The US response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was consonant with the long history of US militarism. In a truly Orwellian exercise, that history was swept aside with a series of bogus rationales for the effective US invasion of the Middle East. Before examining the real motivations for this invasion, it is worth debunking the myths of intervention.
The "imperial presidency" is nothing new. As with most of the US's declared wars (Mexican-American, Spanish-American, etc.), the undeclared wars, invasions, and destabilizations have been without exception manifestations of US belligerence and scorn for the sovereignty of those nations said to standing in the way of "manifest destiny," "the white man's burden," the fight against "communism," and so forth.
The US has a parallel history of combating domestic dissent with crude propaganda and assaults on civil liberties. By the time of the Gulf War, though, the technique had been refined to the point of striking quickly enough to forestall initial opposition, a process abetted by the media's effective censorship of dissent via media adoption of state-directed frameworks for reporting the "news." Why the "free press" operates this way is another question, but the fact that it does is a primary reason that a discussion such as this is necessary and that its subject matter may seem unfamiliar to those who rely on the mainstream media for their information. As others have pointed out, it is truly child's play to debunk the myths; the fact that our supposedly "free" press chose not to do so speaks volumes.
In any case, one cannot even say that the US was opposed in principle to Iraqi aggression in particular, because the US had supported and encouraged Iraq's invasion of Iran. In that case, the US did not to leap to Iran's defense, claiming umbrage at Iraq's use of force, violation of Irani sovereignty, flouting of international law, etc. Recall as well that the US directed at Iran, not Iraq, its reaction to Iraq's blasting of the USS Stark. In other words, the US response to a direct Iraqi attack on a US military vessel was to support Iraq.
While there was a pattern of exploiting various conflicts as pretexts for promoting a greater US military presence in the Middle East (see companion essay), there was no indication of genuine concern for war victims, Kuwaiti or otherwise (see below); militarism in general, which was and is the primary US political currency in the world; or Iraqi militarism in particular, which the US had actively supported.
2. Myth: The US was motivated by its devotion to international law.
Reality: The US made explicit its contempt for international law by
rejecting the World Court's jurisdiction when the Court ruled the US
assault on Nicaragua to be in violation of international law. The US then
vetoed a UN Security Council resolution (11 to 1, 3 abstentions) calling
on all states to observe international law.
In addition, Hussein himself called the US bluff concerning international law, allowing that Iraq would withdraw from Kuwait if Israel and Syria would withdraw from the territories they occupied. The similarities were considerable. Israel, for example, had invaded and then occupied Lebanon for thirteen years, committing a variety of war crimes and atrocities along the way, slaughtering tens of thousands (mostly civilians), etc., and had ignored repeated UN demands to withdraw. Almost every excuse the US gave for going to war with Iraq it could have given for going to war with Israel to force an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon (or the West Bank, etc.).
However, the US had obviously never done anything of the kind regarding Israel, and went through considerable public relations contortions to explain why "linkage," as they called the idea, was unacceptable. So the offer went unanswered, as the logic of respecting international law as a matter of principle and not expedience was not one the US cared to pursue.
Of course, the US didn't want to negotiate anything. It wanted war (see the companion essay for some thoughts on why that was). Just prior to the US invasion, Hussein again offered to withdraw from Kuwait totally, this time asking only that the UN Security Council merely consider the Arab-Israeli conflict and the problem of weapons of mass destruction. On both issues, the US had long been at odds with a virtually universal global consensus, a fact that brings us to the next myth.
3. Myth: The US was motivated by the UN consensus condemning Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait.
Reality: The US is something of an international pariah and
routinely ignores UN consensus denouncing US and/or its clients' policies.
The UN Security Council and General Assembly both condemned the US
invasions of Grenada and Panama. After the Security Council vote noted
above in the Nicaragua case, the General Assembly voted 94 to 3 (US,
Israel, El Salvador) for a resolution calling for compliance with the
World Court ruling. In none of these cases did UN consensus have any
noticeable effect on US actions.
