At the end of the eighties, Kuwait and Iraq had a dispute about the exploitation of oilfields on the border of the two countries. Iraq caused Kuwait of pumping oil from a field that was lying for a part in Iraq. Reportedly after consulting the American ambassador in Iraq, Iraq decided to invade Kuwait, which it considered to be a province of the original country anyway, and any look at the map of the region shows that they certainly have a point. In fact, the state of Kuwait was invented by the British in the time of their empirical rule of the region, in order to safeguard their oil interests.
At the time of the invasion, Iraq had been supported for a decade by the United States in its war against Iran. The fact that Iraq was ruled by the vicious dictator Saddam Hussein did not matter at the time. So Iraq had some reason to be assured about its planned actions, the more so when the American ambassador gave it known that the United States would not take serious action upon the matter. Later this ambassador was withdrawn, of course.
The fact was, Kuwait had been occupied by Iraq, and something had to been done about it because of the Kuwaiti oil reserves. It soon became apparent that friendly persuasion wouldn’t work, at least not at short notice, and there was a noticeably faction in America, as there always is, for direct and hard action. In addition, there also was pressure through all kinds of channels from America’s local caretaker, Israel, to take on Saddam Hussein, because of his attempts at getting hold of a nuclear weapon, a thing that would seriously undermine Israel’s position as the dominating power in the region.
But equally clear was the fact that a war would be a costly thing, in both money and personal terms. Do we put our boys on the line for some rich sheiks, that were living abroad for a large part anyway? At least, that is what the public would say. So there had to be found a good reason to start a war, one that would appeal to the public. So what better to do than to hire experts in talking to the public, a public relations firm. On its turn, this firm got the services of a pretty little woman, who was send to the media, with the message that she had been a nurse in a Kuwait hospital at the time of the Iraqi invasion. Furthermore, she said she had witnessed that Iraqi soldiers had taking incubator equipment from the hospital, after removing the babies that were nursed in them.
This story raised the proper outrage, and the war machine got on its way. Some years later the role of the public relations firm got known, and also the fact that the pretty little woman was a relation of a Kuwaiti ambassadorial staff member. The most remarkable about this story is that it could be repeated only eleven years later, and in the same region, the babies having become weapons of mass destruction, that proved just as elusive, and just as much pure propagandistic lies.
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