many similar aggressions and violations of both the U.N. Charter and U.N. resolutions have gone without any such response or often even without any notice. Indonesia invaded and ravaged East Timor and Irian Jaya with the world taking hardly any notice. Apartheid in South Africa, but less so South Africa's continual aggressions against its neighboring front line states in southern Africa, led to embargoes by the United Nations and its members; but no one ever suggested going to war against South Africa. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan merited condemnation and opposition, albeit not by the Security Council; but certainly no counterinvasion of the Soviet Union was proposed. The Iraqi invasion of Iran received, but did not merit, de facto political and even military support by the same coalition of allies that then waged war against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Indeed, among the very same states who allied themselves in a coalition to "liberate Kuwait" from aggression, several today occupy the territory of other peoples and nations. For instance, Israel invaded and still occupies the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza strip in violation of U.N, Resolution 242: Israel also invaded Lebanon and still exercises de facto military control over its southern part. Syria invaded and still exercises military control over parts of northern Lebanon. Turkey invaded Cypress in 1974 and still occupies part of it militarily. Morocco invaded and took over the Western Sahara. Significantly, hardly anyone except some Latin Americans—not even President Saddam Hussein and certainly not President George Bush—made the obvious linkage of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait with the U.S. one of Panama.

Unfortunately, lying cynicism is not limited to Presidents Hussein or Bush and their immediate supporters. No Security Council resolutions were passed or even proposed to protect President Bush's new world order from his own violation of the sovereignty of Panama. On the contrary, President Bush received only acquiescence or even outright support for his violation of international law and human rights in Panama. So had President Ronald Reagan when he invaded and occupied sovereign Grenada (which is still administered by the United States). Indeed, the entire European Community (EC), not to mention the United States, supported Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she escalated her war against Argentina and its military junta (notwithstanding that she torpedoed all efforts in Lima to defuse the situation and prevent war in the South Atlantic and that she threatened to nuke the Argentine city of Cordoba). The Falklands War was the first major war of the entire West against a single Third World country. The latter received no support from any other country in the North and only moral support, regardless of ideology, from its regional partners in Latin America.

Immediate Economic Reasons for War

The most obvious economic reason for the Gulf War was oil. The real price of oil had again declined, especially with the renewed decline of the dollar. Iraq had some legitimate demands, both on its own behalf against Kuwait and on behalf of other Arab states and oil producers. In pressing these demands by resort to invasion, Saddam Hussein threatened some other oil interests, clients of the United States, and the success of the U.S. divide et impera policy.

Another economic reason for the war was to counter domestic recession or at least its political consequences at home, as Secretary of State James Baker suggested. Indeed, both Presidents Hussein and Bush started this war to manage their own domestic political economic problems in the face of a new world economic recession. The timing, however, of the U.S. response abroad was immediately related to economic needs and political conflicts at home. President Bush's failure to deliver on his electoral promise of a domestic renewal program was eating into his popularity ratings, and the oncoming recession reduced them further.

President Bush reacted with much historical precedent. Harry S. Truman's massive response in the Korean War in 1950 followed postwar demobilization and the first recession in 1949, which many feared might replay the Depression of the 1930s. During the 1953-1954 recession, the United States intervened in the military overthrow of the constitutionally elected Arbenz government in Guatemala. The 1968 Vietnamese Tet Offensive and the 1969-1970 recession were followed by renewed U.S. escalation in Indochina, including in Cambodia. The 1973-1975 recession also resulted in further escalation of the war in Vietnam. The 1979 recession and President Jimmy Carter initiated the second cold war. The two-track decision to install cruise missiles in Europe and to negotiate with the Soviet Union from strength as well as the 3 percent yearly increase in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) budgets, occurred before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979-The unexpectedly strong U.S. response, which was not expected by the Soviets or perhaps anyone else, followed not only the invasion but also the 1979 recession. The 1981-1982 recession brought on Reagan's military Keynesianism and massive arms buildup, not to mention his Nicaraguan contra policy and perhaps his overreaction in Grenada.

