Page 238 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 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

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