The Culture of Fear (26 page)

One might have thought that the American people, in the years that followed the war, would have debated that question. Saddam Hussein, whom President George Bush dubbed “Hitler revisited,” remained in power. Much of the moral rationale for liberating Kuwait from the Iraqis also proved bogus. A high-profile story and set of photographs
about Iraqi soldiers destroying incubators in Kuwait hospitals and leaving babies to die, for instance, turned out to have been planted by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Later determined to have been greatly exaggerated if not completely false, that and other horror stories were key factors in gaining public support for the war. They were fed to the media by an American public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton (headed by Bush’s former chief of staff), which the Kuwaitis paid $11.5 million.
⁵

To this day there has been little national discussion of the possibility that the American people were duped by publicists who recognized that we “would be more likely to fight because of atrocity stories than because one feudal fiefdom was invaded by another,” as Arthur Rowse, a former editor of
U.S. News & World Report,
put it. (Among other brutalities following the war, hundreds of Palestinians in Kuwait disappeared and many were tortured in retaliation for Yasir Arafat’s support of Iraq. Kuwaiti authorities eventually drove 400,000 Palestinians out of the country.)
⁶

Many Americans probably still retain a falsely sunny picture of the war experience for American troops as well. In fact, as the Department of Defense noted in a report released four years after the war:
They also had to deal with propaganda from Iraq about its willingness to use biological warfare, as well as gossip among the troops about medications given to them by their own superiors to protect them from desert conditions and possible chemical warfare.
⁷

If the realities of the Gulf War itself were not major topics for public discussion, however, Gulf War Syndrome—which surely resulted in part
from those wartime conditions—was abundantly debated. Legions of presidential commissions, committees of Congress, Pentagon officials, panels of scientists, and veterans groups held hearings, conducted studies, released reports, and set up web sites. Thousands of news stories and commentaries appeared in the media, relaying a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes about sick veterans, illustrated with photos of them in wheelchairs or beside their deformed children.
⁸

Some of the widely quoted anecdotes were subsequently discredited, including those from Michael Adcock, the first vet whose death was widely attributed to GWS. He said he came down with lymphoma in the Gulf—a medical improbability, since Adcock died within months of his return home, and lymphomas take years to develop. Yet throughout the 1990s activists and their supporters in Congress and the media continually disseminated tales about infirmities caused by service in the Gulf.
⁹

Some of these people seemed to catch a bug of their own that disabled their crap detectors. Consider, for example, J. R. Moehringer of the
Los Angeles Times.
A journalist who has won awards for excellent reporting on other topics, he waxed melodramatic in a piece in 1995. “He has a Purple Heart. It lies beneath a ragged line in the middle of his chest,” Moehringer’s article began. It continued, unexpectedly: “His nanny coos at him as she unbuttons his cotton jumpsuit, exposing the vivid incision made last month by a surgeon’s knife.” Illustrated with heartbreaking photos of little Christian Coats, whose misshapen heart purportedly resulted from his father’s service in the Gulf War, the story tells of “a mini-plague” of physical ailments that veterans contend are “seeping into the next generation.”
¹⁰

Moehringer notes briefly, for the sake of balance, a Pentagon study that concluded that soldiers were not exposed to lethal chemicals and have no unique illnesses, much less diseases inherited by their children. The bulk of the article, however, endorses the theory that Christian’s troubles began when his father inhaled “black, cottony smoke of burning oil wells, stood beside sky-high stockpiles of radioactive ammunition, and ingested fistfuls of experimental medicine.” The future father had a funny feeling about those medicines at the time, but when he told his lieutenant, he was instructed “to shut the hell up” and swallow, Moehringer reported.
¹¹

A study published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
in 1997 strongly refuted the birth defect scare. Comparing 33,998 infants born to Gulf War veterans and 41,463 babies of other military personnel, the researchers found no evidence of an increase in the risk of birth defects for children of Gulf War vets. Their study was reported by Moehringer’s newspaper in a story written by another reporter. For his part, however, Moehringer was still writing scare stories. A few months before the
New England,journal
study came out he published a piece—“Gulf War Syndrome Feared to Be Contagious”—that made an impact well beyond California. Newspapers throughout the country reprinted it, and TV networks and international wire services ran their own reports.
¹²

The basic premise—that medical professionals contracted GWS from vets they treated—had already been rebutted by the Centers for Disease Control, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, and various independent medical scientists. Scientists also had rebutted an alarming possibility Moehringer raised about dangers to the nation’s blood supply from donations to the Red Cross by Gulf veterans. Moehringer instead chose to give prominence to the views of a biochemist in Irvine, California, named Garth Nicolson, who had conducted investigations of members of his own family and others he believed caught GWS from veterans. Nicolson told Moehringer that he himself “lost four teeth and had part of my lower jaw removed.”
¹³

Other news outlets, in covering Moehringer’s story, essentially repeated what he had reported. Of those I located, only CNN managed to add that, although Nicolson had been pushing his theory for two years, he remained the only researcher to claim evidence that Gulf War Syndrome is contagious.
¹⁴

Why would major news media disseminate the speculations of a wannabe expert many months after he had been refuted by certified experts?
¹⁵

The answer to this question is to be found, I believe, in some telling language early in Moehringer’s article: “Despite failing to find favor
with official Washington and colleagues, many remain convinced that the cause of Gulf War illness is an infectious microbe ...” Gulf War Syndrome provided an occasion for criticizing the Pentagon—something that none of the main participants in the war had much motivation to do about the war itself. Veterans of the war, having been heralded for ending America’s post—World War losing streak and curing what had come to be known as the “Vietnam Syndrome,” certainly were not inclined to find fault with how the war was waged. Nor were politicians, who shared, Republicans and Democrats alike, in the glory of America’s victory. Nor were journalists who had engaged in what CBS News anchor Dan Rather described as “suck-up coverage” of the military and exhibited “a lack of guts to speak up, to speak out, to speak our minds” during the war.
¹⁶

Throughout the mid- and late 1990s GWS became
the
vehicle for criticizing the Pentagon; but was it a good one? Susan Sontag addressed the dangers of employing metaphors such as warfare to make sense of serious diseases. Correlatively, I am concerned about the use of a syndrome to come to terms with shortcomings of the military. To use disease to talk of war is as problematic as the other way around.

