Maybe Trump has done us a little favor?
by digby
As I watch the media be more skeptical about the Iran escalation than I’ve ever seen them in my life when it comes to military action, I’m struck by the idea that Trump may have done us a big favor. Skepticism over the rationales the government uses for war has usually been in short supply at times like these so perhaps the fact that Trump is an inveterate liar — and his government is too — has finally opened their eyes to the fact that all is often not as it seems in these situations.
If we get through this, the key will be to hold them to this when someone other than Trump is doing it. Because he certainly is not the first. He and his men are just so crude and lacking in credibility that it’s impossible not to notice.
Recall:
Friday, November 28, 2008
Poppy’s Legacy
by digby
…[I]t pays to remember that the vaunted “realism” of George Bush Sr led to a war that’s still going on today. He’s the guy who got us caught up in Iraq and he did it in ways that his decidedly unrealistic son took to heart. The propaganda, for instance:Take the Kuwaiti babies story. Its origins go back to the first world war when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and updated for the Gulf war, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a modern Kuwaiti hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then tossing the babies out of incubators so that the incubators could be sent back to Iraq.The story, improbable from the start, was first reported by the Daily Telegraph in London on September 5 1990. But the story lacked the human element; it was an unverified report, there were no pictures for television and no interviews with mothers grieving over dead babies.That was soon rectified. An organisation calling itself Citizens for a Free Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti government in exile) had signed a $10m contract with the giant American public relations company, Hill & Knowlton, to campaign for American military intervention to oust Iraq from Kuwait.The Human Rights Caucus of the US Congress was meeting in October and Hill & Knowlton arranged for a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to tell the babies’ story before the congressmen. She did it brilliantly, choking with tears at the right moment, her voice breaking as she struggled to continue. The congressional committee knew her only as “Nayirah” and the television segment of her testimony showed anger and resolution on the faces of the congressmen listening to her. President Bush referred to the story six times in the next five weeks as an example of the evil of Saddam’s regime.In the Senate debate whether to approve military action to force Saddam out of Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned the incubator babies atrocity and the final margin in favour of war was just five votes. John R Macarthur’s study of propaganda in the war says that the babies atrocity was a definitive moment in the campaign to prepare the American public for the need to go to war.It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl, coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. By the time Macarthur revealed this, the war was won and over and it did not matter any more.(For more on the propaganda war, read this award winning article about John Rendon in Rolling Stone.)
Trump is so bad at all this that it’s impossible to ignore. But he isn’t the first, not by a long shot.
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