Page 220 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 199

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
they could, by their focus on civilian casualties, cause greater damage to the
Allies’ military effort than to Iraq’s. Fortunately for the Iraqis (if not for
Saddam) civilian casualties were low, given the ferocity of the Allies’
bombing, and the effort to have Iraq portrayed as the wronged party was
unsuccessful. Eventually, most of the Western journalists were expelled from
the country, with the exception of CNN and a handful of other organ-
isations.
Saddam also used Western media to pursue a more ‘pro-active’ public
relations campaign. Before hostilities began Saddam was filmed greeting the
foreigners who had been trapped in Kuwait by his invasion. More
notoriously, he attempted to use British children to portray himself as a
kindly ‘Uncle Saddam’ figure, but succeeded only in sickening international
public opinion with his implied threat of what might happen to the hostages
should his invasion of Kuwait be resisted.
After operation Desert Storm had commenced, images of captured Allied
airmen, visibly brutalised, were shown on Iraqi television and then through
Western television organisations to the rest of the world. As Philip Taylor
notes, these and other efforts to influence international public opinion
through the use of media were ‘ill conceived and badly researched’ (1992,
p. 90), alienating rather than attracting support for the Iraqi cause. ‘If
Saddam had been attempting to exploit the Vietnam Syndrome to create
public dissatisfaction with the [Allied] war effort, the apparently brutalised
nature of the pilots merely caused fury and resentment’ (ibid., p. 107).
Saddam failed to understand the social semiotics of his communicative
efforts, and thus to predict how his messages would be decoded.

Babies, incubators and black propaganda
If the Allies and Iraq controlled and manipulated the media to pursue their
respective objectives, the Kuwaiti government in exile also engaged in public
relations of the type frequently used in wartime – what is sometimes referred
to as ‘black propaganda’. Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait routinely
committed atrocities against civilians, as they had done for years in Iraq
itself, and some on the Kuwaiti side believed that if serious United Nations
and Western support in the struggle to evict Iraq was to be forthcoming,
these atrocities should be highlighted and, if necessary, exaggerated or even
invented. Thus, in the period of build-up to Desert Storm, when public
opinion in the US and elsewhere was divided and domestic political support
for military action uncertain, a public relations campaign got underway to
portray Saddam as an enemy of such evil that he could not be allowed to get
away with his invasion.
In the US, where reinforcing support for the Kuwaiti cause was most
important, exiles formed Citizens for a Free Kuwait. This body then hired the
public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, at a cost of some $11 million, to

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