In the several years leading up to the Gulf War, the US actively repudiated UN consensus as a matter of course. A few examples:
One might also note that while everyone from George Bush to "liberal" US commentators sang the UN's praises so long as the US was orchestrating a world military response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, it is not hard to imagine the reaction here if the world had followed Bush's model and organized global military rejections of, say, the US invasions of Panama, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, or Southeast Asia.
4. Myth: The US blockade of Iraq was motivated by UN actions or
international opinion generally.
Reality: The UN consensus on economic sanctions against Iraq did
not justify or endorse the blockade, which the UN Security Council
endorsed well after the US began it. Prior to the endorsement, Bush
asserted that even without UN sanction, "we have all the authority we
need" to blockade Iraq, revealing his disdain for world opinion. It was up
to each nation to enforce for itself the economic sanctions against Iraq,
and the blockade was an illegal act when the US began imposing it. Thus
the US blockade of Iraq represented hostility to both international law
and the principle of sovereignty.
5. Myth: US militarism was justified, since other nations went
along with it.
Reality: The US succeeded in dragging other nations into an
essentially unilateral US military escalation, as it did with the
extraction of UN sanction for the blockade. Such "cooperation," coerced at
best, could not and did not legitimate US actions. Nations desirous of US
support in other areas had little to lose and much to gain from going
along with the Global Enforcer in its latest "adventure." All US claims of
internationalism were belied by these facts:
6. Myth: The US was invited to defend Saudi Arabia.
Reality: The Saudis did not ask for US "help," but only acquiesced
to intense US diplomatic pressure and bribery, the latter in the form of
an agreement to sell the Saudis advanced US fighter aircraft that the US
had been unwilling to sell the Saudis for some time. The Saudi
"invitation" to the US was no more legitimate than the Panamanian
"invitation" to the US or the Kuwaiti "invitation" to Iraq.
7. Myth: The US had to defend democracy from the totalitarian
Hussein.
Reality: Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (not to mention the US itself)
were and are no more democratic than Iraq. The repressiveness of two
leading regional US allies should have surprised no one familiar with US
clients around the world, who have been and remain some of the most
egregious human rights violators on the planet. While the UN structure
should certainly be active in preventing the use of violence in world
politics, for citizens of the US, there is the important question of what
it is exactly that "we" are supposed to be defending, a topic to which I
return in the companion essay to this piece.
8. Myth: The US had to stop Saddam Hussein, because he was another
Hitler.
Reality: The speed and uniformity with which Western commentators
adopted this enemy-demonizing propaganda line is straight out of
1984. It is of course an absurd exaggeration that disgraces the
memory of Holocaust victims. And if Hussein had truly been another Hitler,
what would that fact have said of US support for him over the years? As
with Noriega, Hussein was not a different person from the one who received
massive US aid; the propaganda is all that changed.
Just for the record, here are a few highlights of that aid:
In addition, the US has never balked at fascism, in language or practice. Bush's promotion of what he called a "new world order" was too reminiscent of the old fascist "new order" phraseology to be a mere coincidence, especially coming as it did from the mouth of an ex-CIA chief. The concepts, as well, were disturbingly parallel. It is beyond the scope of this essay to take up the so-called "new world order" in detail. Suffice it to say that as the USSR crumbled, Western powers generally drooled at the prospect of getting their greedy little hands on new serf states that could be brought in to the fold for cheap labor with little or no bargaining power, non-existant environmental protections, and so on, in the familiar pattern of the existing Western domains. This "new order" and its rationales are virtually verbatim of fascist dogmas, a fact not too surprising considering the amount of slippage between fascist and capitalist doctrines and practices generally.
Of course, the "old" order of US foreign policy (which the "new world order" only promised to extend, in any case) was replete with Nazi and fascist concepts, allies, clients, and practices. US claims on Middle East oil were and are themselves more than reminiscent of the Nazis' desire for "lebensraum." And US-proxy forces in El Salvador and Guatemala, for example, openly expressed their admiration for Hitler. The Salvadoran ARENA party is a "fascist party modeled after the Nazis," in the words of former US Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White. ARENA founder and "honorary president for life," Roberto D'Aubuisson once told a German reporter (El Dia, Mexico, 2-11-82), "You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of Communism and you began to kill them." Recall as well US recruitment of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers during and after WWII and the resultant effects on "Cold War" policy; US and Nazi capitalists' cooperation during WWII; or the correlation between US "aid" in Latin America and the growth there of institutionalized torture, "death squads," "disappearances," etc.
