The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies

[damnedifIknow]

Polls suggest that Americans tend to differentiate between our “good war” in Iraq — “Operation Desert Storm,” launched by George HW Bush in 1990 — and the “mistake” his son made in 2003.

Across the ideological spectrum, there’s broad agreement that the first Gulf War was “worth fighting.” The opposite is true of the 2003 invasion, and a big reason for those divergent views was captured in a 2013 CNN poll that found that “a majority of Americans (54%) say that prior to the start of the war the administration of George W. Bush deliberately misled the U.S. public about whether Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.”

But as the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to urge the US to once again commit troops to Iraq, it’s important to recall that the first Gulf War was sold to the public on a pack of lies that were just as egregious as those told by the second Bush administration 12 years later."

*Now, eleven years later, as Bill Moyers put it last week, “the very same armchair warriors in Washington who from the safety of their Beltway bunkers called for invading Baghdad, are demanding once again that America plunge into the sectarian wars of the Middle East.” It’s vital that we keep our history in Iraq in mind, and apply some healthy skepticism to the claims they offer us this time around."

http://billmoyers.com/2014/06/27/the-first-iraq-war-was-also-sold-to-the-public-based-on-a-pack-of-lies/

[babylonsister]

1. This President is making the difference, thank whomever you believe in. nt

[jaysunb]

2. It was a crock of shit then

and revisionist history can't change the facts....most of which were well known at the time.

[reddread]

3. Incubators? 91 was packaged and sold by the same Pros who brought us endless war

This is why polls are only useful for determining how ignorant the respondents can be made to seem, and how
that murkiness can be exploited in the general population.

[Octafish]

4. Poppy Bush also lied America into war on Iraq.

In the lie-up to war, even the Kuwait ambassador's daughter was called to perjure before Congress.

The nice young person said she was a nurse at a Kuwaiti City hospital who saw the Iraqi soldiers take babies from their incubators and leave them on the cold, hard floor so they could take the healthcare war booty for Baghdad.



"If I wanted to lie, or if we wanted to lie, if we wanted to exaggerate, I wouldn't use my daughter to do so. I could easily buy other people to do it." -- Kuwait Ambassador

http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html

The public interest also was perked up when Poppy and the Pentagon came out and said the spy satellite photos showed Saddam massing his tanks next to our Saudi oil fields. What really got to the People in '90, though, was the claim Saddam had WMDs and was planning to nuke the USA. Then, like in 2003, the "public" went along with the war.

The buy-partisan nature of money-trumps-peace was made clear when Madeleine Albright, at the time the nation's ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on 60 Minutes:

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: [font color="red"]I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.[/font color]

SOURCE: http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/we-think-the-price-is-worth-it/

Maybe it's just us, but I think the price of all the oil in the world, and all the oil that's been sold, and all the oil that will be sold, cannot equal the value of one human life. To Poppy and War Inc, all the millions dead are just cannon fodder paying the cost of doing business.

[dougolat]

7. There it is: The Hidieous Bleeding Truth ...

...that gets so diligently ignored.

[Live and Learn]

5. How the heck are people so easily duped? nt

[Kablooie]

6. At least the first gulf war had an objective.

They wanted Sadaam to stay in his own county.
Once the goal was achieved, the war was over.

That was the big problem with the Vietnam and W's wars.
They had no clear objective.
Well, I guess Bush's war had the objective of destroying Saddam but there was no consideration of what was needed after the country's government was eliminated.

[reddread]

8. What was the objective of those sanctions that led to 100's of thousands of dead children?

Was Hussein threatening to leave Iraq?
I think you might want to be very careful ascribing motives
especially if they match the words of lying politicians.
I would immediately look elsewhere for an explanation.

[Kablooie]

9. Perhaps the true motive was different but...

The war ended which meant that they had some kind of objective at least.
I'm not saying it was a "good" war, I really can't say, only that it had a goal and ended once that goal was reached.

[reddread]

11. when did it end?

I dont believe our policies and intentions changed a lick for one day over the last 24 years.
who needs boots on the ground when you can cruise in anytime?
Now, how is it that these scary ISIS folks can do WHATEVER THEY WANT?
I guess our drones and watchful eyes are simply helpless before them.

[stevenleser]

13. I agree with you. I think a lot of this is historical revisionism. Gulf War I made sense.

A dictator invaded another country to grab territory and resources and he and his efforts should have been turned back.

There was no lie about that. It happened.

I think what we are seeing with this OP is that some folks on the anti-war side so badly want the arguments against war to be right in every instance that they try to revise history to make it so. I have seen this done with the second world war too. It was all the allies fault and we were lied into that war too.

War is wrong the vast majority of the time. We don't need to revise history so that it is bad in every instance to be anti-war in general.

[reddread]

14. WELL DONE!

is there a dictionary of correct buzz terms that people can use to purport fantasy and revisionist notions?
a beauty of an example.

