Wag the Dog (67 page)

The thing that really stands out and screams Hollywood is the financing of the war. This is exactly how movies are always financed. No war has ever been financed that way. Certainly, no American war. In fact, in the twentieth century we've financed all our wars exactly the opposite way, with the United States contributing money to its allies to keep them fighting. It is difficult to imagine that radical a financial creativity in Washington.

The main argument for the official story of the war is our faith that a
president of the United States would not do the things suggested here. A president wouldn't hire film directors to tell him what to say and do. Presidents don't manufacture incidents to go to war. A president wouldn't make policy, life-and-death policy, just
for the sake of being reelected. Our leaders are men who put honor over expedience.

 

 

 

¹¹⁰
“. . . to judge from initial soundings, there was no great alarm in Washington, and no suggestion of an attempt to roll back the Iraqi assault. . . . Bush met with Scowcroft, Cheney, Powell, Judge William Webster of the CIA, White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, and other members of the National Security Council. The prevailing attitude among the group, according to one participant, was “Hey, too bad about Kuwait, but it's just a gas station and who cares whether the sign says Sinclair or Exxon?”

“. . . both King Hussein and King Fahd placed the blame for the invasion squarely on the Kuwaitis who were being exceptionally stubborn and difficult in their negotiations with Iraq. . . . ‘It's all Kuwait's fault,' he [King Fahd] told King Hussein the morning after the invasion. ‘They would be this adamant. They've brought this about' ”(Jean Edward Smith,
George Bush's War
[Holt, 1992])

¹¹¹
How friendly were we? “In March 1982, Iraq was removed from the State Department's list of terrorist countries, making it eligible for U.S. economic aid. . . . said Noel Kock, head of the Pentagon's counterterrorism unit—‘The reason was to help them succeed in the war with Iran.' Late that year the Department of Agriculture agreed to guarantee $300 million in credits for the purchase of American farm products. By 1990, Iraq had received about $3 billion in farm and other loans. . . .

“[The U.S.] looked the other way . . . when an errant Iraqi jet launched an Exocet missile into the USS Stark, killing 37 marines. . . .

“When the war with Iran concluded . . . Washington continued its tilt toward Baghdad. When Saddam directed his attention to Iraq's Kurdish minority, including the infamous gas attack . . . the U.S. more or less ignored it. The Bush administration . . . reviewed America's pro-Iraqi orientation and decided that there was no reason to change. A National Security directive to that effect was issued in Oct '89. . . . On 1-17-90, President Bush signed an executive order certifying that to halt loan guarantees to Iraq by the government's Export-Import bank would not be ‘in the national interest of the United States.'” (Smith,
George Bush's War)

¹¹²
Jean Edward Smith makes this point, as very few do: “Iraq had long and legitimate grievances against Kuwait . . . Iraq, a secular, modernizing state stood four square against Khomeini-style Islamic fundamentalism. . . . Given the choice between a modicum of social progress in Iraq and the unrepentant feudalism of Kuwait, it was a tough call.”

¹¹³
Smith,
George Bush's War
—not to be confused with
Mr. Bush's War,
by Stephen Graubard (Hill & Wang, 1992). “G.B.'s War” is reasonably balanced and more “factual” in the traditional sense. “Mr. B.'s War” is a polemic that sees the war as a kind of fraudulent political ploy and Bush as the heir to Reagan in a tradition of the corruption of truth.

¹¹⁴
Most of these items can be found from a variety of sources. For convenience, mine and yours, all the direct quotations in this numbered section, unless otherwise noted, come from
Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War
(Times Books, 1992) by the staff of
U.S. News
&
World Report.

¹¹⁵
Obviously, there are people who would disagree. But it is certainly a fact that Americans went to the Saudis with aerial photographs and said, in effect, “Here, look, he's poised to invade you next.” Then King Fahd said, in effect, “Oh my, you better come protect us.” Aerial photographs are not home snapshots at which anyone can point and say, “Hey, that's your mom!” They are, to the contrary, rather hieroglyphic and require a trained expert to interpret them. So what they show is pretty much what the trained expert says they show. The U.S. provided the trained expert. “The problem . . . was that there was no hard evidence that Saudi Arabia was threatened by Saddam. To the contrary, the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council had just announced its impending withdrawal from Kuwait. But the defense team showed the Prince elaborate satellite photography of Iraqi armor deployed near the neutral zone that separated Kuwait and S.A. . . . it's not clear where else the Iraqi tanks should have gone. There was no need for them in Kuwait City, and Saddam's generals, just as President Eisenhower had done with the marines in Lebanon in 1958, ordered them into the countryside.”
(George Bush's War)

¹¹⁶
There were a lot of complaints from the press about how the press was handled. But that's the point of view of apparently a minority of the press, and they seem rather whiny and moot and after the fact.

In fact, the media reported the war almost exactly as the government and military wanted it reported and made the government and the military look more than good, look terrific, doing it. It was a masterly presentation and not a true dissenting voice was heard. Including Saddam, who was not a dissenter but a fine and perfect goad.

The most prominent progovernment press distortion—as a film director from World War II or this one might have planned it—was the illusion that all our bombs were smart bombs that surgically destroyed only cancer cells. The media also helped set up the war: “. . . the administration began a concerted press campaign. . . . Both the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
carried front-page stories on Sat 8-4 that Iraqi forces were massing at the frontier, ready to invade. . . . Both had been leaked by the administration. They were designed to help make the case for American involvement. . . . The news had been deliberately doctored, despite the fact that at no time did either the CIA or the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] believe it probable that Iraq would invade S.A. The president had decided to intervene, the government's elaborate public-relations machinery was preparing the way.”
(George Bush's War)

“The news media did much to befog the atmosphere still further, defining the issues either as the White House framed them for the press or as they imagined them. The breathless commentator . . . spoke in an idiom that reflected a mind-set shaped wholly by the events of America's Vietnam experience and not of something so insignificant as Thatcher's Falklands war. Reflecting constantly on Lyndon Johnson when they would have done better to dwell on Ronald Reagan and his loyal disciple, George Bush, they missed the only story worth telling.”
(Mr. Bush's War)

 

 

 

 

Larry Beinhart has won an Edgar, a Gold Dagger, a Gold Medal at the Virgin Islands International Film Festival, and a couple of local Emmys in Miami. He was a Fulbright recipient of the Raymond Chandler Award. His other books include
The Librarian, No One Rides for Free, You Get What You Pay For,
and
Foreign Exchange.
His
How to Write a Mystery
has been called the best genre-specific book on writing there is and he has also written screenplays, short stories, journalism, and worked in commercial film production and as a political consultant. He's been a motion picture grip and a gaffer and he's taught skiing in upstate New York, in Killington, Vermont, and in Les Trois Vallees, France. Sometimes he yearns for legitimate employment. He has a wife and two children and they're all very interesting people. If you want to see him, he is the host of a homemade (public access, zero budget) television show now syndicated on Free Speech TV. If you like the book and want to tell him so, his e-mail is
[email protected]
.