The point here is that not only was comparing Hussein to Hitler an offensive distortion (which, if true, would only have further reflected on prior US support for him), but the US itself has had no problems accommodating Nazis and fascists in other areas of its foreign policy, and in some cases has actually sought them out.
9. Myth: The US had to stop Hussein, because the invasion of Kuwait
was a prelude to a regional or even world war of Iraqi conquest.
Reality: Preposterous. Even with military and financial support
from the US, the USSR, Britain, France, West Germany, and others, Iraq
spent the better part of a decade fighting Iran's peasant army and ended
in a stalemate. The idea that Iraq was desirous, capable, or poised for
plunging into any protracted conflict with any serious military power is
laughable and factually indefensible. This fact was so obvious that there
was even a propaganda response, to the effect that there's no reasoning
with a madman. The resort to ad hominem, as always, is a tacit acceptance
that one does not have a factual leg to stand on. As for who was or was
not in his right mind, I believe it was George Bush who spent the Gulf War
months hopped up on Halcyon...
In any case, Bush promoted this myth by somberly intoning that we needed to learn the lessons of history and not appease a "land-grabber," or there would be no stopping him. The language of rejecting "appeasement" was again a reference to Hitler and again embodied a criminally callous treatment of the Holocaust. The real lesson of history here concerns the "domino theory," the twentieth century's dominant paranoid fantasy used to justify US aggression. Such "political demonology," as political scientist Michael Rogin calls it, has its own unbroken history in this country, from the image of Native Americans as "savages," to the religion of anti-communism. Its resurrection in the Gulf War, though predictable, was hardly persuasive.
10. Myth: US concern over Iraqi use of chemical
warfare reflected US concern for the victims or US repudiation of chemical
weapons.
Reality: After the gassings, US aid to Iraq increased, providing
effective US endorsement of those war crimes. In an impressive display of
double-think, the State Department in 1990 justified increased grain deals
with Iraq on the grounds that such deals would give the US leverage over
Iraq's human rights abuses, in much the same way that US funding,
training, arming, equipping, etc. of El Salvador's butchers was said to
constitute disapproval of the resultant record of horrors.
US concern for Iraq's victims was a transparent fiction. No Iraqi killings of Iranians produced official expressions of US indignation, and, despite US military casualties, neither did the Stark incident, as noted above. And it couldn't have been that the US was outraged by the numbers killed by Iraq. The total number of victims of US militarism since 1945 alone is in the many millions, dwarfing any Iraqi transgressions.
Furthermore, the US is has itself shamelessly used Kurdish peoples. As John Stockwell has noted,
In 1974 and 1975, the CIA, under orders from Kissinger, had mounted a program to arm and encourage the Kurdish people to revolt against the Iraqi government. This was done at the request of the shah of Iran, who was contending with the Iraqis. When the shah had reached a satisfactory agreement with the Iraqis, the CIA was called off and it abruptly abandoned the Kurds, leaving them helpless, unable to defend themselves against bloody reprisals from the Iraqi army.Kissinger's comment on the program: "One must not confuse the intelligence business with missionary work." Not a lot of hang-wringing over the plight of Kurdish peoples in those words.
In 1979, when Khomeini ousted the CIA-installed shah of Iran, the US suddenly began protesting loudly about Iranian persecution of the Kurds; no such complaints were heard prior to 1979, and the US has never protested Kurdish persecution in the US client state of Turkey.
