The Gulf Crisis and New World Order — Page 358
Sampling of public opinion 011 the Gulf War A report recommending the new target selection has been handed to General Lee Butler, head of the strategic air command, who will pass on his recommendations to President Bush" The Toronto Star: January 12, 1992 Gulf War: One year later Today, Bush has just completed the most humiliating trip abroad by a U. S leader in memory. Into the begging bowl that Bush took with him to Tokyo, the Japanese dropped only the odd coin, like a vague promise to buy more auto parts. Far more embarrassing, Bush also brought back the nightmarish image of himself, ashen-faced and vomiting on the floor at a state dinner, and of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyaz. awa's lecturing him that America's real problems are AIDS, homelessness, broken-down schools and incompetent corporations. In the Middle East itself, the war today seem to have been like a real desert storm, creating havoc while it lasted but afterward leaving the sands humped and hollowed just as they were before. Saddam Hussein is still there in Baghdad. The Kurds, many of them, are still shivering in the mountains. The Middle East peace talks have slowed to a crawl and may soon halt entirely as Washington loses the will and interest to expand energy on anything except electing the next president. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It was a war about oil. We've got the oil again. the rest of the Middle East's problems are its own. " Why were Iraq's agricultural and water-treatment facilities destroyed, its electrical system crippled and air attacks carried out against clearly marked civilian vehicles on the highways and Bedouin tents in the desert? In a little noticed but exhaustively researched report titled Needless Deaths i11 the Gulf War, Middle East Watch calls a public investigation into all these points. How much pro-war feeling in the United States (and Canada) was whipped up by a relentless public relations campaign, led by Hill and Knowlton, the American PR giant that was hired by Citizens for afree Kuwait? That group was financed by the Kuwaiti government. Just one example surfaced last week. Harper's magazine publisher John MacArthur revealed in a New York Times article that Nayirah, 358