- NEWARK, NJ (UPI) -- A decade
ago, the United States and its allies liberated Kuwait from Iraq's occupation.
The actual battle to free Kuwait was far shorter than the battle to win
the approval of the American people to go to war.
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- The military tactic of the battle to defeat Iraq and
liberate Kuwait was quite similar to tactics used to convince the American
public they had to go to war to defeat the evil menace of Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein. In American football, they call it the "End Around."
The military calls it a "Flanking Movement"; it is the same thing.
The idea is to get behind the other side's defense by deception, than attack
from the rear.
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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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Nothing could outrage the people of this country more
than this awful barbaric cruelty, surely.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- All of this was heart wrenching, and all of this was
a lie. All of this was a product of a Washington D.C. public relations
firm with close ties to the Bush administration.
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- While Iraqi troops did commit atrocities in Kuwait, they
never tore little babies from incubators and murdered them -- and there
was never democracy in Kuwait. We found all this out afterwards.
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- The young woman who testified to the horror before congress?
She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to Washington. She was in
Paris when the Iraqi's invaded Kuwait. She never worked in a hospital;
she never worked in her life. Her father was a scion of the immensely wealthy
dynasty that rules Kuwait. The woman who testified before the General Assembly?
She was not in Kuwait at the time of the invasion either. She was the wife
of the information minister of Kuwait
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- And Democracy? A single family rules the country. The
al Sabbah family. The emir the aged patriarch, rich beyond belief, who
ran Kuwait, lived in an opulent palace with a lot of gold trimmings. There
never was, and there is not now, or will there ever be, a democratic government
in Kuwait. The tribe, the family, the dynasty run Kuwait. I came to the
conclusion during my time reporting on the war from Saudi Arabia and from
the desert accompanying the army of Kuwait during the battle for the country,
that they are not very nice people.
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- The American people had to be convinced that we were
going to risk the lives of our young men and women to free the people of
Kuwait and to rid the world of the evil of this man Saddam and his army.
George Bush the elder lied to them to get them to agree. And they did.
They tied yellow ribbons everywhere, rallied behind the men and women of
their military. And we beat Saddam in a matter of hours. We beat his army
and drove them in panic from Kuwait. And we were within sight of Baghdad.
We could have gone into the city and routed Saddam from his palace. His
army no longer existed.
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- Why didn't we? That is another lie. We did not do it
because if we had occupied Iraq we would be obligated to create a democratic
government in Iraq. Nothing could upset our Arab brothers, our allies,
more than a real democracy in the Middle East.
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- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, are all run
by despotic dynasties. How long would they last if Iraq was free, truly
free? And the Americans were there to make sure Iraq stayed that way. Not
very long, I would bet. And somebody, maybe George Bush the elder would
have had to convince the American people that we had to support these despotic
regimes, no less oppressive than Saddam's Iraq, when the people of those
countries rebelled and demanded freedom. We would be sending troops to
every country in the Middle East just to keep our supply of oil intact.
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- We can do business with dictators, we always have in
the Middle East, and we would find it harder to do business with a free
people.
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- No matter what the Bush administrations tells us we have
to remember it is really about oil and money. The rest is nonsense.
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- -- Morgan Strong is a journalist and consultant on the
Middle East for "60 Minutes" and others, and is a former professor
of Middle Eastern History at Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.)
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- http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021004-034429-3028r
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- Comment
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- From Henry E. Lenz
10-17-2
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- Hi Jeff...
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- Having just learned of your site, I have been enjoying
reading the numerous articles you have.
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- The particular one I wish to comment on is titled "Bush's
Iraq Lies".
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- Just prior to the first time we went into Iraq, we were
experiencing the major melt-down of a lot of financial institutions.
As more and more information came out about the "Savings and Loan
scandal and bailout", we learned that Neil Bush, the brother of our
current president, was heavily implicated in one of these billion dollar
"failures".
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- One week (interesting timing); after the news of his
involvement, we were invading Iraq. At the time I wondered about the
timing of this, since it certainly served to push Neil's name out of the
headlines. The coincidental timing of this was apparently lost on most
people, and allowed the son of then president George Bush Sr. to escape
the glare of public scrutiny and avoid any penalties for his grevious financial
misconduct.
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- Earlier this year the media was starting to get more
adamant with questions about possible financial misconduct by the current
president Bush, and vice president Cheney. It was only after these questions
were getting into specific details, that Bush started jumping up and down
about Iraq.
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- Talk about misdirecting attention away from real issues.
It is a shame that a family; that has had such a history of lying to
the public, should continue to have such power that they can send countless
people to die in a war that does nothing but cover up their own criminal
behavior. Not to mention the fact that they should be considered to
be murderers for all the deaths that have and will come out of the repeated
Iraqi conflicts.
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- While I do believe that Saddam is an evil man, I feel
that we are being led by men that are just as evil, albeit sneakier and
with better PR teams.
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- It is too bad that the people will never truly learn
just how badly they have been screwed, or there might finally be a major
shakeup of the American political system.
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- Perhaps you could run an article about that sometime.
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- Enjoy yourself, Henry E. Lenz
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