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President George Herbert Walker Bush did a marvelous job of getting behind the defenses of the American people and attacking their complacency and indifference from behind.

The first President Bush had to convince the American public of Saddam's unmitigated evil. He brought in his best troops, a public relations firm bristling with the powerful weapons of deception and fraud, to convince the docile Americans they had to rid the world of this most despicable and evil man. The Americans had an obligation to restore peace, tranquility and democracy to the helpless people of Kuwait now brutalized by the hideous thug Saddam.

The elder Bush had to show us just how evil Saddam was. So they told us about the atrocities the Iraqi army committed in Kuwait. They told us of how his troops had entered the hospitals of Kuwait and tore innocent babies from incubators and shipped the incubators back to hospitals in Iraq. We saw television news broadcasts of a young girl, a witness to this unimaginable horror, describe to a congressional committee how babies only days old were taken from incubators, thrown to the floor of the maternity ward in clear sight of their mothers, and stomped to death by Iraqi soldiers.

Nothing could outrage the people of this country more than this awful barbaric cruelty, surely.

The incubator story was repeated over, and over. There was testimony before the United Nations General Assembly by another witness, a Kuwaiti woman who said she also worked at the hospital and had seen this horror. Even the first President Bush repeated the story several times to demonstrate the extraordinary cruelty Saddam was capable of.

The American people were provided the tearful pleas of elected officials of Kuwait imploring us to restore democratic government and free their people from the tyranny of Saddam.

Other known "stories" of the era was Iraqi troops massing on the Saudi Arabia border, and suspected Iraqi infiltration.

As such, how instrumental was such propaganda towards gathering public support for invasion? How much of it was a mistake, or outright invention for propaganda purposes?

The article as a whole is rather sensationalist and even points to its own faults (the Iraqis did commit atrocities) and overplays the way the war itself played out. That being said I have two broad comments:

Bush I has modest to decent support prior to the war and probably had more than enough political capital to get the authorization for the use of force regardless of the actions taken to sway American public opinion. The critical and deciding point was to get an actual Security Council resolution that the US, Russia and China all signed off on. With that in hand its pretty safe to say the war was going to happen since it would be the first such venture in the post Berlin Wall era where the US and Russia were agreeing on a set of actions to be taken in the former third world battleground states. In plain words his foreign policy currency would have been more than enough to buy the war for the American public. Moreover the article oversells support for the gulf war as it was since the use of force resolutions barely passed (52-47 in the Senate).

Point two is that the US was using this as a foreign policy tool in the region and all kidding aside the authorization for use of force allowed us to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. Going further than that would have exceeded the UN mandate and caused a huge backlash in international opinion. Bush II might not have figured this out but foreign policy currency can run out so hoard it when you can and don't throw it away. His dad was smart enough to realize that any benefit to the US by removing Saddam would be outweighed by the backlash from exceeding the mandate.

CmdrWilkens wrote:The article as a whole is rather sensationalist and even points to its own faults (the Iraqis did commit atrocities) and overplays the way the war itself played out. That being said I have two broad comments:

I understand there was an entire book written by a journalist about the Gulf War propaganda. Unfortunately, I have not read it, nor recall the title.

Point two is that the US was using this as a foreign policy tool in the region and all kidding aside the authorization for use of force allowed us to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. Going further than that would have exceeded the UN mandate and caused a huge backlash in international opinion. Bush II might not have figured this out but foreign policy currency can run out so hoard it when you can and don't throw it away. His dad was smart enough to realize that any benefit to the US by removing Saddam would be outweighed by the backlash from exceeding the mandate.

Wasn't there considerable conservative public backlash against the NWO after the Gulf war?

Absolutely, groups sprung up all throughout the Neocon wing which promoted the idea that we should have "finished the job" and that we had both the might and the right to do so.

(rest of post lost in stupid fuckup by me) - Shep

CmdrWilkens wrote:Absolutely, groups sprung up all throughout the Neocon wing which promoted the idea that we should have "finished the job" and that we had both the might and the right to do so.

Even Saddam recognized this. When he learned that the Coalition would not drive on Baghdad and depose him from power; he said to his associates "We've won."

It's very interesting to think of what things would have been like if we had driven onto Baghdad in 1991.

It's worth noting that in 1991 we had 500,000+ men in:

VII Corps:
1st Armored, 3d Armored, 1st Infantry, 1st Cavalry and the British 1st Armored.

XVIII Airborne Corps:
24th Infantry, 82nd Airborne, 101st Air Assault, and the French 6th Light

I MEF:
1st Marine, 2nd Marine

In 2003, we had just:

3rd Infantry, 4th Infantry, 101st Air Assault, and 1st Marine (175,000 men total)

Plus IIRC a single British Armored division.

Plus, there would have been much more support from the Iraqi people -- remember us telling them to rise up against Saddam and then doing nothing as Saddam massacres them to maintain control post Gulf War?

In addition global support would have been higher in 1991. The international coalition that participated in that war was much larger than in the 2003 invasion. Its possible there would be rifts created and some countries would be outright against taking the fight to Bagdhad. But on otherhand even in the worst case of dissent among other countries whatever support existed would still be much greater than the fiasco that surrounded the 2003 iraq war.

MKSheppard wrote:Plus IIRC a single British Armored division.

1 (UK) Armoured Div HQ was there, but it only had it only had a single armoured brigade (7th) attached. It also had 3 Commando Brigade and (IIRC - I'm not certain on this point) 16 Air Assault Brigade, both of which are light infantry.

There's also another key point that everyone's missed.

In 1991; Saddam had his entire military, all of his war plans etc, around a massive conventional conflict. Basically, he imagined the Iran/Iraq War of 1980-1988, just on a bigger scale.

