Page 221 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 200

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
disseminate atrocity stories connected with the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.
Special ‘information days’ were held, videos produced and US congressmen
enlisted to lend their weight to the appeal for military intervention. 6
Many of the atrocity stories were true, as already noted, while others
appear to have been manufactured for the specific purpose of mobilising
public opinion behind Kuwait. Most notable in this connection was the tale
of how Iraqi troops in Kuwait City had entered a hospital, removed 312
babies from the incubators in which they were placed and shipped the
incubators back to Iraq, leaving the infants to die on the hospital floor. In
October 1990, Hill and Knowlton sent a Kuwaiti eyewitness, a young
woman named as ‘Nayirah’, to the US Congress’s ‘Human Rights Caucus’
before which she gave a detailed and emotional account of the incubator
story.
The story spread quickly, appearing in the media of several countries as
‘true’. In the US Congress, shortly afterwards, the resolution to pursue a
military solution to the Gulf crisis was passed by a mere two votes. US
observers are in little doubt that ‘Nayirah’s’ story and others of a similar
type which were circulating at this time contributed substantially to
swinging political support behind the military option and thereby setting
in motion the subsequent Desert Storm (Macarthur, 1992). In the event,
‘Nayirah’ turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the
US and the incubator story to be false. When Amnesty International
inspected the scene of the alleged atrocity after the cessation of hostilities,
the organisation found no evidence to substantiate the story.
The incubator story is probably the most extreme example of the pursuit
of media management and manipulation, public relations and propaganda,
which characterised the 1991 Gulf War. In this respect the Gulf was not
unique, since such techniques have become commonplace in military conflict
in the course of the twentieth century. But the combination of new com-
munications technologies, sophisticated public relations and geo-political
significance which provided the context of this particular conflict gave media
management a heightened role. In the Gulf, messages of various kinds
transmitted through the media had real political and military consequences,
in so far as they served to outrage public opinion at one moment, reassure it
at another and provide legitimation for official allied accounts of the conflict,
its genesis, and its preferred outcome.
To draw attention to the ‘hyperreal’ quality of the Gulf War as
experienced by those not in the front line and the extent of media man-
agement from all sides is not necessarily to criticise these features. Few
would deny that there are circumstances in which such techniques are
appropriate; in which manipulation, distortion, and even deception may be
legitimate instruments of warfare. There are just wars, and the Gulf
conflict was the closest the world had come to one since the defeat of the
Nazis. One might also argue, however, that in the history of post-Second

200