To begin with it is problematic for ailing veterans themselves. Elaine Showalter, a professor of humanities at Princeton, observes in a discussion of GWS in her book
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media
that thousands of Gulf War vets have undergone countless medical exams rather than getting the psychological counseling they needed. Convinced they have a unique organic illness, veterans “tend not to see psychotherapists even when their stories make clear that anxiety, fear, and anger are among their symptoms,” Showalter writes.
¹⁷

Using GWS to critique the military is problematic on logical grounds as well. Any pronouncements the Pentagon made about veterans’ health became fair game for more fear mongering about GWS and further criticism of the military. When the Pentagon released studies showing that Gulf veterans were no more ill than would be expected by chance and that their ailments were similar to those that afflicted veterans of previous wars, the news media quoted “leading critics” saying “no one’s going to accept these studies,” and veterans claiming the Pentagon
“lied ... every step of the way.” Yet when the Pentagon admitted that, contrary to its own earlier claims, more than 20,000 American soldiers may have been exposed to chemical agents and given experimental drugs, such admissions were greeted with ever greater condemnation and suspicion. Some in Congress, extending the analogy Bush had used against Saddam Hussein during the war, made comparisons to gas chamber experiments on U.S. troops in the 1940s. Senator Jay Rockefeller accused the Pentagon of “reckless disregard for the health and well-being of U.S. servicemembers.”
¹⁸

Some studies do suggest that some veterans’ ailments resulted partly from the numerous inoculations they received against a half dozen diseases ranging from cholera to anthrax, as well as insect repellents they wore. These studies too have been discredited by prominent medical authorities, and in any event, the Pentagon administered the drugs out
of regard
for the soldiers, in hopes of safeguarding them, not to harm them.
¹⁹

Not until well into the twenty-first century are medical scientists likely to have sufficient long-term studies to reach a definitive conclusion about the causes of Gulf War Syndrome. Yet the nation’s journalists, happy to recast the Gulf War Syndrome story as “a good old-fashioned cover-up” rather than a “complicated ... medical mystery,” as an analysis in the
American,journalism Review
put it, poured forth with non sequiturs of their own. “Whether or not there is a coverup, the case represents the Pentagon’s self-protective culture at its worst,” declared a Washington Post story in 1996 on possible causes of GWS. Wrote New York Times reporter Philip Shenon around the same time: “Although there is no convincing evidence that American troops were made ill from exposure to Iraqi chemical or biological weapons during the war, the silence of major government figures from the war has added to the suspicion of ailing veterans that the Pentagon is withholding evidence that might explain their health problems.”
²⁰

It fell to seasoned skeptics at these same newspapers to question their colleagues’ innuendos of a governmental conspiracy against our troops. Gina Kolata of the
New York Times
consulted prominent scientists at medical schools, who suggested that, whether or not veterans were
exposed to chemical weapons, such exposure could not explain GWS. For one thing, if toxic exposure had been great, large numbers of veterans should have been hospitalized. Instead, their hospitalization and death rates were about the same as those of their peers who did not serve in the war. The range of symptoms veterans reported were also too diverse, Kolata pointed out, to be explained by chemical exposure.
²¹

David Brown of the
Washington Post,
in a detailed story in 1997, put the matter even more baldly. “The theory that many veterans of the Persian Gulf War are ill because they were unwittingly exposed to nerve gas more than five years ago contradicts most of what’s known about the health effects of chemical weapons,” he wrote. People exposed to nerve gases almost invariably exhibit symptoms immediately, and three decades of research contradict the likelihood of permanent or delayed damage as a result of exposure.
²²

Yet in 1997 and 1998 a predominant impression conveyed by much of the media was that nerve gas had caused the ailments that nearly 100,000 Gulf War vets were reporting. Several lengthy articles in the
New York Times
by Philip Shenon and a book by Seymour Hersh gave prominent play to scientists who argued that exposure to nerve gas had caused cognitive and other health problems for Gulf War vets. The impression was bolstered by a TV movie in May 1998 advertised as “the movie the Government doesn’t want you to see.” Utilizing the Cuisinart effect discussed earlier, the film intercut scenes with stars Ted Danson and Jennifer Jason Leigh and interviews with real-life vets and politicians. “The lines between fact and fiction are collapsing,” John Sacret Young, the writer and executive producer of the movie, declared in a piece about the making of the film. Young referred to Gulf War Syndrome as “a neurological holocaust.”
²³

Three days before Young’s much-hyped film aired, a short piece by Gina Kolata, buried deep inside the
Times,
reported on a study suggesting that stress played a crucial role in Gulf War maladies. By then there had been many studies indicating the same, and four months had passed since a report on “Frontline,” the investigative program on National Public Television, criticized editors at the
Times
for having assigned Shenon, its Pentagon reporter, to cover Gulf War Syndrome
rather than a medical reporter. The program pointed out what most of the media had not: thousands of veterans who were ill had not been exposed to nerve gas, and, vice versa, most of the troops who may have been exposed were not ill.
²⁴