[stevenleser]

16. Have no idea what this post of yours means. nt

[EX500rider]

17. I think they are agreeing with you...if not I will..

....and this whole "bogus sat pics of Iraqi tanks massed on the Saudi border".....Iraq actually DID invade Saudi Arabia, there was a whole battle fought IN a Saudi border town.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khafji

I guess they were just lost and looking for a Starbucks?

[hobbit709]

10. The main reason Saddam invaded Kuwait was he caught them slant drilling into Iraq

with the aid of Halliburton and they wouldn't stop.

[reddread]

12. thanks for adding genuine context

the official story should not be handed around as truthful in these parts.

[stevenleser]

15. That is one of the reasons Saddam put forth, yes and some folks say there is evidence in its favor

for instance http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/23/opinion/23iht-edcool.t.html

Many oilmen in the West understood that Kuwait and others kept oil prices down by overproducing, which was one of Saddam's grievances.

Also, there is evidence that Kuwait was engaged in slant-drilling of Iraqi oil, under the border. As one oil executive put it, slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas or Oklahoma.

True, the Kuwait-Iraq border was poorly demarcated.

note there is no evidence provided in that NYT article.

Wikipedia addressed the claim thusly...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Kuwait#Economic_warfare_and_slant_drilling

Economic warfare and slant drilling[edit]
In 1988 Iraq's Oil Minister, Issam al-Chalabi, stressed a further reduction in the crude oil production quota of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members so as to end the 1980s oil glut.[19] Chalabi argued that higher oil prices would help Iraq increase its revenues and pay back its US$60 billion debt.[19] However, given its large downstream petroleum industry, Kuwait was less concerned about the prices of crude oil and in 1989, Kuwait requested OPEC to increase the country's total oil production ceiling by 50% to 1.35 million bpd.[20] Throughout much of the 1980s, Kuwait's oil production was considerably above its mandatory OPEC quota and this had prevented a further increase in crude oil prices.[20] A lack of consensus among OPEC members undermined Iraq's efforts to end the oil glut and consequently prevented the recovery of its war-crippled economy.[21] According to former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, "every US$1 drop in the price of a barrel of oil caused a US$1 billion drop in Iraq's annual revenues triggering an acute financial crisis in Baghdad".[17] It was estimated that between 1985 and 1989, Iraq lost US$14 billion a year due to Kuwait's oil price strategy.[22] Kuwait's refusal to decrease its oil production was viewed by Iraq as an act of aggression against it.

The increasingly tense relations between Iraq and Kuwait were further aggravated when Iraq alleged that Kuwait was slant-drilling across the international border into Iraq's Rumaila field. The dispute over Rumaila field started in 1960 when an Arab League declaration marked the Iraq-Kuwait border 2 miles north of the southernmost tip of the Rumaila field.[23] During the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi oil drilling operations in Rumaila declined while Kuwait's operations increased. In 1989, Iraq accused Kuwait of using "advanced drilling techniques" to exploit oil from its share of the Rumaila field. Iraq estimated that US$2.4 billion worth of Iraqi oil was "stolen" by Kuwait and demanded compensation.[24] Kuwait dismissed the accusations as a false Iraqi ploy to justify military action against it. Several foreign firms working in the Rumaila field also dismissed Iraq's slant-drilling claims as a "smokescreen to disguise Iraq's more ambitious intentions".[23]

On 25 July 1990, only a few days before the Iraqi invasion, OPEC officials said that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates had agreed to a proposal to limit daily oil output to 1.5 million barrels, thus potentially settling differences over oil policy between Kuwait and Iraq.[25] At the time of the settlement, more than 100,000 Iraqi troops were deployed along the Iraq-Kuwait border, and American officials expressed little indication of decline in tensions despite the OPEC settlement.[26]

When you check into the footnotes, one of the articles you get is:

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-the-gulf-the-oilfield-lying-below-the-iraq-kuwait-dispute.html

The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, with headquarters in London, acquired American drilling expertise when it bought the Santa Fe International Cor poration in 1981 for $2.4 billion. Santa Fe, based in Alhambra, Calif., has separate divisions that specialize in oil field drilling and rig operations, pri marily in offshore areas around the world, as well as in exploration and production, mostly in the Gulf of Mexi co, Texas and Louisiana.

Six American Workers

John J. Mika, Santa Fe's vice presi dent of administration, said six Santa Fe employees, all Americans, were among the oil workers captured by Iraqi troops in the early moments of the Aug. 2 invasion. All of the men were believed taken to Baghdad, he added.

The Santa Fe employees worked on several rigs ''immediately adjacent'' to the Iraqi border, Mr. Mika said. He added that he was unaware of any well that might have utilized the ''slant'' drilling technique along the Iraqi bor der.

W. C. Goins, senior vice president of OGE Drilling Inc., a Houston company that provided oilfield supervisors and workers for Kuwait in the same area, said he was ''positive'' all of the wells his employees drilled and operated ran vertically down to the Rumaila pay zone. ''That field crosses the border in north Kuwait,'' he added. ''Iraqis were drilling on one side, and Kuwaitis on the other side.''