The country of Kuwait provided material and strategic support to Saddam Hussein's government during Iraq’s eight-year war against its neighbor, Iran. In addition to $14 billion in loans, the Kuwaiti government opened up national ports for Iran to use after the shutdown of Basra. This resulted in a huge debt, one that Iraq could scarcely pay back after blowing its wad on war. In an effort to raise funds, Hussein suggested a rise in oil prices. Kuwait and the rest of OPEC, under pressure from the West to keep oil prices reasonable, balked at the suggestion. Going the cartel one better, the Kuwaiti ruling family increased oil production, thus ensuring that prices would remain low.

And where did the Kuwaitis get all this extra oil? As it turns out, they were stealing some of it from Iraq. Through a process known as ‘slant drilling,’ Kuwaiti oilers began digging their wells inside their home country. But instead of drilling straight down, they dug at an angle, eventually tapping into the rich Rumalia oil fields located just north of the Kuwait-Iraq border.

Determined to regain control of Rumalia, Hussein planned an invasion against his former ally. As a long-time friend of the United States, he didn’t foresee the Americans having any problems with the action. When asked on 25 July 1990 about recent military movements that looked like an imminent invasion against Kuwait, Hussein explained his intentions to US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie. He queried her opinion as to how the US would respond. Glaspie replied, through an interpreter, that the US “inspired by the friendship [to Hussein] and not by confrontation, does not have an opinion....we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts.” She even suggested a US media campaign to counter the effects of a recent scathing anti-Hussein report done by ABC’s Dianne Sawyer so that he could “explain Iraq to the American people.” A year earlier, President George H.W. Bush signed a National Security Directive which gave Iraq $500 million dollars in credits. Thus, it’s easy to speculate that Hussein went into the conflict against Kuwait without expecting any abreactions from the US, and subsequently the global community.

So, Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990. Despite the massive military maneuvers noted by the US and other observers, the Iraqis seemed to take Kuwait by surprise, easily routing its ground and air forces. This compelled the ruling Amir, Jabar-Al-Ahmed Al -Jabar Al-Sabah, to flee the country to Saudi Arabia, while his brother, Fahad, died defending the palace. Hussein immediately established Alaa Hussein Ali as the governor of what amounted to an Iraqi province. Meanwhile, the exiled royal waited for any chance to regain control over their nation.

Although the Iraqis won a quick and decisive victory, they suffered greater consequences than they anticipated. The very abreaction from the global community they thought wouldn’t be a problem, became a problem. Along with the US, such other former allies as France and the USSR condemned the action. Some of Iraq’s old friends began to call for retaliatory action.

In later years, some would suspect that Glaspie and her superiors in Washington actually wanted to goad Iraq into war in order to destabilize the power of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, and its growing influence within the Middle East. While claiming socialist values--which would have made the West somewhat jumpy during the latter days of the Cold War all by itself--the Ba’athists were actually more committed to the idea of regional autonomy. As it stood then (and now), Iraq owned not just the Rumalia fields, but other rich sources of black gold. British Petroleum, however, controlled the production, and administered those fields. Iraq had already nationalized its oil reserves. Were he to take stronger measures, Hussein might have destabilized the oil industry. Worse yet, were the influence of the Ba’ath party to extend beyond Iraq, any Western influence over petroleum production could face serious difficulties. Then too, there was also the more immediate concern of preserving lower oil prices.

A 1996 article by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, of the zine Blazing Tattles, outlined the problems that the Bush White House had in selling war to the American public. Americans, at this time, were exceedingly reluctant to fight a war that smacked of Vietnam. Moreover this particular cause (Kuwaiti liberation) seemed particularly loathesome. The royal al-Sabah family strengthened its grip on control in 1986 by dissolving the National Assembly, heavily censoring the press (while intimidating reporters through violence and threats), and forcing down the wage-base by importing cheap foreign labor that bordered on slavery.

While it’s true that Hussein had ordered the execution of 150,000 people, many of them Kurdish, US complicity became apparent. As Richard Falk wrote in a paper for the Transnational Institute shortly after Hussein’s execution:

A fuller exposure of Saddam Hussein’s crimes would have awkwardly exposed American complicity. Iraq was a strategic ally of the United States in the 1980s, the decade in which the worst excesses of Baathist rule took place, including the persecution and execution of religious leaders. It was the United States that encouraged the attack upon Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in 1980. It was the United States that supplied many of the components of the chemical weapons used against the Kurds, and then relied on its diplomatic influence to shield Baghdad from censure in the aftermath of these shocking events. And later it was the United States in 1991 that authorized the bloody crackdown of the Kurds in the North and the marsh Arabs in the South.

So while the US had plenty of mud to sling mud at Hussein, it would have difficulty doing it in such a way as to not soil itself in the process. And Kuwait seemed hardly worthy of liberation. As former Army PR officer Hal Steward described the problem in a 1990 paper for Public Relations Quarterly:

If and when a shooting war starts, reporters will begin to wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks....The US military had better get cracking to come up with a public relations plan that will supply the answer the public can accept.

According to Stauber and Rampton, hawks within the US did just that. The Rendon Group received a $100,000 per month retainer for propagandizing the Kuwaiti cause. In one instance, they hired an Iraqi student, attending school in Boston, to impersonate Hussein in a series of recordings designed to compromise Ba’ath support in Iraq. Neill & Company hauled in $50K-a-month lobbying Congressional support for an invasion of Iraq. Through former US Ambassador Sam Zakhem, Bahrain channeled $7.7 million to The Coalition for Americans at Risk and The Freedom Task force. These two astroturf organizations used the money to produce and place TV and print advertisements. They also sponsored pro-war rallies.

PR juggernaut Hill-Knowlton received $10.8 million to stoke the war fires from a group calling itself The Citizens of a Free Kuwait, a front organization for the al-Sabah family. Some of that went to the Wirthlin Group, a research subsidiary of HK, to study polling trends. Some of it went to distributing “Free Kuwait” t-shirts and bumper stickers on college campuses across the US. Some of it went into the hasty publishing of a 154-page book, The Rape of Kuwait by Jean Sasson. The firm even organized events that took on the tone of pseudo-holidays (e.g., National Free Iraq Day, National Prayer Day, and National Student Information Day).

While all of these PR activities constituted propaganda, not to mention massive deception, the pièce de résistance, consisted of an out-and-out hoax, which, more than all of the PR efforts combined, drove the US into the Desert Storm.