Page 223 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 United States,
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.

CONCLUSION

The incubator story is probably the most extreme example of the
pursuit of media management and manipulation, public relations
and propaganda, which characterised the 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 communications 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.

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