Gil Smart’s weekly column “War cries sound familiar” observes:
“In 1990, stories of Iraqi troops ripping Kuwaiti babies from their incubators and leaving them to die helped provide the rationale for the first Gulf War. The woman who fed that story to Congress, and the American people, was later discovered to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, her testimony part of a public relations campaign run by an American firm on behalf of the Kuwaiti government.”
WATCHDOG: Of course partisans will float propaganda, but there appears to be solid evidence for government claims that Syria has used nerve gas against its citizenry.
Smart would have done better to cite the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution based upon a fictionalized attack on an American ship and used by President Lyndon Johnson to escalate American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Or he could have mentioned how newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst incited the Spanish American War by phony claims that the USS Maine had been attacked and sunk. (It was later determined its sinking was likely due to an explosion in the boiler room.)
George H. W. Bush and this country launched ’Desert Storm’ against Iraq because Saddam Hussein without provocation invaded neighboring Kuwait and was threatening to also annex Saudi Arabia. Hussein sought to achieve a strangle hold on the production and pricing of oil and by doing so would have adversely affected the vital interest of the USA and other nations.
H. W. had little trouble rounding up a coalition of allies and financial contributions from Arab nations actually enabled the USA to earn a profit from the military operation!
That is a lot different from when the government purposefully misleads the citizenry, as was the case with George W. Bush and the second Iraq war.
I agree with the Watchdog. In fact, failing to intervene can sometimes have disastrous consequences, as in Rwanda.