In addition, the US at that time had certainly not repudiated chemical weapons, either in theory or practice. Recall that Bush pressed for $265.5 million for chemical weapons in 1990-91 alone; that Bush as Vice President had cast a deciding vote in the Senate to break a tie and continue US chemical weapons programs; that the US stockpile of chemical weapons in 1990 was sufficient to kill everyone in the world 5,000 times over; and that at the time of the Gulf War, the US was pursuing a new generation of chemical weapons, known as "mask breakers," designed to render all defenses useless. And even after the invasion of Kuwait, Bush vetoed a bill that would have forbade sending US aid to countries that use chemical weapons, on the grounds that the bill interfered with Executive foreign policy prerogatives. Evidently, Bush wanted to be able to approve chemical warfare in some instances and denounce it in others, depending on the propaganda utility of an appeal to morality.
Beyond the potential for US chemical warfare, let us not forget that the US has often used various kinds of chemical and biological weapons, such as "Agent Orange" in Southeast Asia and napalm and white phosphorus in Central America, with grim results, to say the least.
11. Myth: Bush was, as he claimed, acting to protect US "national
security" and "our way of life," and to reject the "law of the jungle" and
the idea that "might makes right," by "drawing a line in the sand."
Reality: The only real "threat" represented by Iraq was that Arab
nations might try to control their own resources. Controlling other
nations' resources may well be a cornerstone of US foreign policy, but it
is hardly a legitimate concept or a valid part of our "national security."
Imagine the response here if Russia claimed a right to invade the US to
secure control over US grain production.
The "way of life" continues to be one of profligate oil consumption and the correlate environmental destruction and distortion of the domestic and world economies. Such a "way of life" should be utterly reversed in any case, not defended.
The idea that US militarism ever represented a rejection of the "law of the jungle" or "might makes right" is a manifestly absurd contradiction in terms, and may be dismissed without further comment. The "drawing a line in the sand" image, though, is worth considering, implying as it does US aggression, as it is the beach bully who draws a line in the sand, daring and provoking someone weaker to cross it.
So much for the moral justifications for the US military response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Before moving on, I should note that most of the above proceeds from the assumption that the US should apply to itself the same standard it applies to other nations. Of course, the US has never done anything of the kind, and was no double deeply offended that another nation might have had the temerity to ape US tactics. Any of the "moral" justifications will work, given the presumption that the use of force is an imperial prerogative of the US alone. That presumption necessarily underlay the very offering of such rationales by government spokespeople and contemporary imperial sycophants. Bush clearly made this presumption, finding no contradiction in demanding that South Africans, Palestinians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, etc. not resort to force to defend themselves from US and/or US-client force. As Noam Chomsky has noted elsewhere, Western apologists solemnly refer to this demand as having something to do with what are called "civilized norms of behavior," from which the US is evidently exempt.
13. Myth: US actions were needed to keep oil flowing, or to keep
oil prices down.
Reality: It was the blockade and economic sanctions--and not Iraqi
actions--that cut off oil from Iraq and Kuwait. Iraq had every reason to
continue selling oil, and had given no indication it would stop. In fact,
US actions, such as the blockade, provided the very pretext for the
immediate raising of gasoline prices. Of course, given that it takes
months for oil from the Middle East to become gasoline at US service
stations, to say nothing of the "strategic reserves," instant gas price
hikes were purest corporate greed. The "windfall profits" thus generated
recalled those of the "embargo" days in the 1970s, although,
significantly, there was no talk before, during, or after the Gulf War of
a "windfall profits" tax.
And even many of those who argued against waging an "oil war" assumed that the fight would have been for "cheap oil," neglecting the simple fact that oil price increases were proportional to US military escalation. Did anyone seriously believe that oil companies would lower prices anytime soon for any reason? Earlier that year, the price of crude oil had come down a bit, but gasoline prices had gone up anyway. And if the blockade had significantly cut oil supplies, a dubious prospect at best, US actions would have been directly responsible for any resultant price increases. Of course, Iraq and Kuwait provided only about ten percent of US oil imports, an amount that could easily have been compensated by increased production in other oil-producing nations. To keep prices higher, none of them produces at maximum capacity. These facts should give us some pause as we contemplate the possible effects of the blockade on world oil supplies or on the rising price of oil.