World Geopolitical Economic Reasons for War

The recession started in the United States but was soon a worldwide phenomenon. France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and even Switzerland were experiencing reduced or negative growth rates. Africa was in a depression. In Latin America, gross national product declined .5 percent and per capita income went down 2.4 percent in 1990, on top of a 10 percent decline in the 1980s. Eastern Europe experienced an overall 20 percent economic decline in 1990; statistics for the Soviet Union were equally dismal. The People's Republic of China (PRC) was worried about growth, as was India, which the recession had largely bypassed in the 1980s.

Were Japan and Germany exceptions? The answers to this question were ambiguous, as could be seen in these newspaper headlines: "Without World Recovery, Bonn Fears a Slowdown," "Germany's East: Bleaker Yet," "Economy Feels Strains as Price of Unity Mounts," and "German Trade: No Moscow Miracles Foreseen." The Bundesbank president, Karl Otto Pohl, declared the economic consequences of German unification a "catastrophe" and drove the deutsche mark down several pfennings the next day.

Japan's stock market declined 40 percent in 1990, real estate prices plummeted, and Japanese investors and speculators transferred funds from abroad to help them cover their losses at home. In 1990, for the first time since 1986 and now that the United States needed it most, the net flow of Japanese capital was from the United States back to Japan. The prospects for a severe recession in Japan and the East Asian newly industrializing countries were quite real. Thus, the threat that world recession in the early 1990s would be even more severe than in the early 1980s was quite real.

At the same time, U.S. economic and geopolitical interests worldwide were under siege. The primary threats to these interests—competition from Japan and Germany or from a Japanese-led Asia and a German-led Europe—were intensified by the virtual elimination of the Soviet threat. The cold war was over, and Japan and Germany had won! The United States was now economically dependent on continued capital inflows from its principal economic rivals, which the Japanese had already begun to withdraw. In response to even deeper recession and/or with greater deliberation, the Japanese now intended to pull the financial rug out from under the United States and its dollar altogether. And other trade and economic disputes were growing ever deeper, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Uruguay rounds. Japan was distinctly uncooperative, and Europe refused to budge more than a few percent on the issue of agricultural subsidies. The road to "Europe 1992" was made more difficult by the 1989-1990 events in Eastern Europe and by Great Britain's intransigent foot dragging.

"BRAVO FOR AMERICAN POWER" celebrated the "serious" Sunday Telegraph (London) in a five-column January 20, 1991, editorial: "Bliss is it in this dawn to be alive; but to be an old reactionary is very heaven. . . . Who matter are not the Germans or the Japanese or the Russians but the Americans. Happy days are here again." The Telegraph also made its own the observation of the aptly named U.S. journal National Interest: "The fact [is] that the military power of the United States was the only thing capable of mounting an effective riposte—when the economic power of a Japan or a Germany was virtually irrelevant." The United States was not able to use its military might against Japan and Germany; and it could no longer do much for them either, now that the Soviet military threat was waning.

Since 1945, world economic conditions have shaped international and national politics and social movements. In particular, the economic conflicts and opportunities generated by the world economic crisis since 1967 have proved more important in shaping international relations and domestic policy than has the ideological and political cold war between the United States and the (former) Soviet Union. Many East-West conflicts have been a sham and a cover for always real North-South contradictions. None of the fourteen "revolutions" in the South since 1974 has been what it appeared to be or has turned out as was hoped or feared. The United States still has the military power and the political ambitions to try defending its place in the world order—now all the more so at the expense of the Third-World South.

The escalation of the Gulf crisis was marked by three important new departures in recent international political economic relations:

1. The energetic U.S. response in the Gulf was visibly over an economic issue—oil. This issue was absent any cold war ideological overtones. The conflict about oil and the massive U.S. response were barely masked behind appeals to the "defense" of small states in international "law."
2. This mobilization occurred without any pretense of an East-West ideological cover.
3. There was near unanimity and alliance of the North against the South. The lineup against Iraq from West to East included the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the PRC and Japan as well as U.S. client states and governments whose arms were easily twisted, as in Egypt and Pakistan. This new alignment was a major difference, a new departure, and an ominous threat for the future of "international" relations.

Economic Buildup and Political Escalation in the Gulf

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was not an unexpected bolt of lightning out of the blue. Its utilization by the United States as a pretext to launch a new world order through the most destructive war since World War II appears increasingly as malice aforethought.

