Page 239 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

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.

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 manage-
ment 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
management 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 World War conflicts, the
same or similar techniques have been used by the Western powers
in military expeditions of far more dubious legitimacy – Grenada,
Nicaragua, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, to name but
three. In each of these situations, ‘enemies’ were created and
‘threats’ were manufactured by military public relations specialists,

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