The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 12 (2001)

Support Our Troops: The U.S. Media andthe Narrative of the Persian Gulf War
Nobuo KAMIOKAI
On January 17, 1991, U.S. president George Bush announced the commencement of air strikes against Iraq, justifying the bombings in termsof a narrative of the good defending the weak against evil. In his statement, Bush labeled Saddam Hussein “the dictator of Iraq,” and characterized Kuwait as “a small and helpless neighbor” that had been“crushed, its people brutalized.”1 Bush dramatized events as follows:
While the world waited, Saddam Hussein systematically raped, pillaged, andplundered a tiny nation no threat to his own. He subjected the people of
Kuwait to unspeakable atrocities, and among those maimed and murdered
innocent children.

Since the entire world supported the American troops, Bush argued, theGulf War would never be “another Vietnam,” the “ﬁghting [would] not
go on for long, and . . . casualties [would] be held to an absolute minimum.”The logic that Bush employed in constructing this narrative was asclear as its purpose. Bush cast Hussein as the sole “bad guy,” a killer of
innocent children, and America as the “good guy” called upon to struggle
Copyright © 2001 Nobuo Kamioka. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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against Hussein’s evil. Some critics have inferred that in constantly referring to Hussein as “Saddam,” Bush intended to associate Hussein directly with Satan or Sodom.2 Entitled in Bush’s assessment to the support ofthe entire world, virtuous America could look forward to defeating
Saddam easily, with minimum casualties. By thus making Hussein into
an unambiguous ﬁgure of evil—and thereby contrasting the Gulf War
with the Vietnam War—Bush attempted to win support for his decision
to wage war.
Numerous critics have pointed out the falsity of Bush’s logic. Fiercest
among these critics is lawyer and human rights activist Ramsey Clark,
who accused the Bush administration of intentionally luring Iraq into thewar. According to Clark, “the U.S. government used the Kuwaiti royalfamily to provoke an Iraqi invasion that would justify a massive assault
on Iraq to establish U.S. dominion in the Gulf.”3
Though Clark may have gone too far here, other critics have agreed
that in order to justify his decision, Bush exaggerated Hussein’s aggressiveness—and speciﬁcally his assertions of atrocities against the Kuwaiti
people—on the basis of little evidence. While Hussein was expressing
willingness to negotiate a solution to the Gulf crisis, Bush was stirring
up ill feelings against him with hints that Iraq might next invade Saudi
Arabia. By reducing the question to a choice of opposing evil or not,Bush made the decision to attack Iraq seem only natural.4
Critics have also argued that the American mass media cooperated
with the U.S. government and military by accepting Bush’s logic uncritically. In most portrayals, the media employed Satanic imagery to represent Hussein, ignoring the historical and social context of the Gulfcrisis, that is, “the political economy of oil in the region, the division
between rich and poor Arab nations, and . . . complex inter-Arab relations.”5 Furthermore, by portraying American soldiers favorably, themass media reinforced a key phrase that the Bush administration had
used to rally public opinion: “support our troops.” As media critic
Douglas Rushkoff has noted, this phrase served to distract people fromthe more immediate question, “do you support this war?”6
Although TV news coverage exercises a powerful inﬂuence over public opinion—and is widely expected to be objective—close consideration of the media during the Persian Gulf War demonstrates thecontingency of the media’s purported fairness. In this essay, a survey ofsecondary sources will provide an overview of contemporary criticism
of media bias during the Gulf War, and direct examination of major net-

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work coverage of the war will yield an assessment of media sympathy
for the American government and troops. Through their news coverageand programming, the major U.S. TV networks aided the U.S. militaryand government in creating a consensus among Americans to support
the war; this essay will reveal the nature, agency, and function of the narrative that was constructed to achieve this aim.
II
Much has been written on American media coverage of the Persian
Gulf War, and most media critics have indicated how biased they foundmass media coverage of the war to have been. Relying mainly on
Douglas Kellner’s The Persian Gulf TV War and essays in Seeing
Through the Media (eds. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz), the following survey pulls together varied examples of coverage that critics
have cited in an effort to characterize media response to the war in general.
First, as mentioned above, the mass media joined in propagating satanic or otherwise negative imagery of Hussein. A number of media outlets
used the phrase “the rape of Kuwait”7 and described Hussein as a brutal
savage cruelly torturing the Kuwaiti people. Among the phrases that themedia employed to refer to Hussein were “one of the world’s most dangerous men,” “the Butcher of Baghdad,” “a madman who wants to rule
the Middle East,” “delusional,” “doomed,” “godfather of terrorists,”“keeper of hostages,” and “scourge of the Kurds.”8 One tabloid paperfeatured an article titled “Hussein’s Bizarre Sex Life” that included animage of Hussein as a crossdresser in a mini skirt.9
Hussein was furthermore frequently compared to Hitler. He wasreferred to as “the Hitler of the 1990s,” and The New Republic airbrushed
a photo of Hussein to transform his mustache into one like Hitler’s.10
When Iraqi Scuds hit Tel Aviv, it was rumored that Iraqi missiles had
carried nerve gas (they had not), and footage of Israeli children putting
on gas masks was widely broadcast; this rumor clearly fueled Holocaust
comparisons, reinforcing Hussein’s identiﬁcation with Hitler.11
With regard to Hussein’s minions, Iraqi soldiers were described as“devils.” Rumors that Iraqi soldiers were raping captive female American soldiers and Kuwaitis were circulated through unsubstantiatedarticles.12 The media also circulated a rumor that Iraqi soldiers removed
ﬁfteen Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die on the ﬂoor

