Why the Dark Secrets of the First Gulf War Are Still Haunting Us

By Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet. Posted February 27, 2009.

Two months after the war ended, the editors of 15 news outlets protested to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney about the Pentagon's control. But the damage had been done. The real war was never reported to the American public.

What We Missed and Need to Remember

Americans never saw images of even one of the 100,000 civilians killed in the aerial war, just coordinates of precision-guided strikes, the majority of which missed their marks.

We never learned that the government's goals had changed from expelling Saddam's forces from Kuwait to destroying Iraq's infrastructure. Or what a country with a destroyed infrastructure looks like -- with most of its electricity, telecommunications, sewage system, dams, railroads and bridges blown away.

There were no photos or stories of the start of the ground war on Feb. 24, 1991, after Iraq had agreed to a Russian-brokered withdrawal. We never saw the "bulldozer assault" of Feb. 24-26, when U.S. soldiers with plows mounted on tanks and bulldozers moved along 10 miles of trenches, burying alive some 1,000 Iraqi soldiers. Or the night of Feb. 26, when allied forces cordoned off a stretch of highway between Kuwait and Basra, Iraq, incinerating tens of thousands of retreating soldiers and civilians, in an incident come to be called the "Highway of Death."

We saw no coverage of dead Kurds and Shiites who, at Bush's instigation and expecting his support, rose up against Saddam. Nor in the months and years after, the news of the Iraqi epidemic of birth defects, cancers and systemic disease.

We heard little about the 20,000 troops occupying Saudi Arabia after the war, the growing regional resentment for the destruction and death, injuries and insults of invasion and occupation. We never heard of the Saudi Muslim radical Osama bin Laden, his outraged protests, for which he was banished, wandering the region, recruiting young followers to avenge the desecration of Islam's sacred sites.

As for our own, there were no images of returning coffins filled with U.S. service members, nor, in the days and months after the war, coverage of the war's aftermath: The 200,000 troops who returned profoundly ill from Gulf War illness; the trauma, addiction and/or brain damage that caused veterans to kill their wives, family, fellow citizens, and/or themselves; and, of course, on Sept. 11, 2001, the tragic event used by the George W. Bush administration to launch a second war against Iraq.

There was no mainstream media coverage of the roots, just of the proclamations of them versus us, hatemongers versus freedom lovers, barbaric cowards versus civilized heroes.

We could read about bin Laden's jihad, but little appeared of the fatwa he and his counterparts throughout the Middle-East issued, except the often-quoted statement that it was the duty of every Muslim "to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military," leaving out the second part of the sentence -- "in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”

Barack Obama's early opposition to George 43's Gulf War was a sign of the integrity, knowledge, and depth for which Americans would elect him,  trusting these virtues would guide us in hard times. Patriotic etiquette discourages politicians, especially presidents, from bearing complexities in public forums.

But war-weary, broke and scared Americans will welcome the president breaking rules and speaking awkward truths.

Invasion and violence, like chickens, do come home to roost. We're ready for a leader who grasps history's complications and heeds its lessons and who won't release us from one war only to tie us to another, and another.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, democrats, 9/11, pentagon, kuwait, dick cheney, osama bin laden, james baker, barack obama, george h.w. bush, gulf war, gulf war syndrome, april glaspie, margaret tutweiler, citizens for a free kuwai, pentagon propoganda, hill and knowlton, highway of death

Nora Eisenberg is the director of the City University of New York's Faculty Fellowship Publication Program. Her short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in such places as the Partisan Review, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, Tikkun, and the Guardian UK. Her third novel, When You Come Home, which explores the 1991 Gulf War and Gulf War illness, was published last month by Curbstone Press.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from World! Sign up now »