Field reporters on rooftops in fishing vests. Table maps and model airplanes. Endless speculation on what Bush, Saddam, Blair and the troops on the front line might be thinking at any given moment. I’ve seen it before too many times, and I grew up in arguably one of the most peaceful eras in world history.
Battles take place. Bombs explode. Generals and politicians hold lengthy press conferences where they spew quotable sound bites and refuse to answer any legitimate questions. People die, but we rarely see the corpses.
We sit in front of the television for hours at a time, shocked and awed by the experience, but no better informed about the conflict. The world hasn’t even pinned down an accurate body count from the last Gulf War, and another one has already started.
These are strange days we’re living in. You’re either for or against; a friend of liberty or an appeaser for a brutal dictator. There are no gray areas anymore, because the case for war is so tenuous that there was no room for debate or doubt.
Because I’ve seen it all before, I know that the real story of the conflict will not appear on the nightly news, but will trickle out bit by bit over the next few years. The truth always comes out, and it’s always too late.
That may sound glib, but my experiences as a war watcher have taught me that nothing is as simple as it is portrayed, that news organizations, politicians and military leaders can’t be trusted to tell the truth about anything during these times. If governments were truly honest in the first place, we’d never need to go to war.
Here are a few history lessons from the first Gulf War to digest:
In the first Gulf War, the Kuwaiti government and an American PR company planted a fake story in the U.S. media about Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving them on the floor. The first President Bush repeated these allegations several times while making a case for war at home, winning the support of Congress, the coalition, and the general public in the process.
All those precision guided bombs from the last Gulf War campaign? According the U.S. Air Force, 90 per cent of all bombs dropped were of the unguided conventional type, and 90 per cent of the guided bombs missed their targets.
Another lie we were told back then is that there were up to 360,000 Iraqi troops amassed on the Saudi border, poised. Russian satellite photos purchased by ABC News and the St. Petersburg Times of Florida later proved that the real number was closer to 20,000 – a defensive force, not an invading army.
Now we’re at war again. And it’s the same old story; the same footage of explosions and infrared cameras, the same refugees lining the highways, the same grainy shots of missiles hitting their targets – it’s only the lies that have changed.
Either the pro war camp isn’t trying hard enough or has gotten too smug, but the lies aren’t even all that convincing this time around. They got me with that incubator thing 12 years ago, I admit, but I’m harder to fool this time. So are the majority of the people around the world who still oppose this war.
There are already a lot of troubling inconsistencies in this conflict, things that make me go huh?
1. The justification for this war has been a moving target. At first we were told it was about Iraq violating UN resolutions and the integrity of the UN – then the U.S. and the U.K. bullied and bribed UN members for all they were worth, and called it an irrelevant debating society when they failed to gain support.
Then we were told it was about disarmament. The Iraqi’s complied with every UN request, were proactive in destroying arms, and gave weapons inspectors free run of the country. According to chief UN Inspector Hans Blix, there were still a few outstanding issues, but they could have been resolved in a matter of months.
So the justification changed again. Next the pro-war camp accursed the Iraqi’s of aiding and abetting the al Qaeda terrorist organization. Despite the fact that they haven’t produced any credible proof of this, they succeeded in convincing almost 60 per cent of American’s that Saddam Hussein was somehow behind 9-11 and is a terrorist threat.
But the world wasn’t buying it, so the goalposts moved once again to regime change, via a pre-emptive war against what they said was a growing security threat to the U.S. and its allies – both concepts are illegal according to the UN charter.
Iraq has no air force, no navy, severely dated military hardware, and an army half the size of the first Gulf War and still it posed a credible threat to the free world? Huh?
2. The stories of the day aren’t adding up. For example, the U.S. military said recently that it is planning to drop timed land mines around sites believed to contain Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons.
My question is why weren’t the UN inspectors told of these sites? And why use land mines, the most indiscriminate of weapons on the planet, to keep the Iraq army at bay when they could have destroyed those buildings and bunkers in precision bombing campaigns? Huh?
3. No real evidence to support the coalition has been produced.
The British intelligence documents that established a link between Iraq and al Qaeda? It turns out they were based on Internet data and a decade old term paper by an American student. The rest of the proof of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda comes down to one terrorist with tenuous links to al Qaeda who received medical treatment in Baghdad. My questions is this: if 20 al Qaeda terrorists could move around freely in the U.S., taking flying lessons and attempting to purchase crop dusters, why is it impossible that one man could visit a hospital in Baghdad without the knowledge of the Iraqi government?
And where is the proof that Saddam was attempting to restart Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The documents that proved Iraqi agents were attempting to purchase uranium from Niger turned out to be forged. The aluminum tubes that were supposedly going to be used to process uranium were ruled out for that purpose by International Atomic Energy Association inspectors.
Where is the urgency of the first Gulf War? Where is the – and I apologize for resorting to this overused term – the smoking gun in March 2003?
Until someone produces some real proof, all I can be is a skeptic.
Until history can make sense of this conflict, I have a feeling I’ll be saying ‘Huh?’ a lot in the coming weeks and months.