Further, Iraq said all along that it wanted "moderate" price increases, and it had no interest in pricing itself out the market or in seriously disrupting OPEC. In fact, one of its excuses for invading Kuwait was that Kuwait had been over-producing and under-selling the OPEC standard Iraq desired (see the companion essay for more on this topic).
And even if the US had been fighting for "cheap oil," why would that have been a valid cause? High oil prices are not bad. Oil will not last forever, and US oil prices have been artificially low for years. Even without a sane US energy policy, seller and buyer discontent with high oil prices would produce a renewed use of and search for alternate energy resources, increased conservation, and an increased demand for rational mass transit in the US and possibly even urban planning not designed around the automobile--all with tremendous environmental and economic benefits.
It is worth noting in this regard that nuclear power is not the solution. The nuclear power industry has an horrendous environmental and safety record. For example, so-called "low level" radioactive waste alone is now estimated to be responsible for as many as nine million "excess deaths." Beyond exacerbating such possibly unsolvable problems as disposal of nuclear waste, trading fossil fuels for nuclear ones would have us trading oil wars for nuclear fuel wars, a disquieting prospect, to say the least.
14. Myth: Iraq's invasion of Kuwait justified the continuation of
the US war economy.
Reality: The US invasions of Granada, Panama, Peru, and the Middle
East expressed US militarism's frantic search for a new justification in
the wake of the "Cold War" "victory." That search was and is a primary
reason for US militarism worldwide. Iraq could not possibly threaten the
US in any serious way; there was and is no more reason then or today than
there ever was to mortgage our economy to the "defense" industry (see the
companion essay for more on this topic).
15. Myth: In spite of all facts, history, and logic, in the case of
the Gulf War, the US was in the right because Hussein was such a criminal,
and even though US motivations were not pure, the ends basically justified
the means.
Reality: Well, let's see: what were the ends? The brutal Iraqi
occupation of Kuwait was replaced by the brutal reinstatement of the
Kuwaiti government, which immediately set about summary arrests and
executions of "suspected collaborators." The leadership of Iraq remained
the same, and the Iraqi exile community of democratic opposition (who, by
the way, had opposed the war, along with everyone else, not that anyone in
the US would know such a community even existed, since it had been
systematically frozen out of US media) was in no way strengthened. The
Kurdish people who had been again encouraged to rise up against Iraq were
cut off again (see above) and again
brutalized. Billions of dollars were wasted. The local environment was
devastated. Gasoline prices went up and stayed up. US troops came home
suffering from "Gulf War
Syndrome," responsibility for which the US denied repeatedly (so much
for "supporting the troops"). 100,000 to 200,000 or more people were
killed, and Iraqi infrastructure was so devastated that cholera and
typhoid epidemics raged, threatening to kill another 100,000 or more,
mostly children, according to one Harvard study. All in less than two
months.
And all for what? Nothing of substance comes to mind, though it is difficult if not impossible to imagine anything that could conceivably justify such crimes.
Not only did the war did not oust Hussein, but the State department quietly noted after the war that in their view the US is best served by a cowed Hussein's remaining in power in Iraq. Why? Well, for one thing, as long as he remains in place, he will be a ready scapegoat for whipping up militarism whenever it is politically serviceable to do so (as in "Monica's War," and other examples). Beyond his immediate utility in the role of demon-of-the-month, the broader question is about why he was a favorite for so many years in the first place. Why does the US befriend so many brutal regimes the world over, and actively oppose all efforts to overthrow them? These questions go to the heart of US foreign policy, and I address them in the companion essay to this one.
In any case, it is tiresome to be told, with each new aggression, that this time things are different, and that this time all relevant history may be safely ignored. Just because the rationales for the war against Iraq may have seemed more reasonable than did anti-communist fanaticism does not mean that they had any more to do with the war they were rationalizing than in past cases.
So much for the puffery about US world leadership and morality, the myths of intervention. But if the US war with Iraq had no moral or pragmatic justification, the question arises: What was it all about? The answer to that question is worth a little further exploration.
The Gulf War: Origins and Motivations
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