By 2003; he'd changed all of his war plans around to fight a spoiling conventional battle, followed by an insurgency led by the billion and one groups like the Feyadeen (created 1995), as he'd recognized that he couldn't defeat the US in an open field conventional battle.

If we invade in 1991; there's no Feyadeen etc to provide the nucleus and core for an insurgency -- running an insurgency is a lot more difficult than people give credit for -- and Al Quaeda and the Taliban are just too busy trying to seize power in Afghanistan following the Soviet Withdrawal to jump into Iraq.

CmdrWilkens wrote:Absolutely, groups sprung up all throughout the Neocon wing which promoted the idea that we should have "finished the job" and that we had both the might and the right to do so.

(rest of post lost in stupid fuckup by me) - Shep

No worries

The rest of the post for those who missed this pointed to the fact that Bush I and associates had plenty to lose in international credibility from exceeding the UN mandate and very little to gain domestically, at least I'm pretty sure that's what I wrote

I was just a tot when the First Gulf War occured, hell, the only thing i recalled was some news report about buying water, and then Tanks on the evening news before I went on to watch the band Grasshoppers on tv.

Still, why was there a need for George Bush to generate media frenzy and/or public support via such propaganda measures? The US and Russia were already co-operating at this stage and there was a UN resolution. Basic US interests like oil and money was just as prevalent then. The US had also begun flexing its muscle in Grenada and Panama.
Was this a fear of the so called Veitnam Syndrome?

Still, why was there a need for George Bush to generate media frenzy and/or public support via such propaganda measures?

Bush wasn't behind "Nurse Nayirah" and the associated propaganda campaign; it was the Kuwaiti government-in-exile who conceived and paid for that effort, which was carried out by a private PR firm. It is however conceivable he knew it was bullshit and and chose not to reveal it, and there would have been understandable (though not necessarily correct) reasons for not doing so, such as that while it's debatable if Nurse Nayirah was actually necessary to obtain the authorization to use force (both from Congress and the UNSC), revealing it as fraudulent before obtaining authorization to use force would quite possibly have made it impossible to do so.

Consider also that Bush I had to consider this fight being much harder than it turned out to be. The military hadn't really mounted a serious mobilization in a generation and most of this was all new tech running in the field.

We kicked their asses, but that was not a sure thing going into Gulf War 1, extra effort would be needed to secure support if the fight went poorly for the coalition.

So..... did the propaganda serve the goal of demonising the Iraqi army though?

I mean, we can certainly see how the Iraqis had been demonised in the current occupation, but is this a leftover effect from the first gulf war? Or something new, sparked by 9/11 and WMD fear?

PainRack wrote:
Still, why was there a need for George Bush to generate media frenzy and/or public support via such propaganda measures?

Because the US population was still gun-shy over Vietnam, and the US had good reason to think that it would lose thousands of men fighting Iraq, while few American knew anything at all about Iraq or Saddam. It was also kind of hard to wrap peoples heads around the Iraq that a single Iraqi Republican Guard mechanized corps (Saddam had three of them) had more tanks and firepower then every other army on the Arabian Peninsula meaning that Saddam was limited only by his logistics in his ability to rapidly overrun the whole place. At that point he’d control 60% of the worlds oil supply, and nothing suggests he would not have done this had the west failed to strongly oppose his conquest of Kuwait. Kuwait was a test case in which Saddam had a flimsy 80 year old excuse for invading, and a vital springboard for such an invasion as all the roads from Iraq to Saudi run through it.

The US and Russia were already co-operating at this stage and there was a UN resolution. Basic US interests like oil and money was just as prevalent then. The US had also begun flexing its muscle in Grenada and Panama.
Was this a fear of the so called Veitnam Syndrome?

Most of the domestic propaganda effort in the US came before the UN authorized the use of force and before the US actually built up its forces into an offensive posture. By that point support for the effort had largely solidified as videos of Saddams goons shooting people in the streets and doing similar thinks leaked out, and it became blatant that Saddam did not want negotiations or peace or anything but annexation of Kuwait as a prelude to dominating the Middle East. Saddam was his own worst enemy in this respect as he made no secret of his intentions or brutality, and attempted to issue a Fatwa calling for Muslims to expel all invaders from the Arabian Peninsula. That latter move was a huge mistake as he did not have the religious credentials to issue a Fatwa, and it led to hundreds of Muslim clerics issuing Fatwa’s calling for Saddams ejection from Kuwait.

PainRack wrote:So..... did the propaganda serve the goal of demonising the Iraqi army though?

Yeah it did, the propaganda effort aimed at the Iraqi forces in the field was highly successful for a long list of reasons, far more so then anyone imagined it would be. The propaganda was especially effective since it was combined with an unprecedented effective air campaign that strangled the Iraqi supply system, and because the leaflets and broadcasts were backed up by Muslim leaders around the world denouncing the men as enemies of Islam. Propaganda bombardment combined with B-52 bombardment was an almost surefire way to get a battalion to surrender the moment it sited Coalition Tanks. Some men reported surrendering because they had merely seen the results of such air attacks.

Propaganda worked very well in 2003, but it isn’t a worthwhile comparison, as by that point even elements of the Iraqi high command including several top men in the Republican Guard had already secretly defected to the US. That ensured that even if whole Iraqi divisions hadn’t disintegrated on first contact (merely whole brigades did so in 1991) then they still would have been fucked and steam rolled owing to the lack of any coordinated battle plan. Saddam was also just dumb as hell in 2003 and simply did not plan on the US to go all the way go Baghdad. Most opposition thus came only from Saddams personal militia the Fedyeean (fun fact in 1991 we thought the Fedayeen were Special Forces units!) who were lacking in heavy weapons and deployed primarily to control the population and not oppose a maneuver force on the ground.