Stealing Kuwait was not simple greed or national hatred. Theft on a national scale [of what had been Iraqi before the British created Kuwait] had become the only possible access for war-devastated Iraq to, . . the modern standard of living that Western nations and small oil-producing emirates of the Gulf enjoy today as a matter of right. . . . The strength of this almost suicidal drive to emerge from poverty and backwardness . . . was the motor. (Jim Hoagland, International Herald Tribune, March 5, 1991)

"The Americans were determined to go to war from the start," and Saddam Hussein "walked into a trap," according to the former French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson (International Herald Tribune, March 11, 1991). "State Department officials . . . led Saddam Hussein to think he could get away with grabbing Kuwait. . . . Bush and Co. gave him no reason to think otherwise" (New York Daily News, September 29, 1990). Former White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger wrote at length about how this trap was set. Other aspects of the trap emerged elsewhere, and some may be summarily put together here. The belatedly publicized July 25 interview between President Hussein and U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie was only one piece of a largely hidden trap.

At the State Department, Secretary James Baker had promoted John Kelly to assistant secretary of state for Middle Eastern Affairs. Kelly visited Baghdad in February, "the records of which he is desperately trying to deep-six" (William Safire, International Herald Tribune, March 26, 1991). Kelly told President Hussein that "President Bush wants good relations with Iraq, relations built on confidence and trust." Moreover, Kelly then rebuked the Voice of America and countermanded the Defense Department on statements he considered too unfriendly to Iraq. On April 26, Kelly testified to Congress that Bush administration policy toward Iraq remained the same and praised Saddam Hussein for "talking about a new constitution and an expansion of participatory democracy." On July 31, only two days before the invasion of Kuwait, Kelly again testified to a congressional subcommittee that "we have no defense treaty with any Gulf country."

Evidence suggests that the Persian Gulf war was the result of a long process of preparation, much more so than was the case with the Tonkin Gulf incident in Vietnam. For a decade during the Iran-Iraq Wars, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had enjoyed U.S. and Western military, political, and economic support, including $1.5 billion in sales approved by the U.S. government. George Bush had been a key figure in the Reagan administration's support for Iraq. After the conclusion of Iraq's war with Iran and the accession of George Bush to the presidency, U.S. policy toward Iraq became increasingly confusing and/or the product of a downright Machiavellian strategy to deceive Iraq and set a trap for Hussein.

President Hussein may also have had reasons for the invasion that were additional to his oil-related grievances with Kuwait. The stalemate in his war with Iran may have incited him to try once again for a realignment of the regional balance of power. It is useful to recall that Mesopotamia (Iraq), Persia (Iran), and Egypt, and occasionally the Arabian Peninsula as well, have been disputing, without resolution, hegemonial regional overlordship since the Sumerian Sargon tried to achieve it around 2500 B.C.

Between the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and the start of U.S. bombing on January 17, 1991, President Hussein gave clear indications of his willingness to negotiate an Iraqi withdrawal on at least six occasions. Three times, he unilaterally took steps that could have led to withdrawal. President Hussein made repeated statements indicating that he was serious about withdrawal, which would include Iraqi "sacrifices" for a negotiated package deal. On more than one occasion, President Hussein and his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, also told Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar of the United Nations of their desire for a negotiated solution. All these Iraqi and other initiatives came to naught because the Bush administration wanted and arranged for them to fail.

Fighting and Lying to Win the War

Two propaganda blitzes dominated the war. One was that it was valiantly waged against "the world's fourth largest army" with a highly trained "elite Republican Guard." The other one was that coalition forces therefore had to put on history's first high-tech "Nintendolike" electronic war with "smart bombs"—at least courtesy of U.S. and U.K. military command videotaped briefings for CNN and other TV networks around the world. Hardly anyone then noticed that these two features of the war were mutually contradictory in principle and empirically false in practice. Claude Cheysson, did, however, declare, "I categorically reject notions about avoiding unnecessary damage. The allied goal of annihilating Iraq's economy was bound to involve civilian casualties . . . 200,000—a massacre, with a terrifying impact. . . . Why don't you ask why the air war lasted 40 days instead of the 15 as p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE IMAGE AND REALITY
• PART TWO MANY NATIONS, ONE IMAGE
• PART THREE COMING BACK TO REALITY
• About the Book
• About the Editors and Contributors