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NOBUO KAMIOKAof the hospital, a rumor that was later revealed to have been forged by
the public relations ﬁrm of Hill and Knowlton, the president of which
had been Bush’s former chief of staff.13
The cumulative image evoked by these news stories was this: swarthy
rapists were attacking helpless women and children, and Americans were
honor-bound to save them. Prejudice toward Arabs and Muslims was
implicit in this image; Iraqis were reduced to “Arab terrorists”, “Muslim
extremists”, and “generic enemies of America’s troubled past.”14 In
keeping with this image, a number of reports emphasized the backwardness of Arab societies in general and the oppression of Arab womenin particular.15
Such reports furthermore spoke to another common theme of themedia coverage that Americans were morally superior and went to
Kuwait as civilized liberators. Videos were repeatedly broadcast of laserguided bombs dropping with pinpoint accuracy on their assigned military targets, apparently without killing human beings. The constantairing of such demonstrations of technological superiority reinforced themessage of moral superiority, while diminishing the reality that U.S.
weapons, not all of which were necessarily “smart,” killed great numbers of Iraqis, including civilians.16
Against the backdrop of this American good guy vs. Iraqi bad guy
narrative, the mass news media sharply contrasted the Gulf War with
Vietnam, superimposing instead more “patriotic” images of wars past.
Newscasts repeatedly showed footage of American soldiers leaving theirfamilies, as well as interviews with family members that stressed thefamilies’ concern for their soldiers. Such stories obviously worked to
evoke viewer sympathy, and thus emotional identiﬁcation with the families’ positions. According to one study, the TV networks spent moretime on these “family support stories” than on any other kind of warrelated news story by a ratio of almost two to one.17 With coverage thatin contrast ignored or marginalized the anti-war movement,18 theAmerican news media created the impression that Americans were united in their support for the war.
American popular culture contributed to this impression. TV talkshows featured programs on the families of soldiers, and these programs
predictably lingered on family members’ emotional remarks about thesoldiers, thus evoking a sense of the importance of supporting these soldiers, and by implication the war effort. Anti-war statements were occasionally allowed, but these were invariably rebuffed in emotional terms

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by other guests, who regarded such sentiments as undermining both thesoldiers and the families who bore the hardship.19
In the Super Bowl telecast of January 27, 1991, images of Whitney
Houston singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” were crosscut “with amontage of U.S. ﬂags and athletic-looking, young male representativesof U.S. combat units.” At half-time, a live-satellite feed delivered interviews of U.S. soldiers gathered to watch the game at Saudi Arabianbases. After the interviews, two thousand sons and daughters of Persian
Gulf military personnel marched onto the ﬁeld, wearing yellow ribbons
and small U.S. ﬂags, and thus, as Lauren Rabinovitz observes, “families
broken by the war were made whole by the television apparatus.”20
America’s preeminent athletic competition was thus transformed into apatriotic display to boost American troop morale and public support for
the war effort.
Elsewhere in pop culture, the situation comedy Major Dad aired a special episode dealing with the Gulf War on February 4, 1991, just after
the opening of the war. This program usually sought humor in the twomain characters’ political differences—the wife’s liberalism vs. the husband’s militarism. However, in this special episode the husband seeks
his wife’s approval of his decision to go to the Persian Gulf, explaining
to her that he has “two families,” a private family and an ofﬁcial family. His point is that it is his duty to ﬁght for his ofﬁcial family, the U.S.
army, and ultimately his wife recognizes that to protect the private family, she has no choice but to support his decision. The episode evoked
an emotional sense of soldiers as members of one big national family,
America, and that support for this family should transcend any differences in political views.21
The tabloid press also lent its support to the war effort with numerous
articles on TV and movie stars’ responses to the war; in general, warsupporting celebrities were treated favorably while those who expressedanti-war sentiments were castigated. After actor Woody Harrelson participated in an anti-war meeting, for example, one tabloid featured anarticle headlined “Baghdad Woody” that described how Harrelson was“under furious attack from the outraged members of the cast and crew.”
Another tabloid featured an article on Jane Fonda—dubbed “Hanoi Jane”
during the Vietnam era for her anti-war activism—which centered on thematurity that she demonstrated in supporting the American war effort
this time around.22
One reason for the widespread failure of the mass media to exercise

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objectivity in its treatment of the war was the enforcement of strict news
censorship. The military developed a “pool system” for the Gulf War
whereby they provided information to the press exclusively through ofﬁcial brieﬁngs, rather than allowing reporters to collect news material on
their own. All photos and articles were censored, access to soldiers wascontrolled, and reporters had no option but to rely on ofﬁcial militarypress releases. Furthermore, as the military withheld information fromthose who provided negative coverage, reporters were under constantpressure to treat the American war effort favorably to maintain access.
Discouraged from broadcasting photos of dead bodies, the networks
repeatedly televised footage of missiles dropping on military targets, creating an impression of a clean, video game-like techno-war that was
devoid of human suffering and death.
Needless to say, the American military developed this “pool system”
of censorship in reaction to their failure to control events during theVietnam War. In the Vietnam era, reporters were allowed to accompany American platoons, reporting freely on the most horriﬁc aspects of
the war. They photographed dead bodies, reported on the American soldiers’ poor morale, and even publicized atrocities against the Vietnamese
people (including women and children). Such reportage, of course,
fueled the anti-war fervor at home.
To prevent the Gulf War from becoming “another Vietnam,” the military emphasized control of information and command of media cooperation. The “pool system” succeeded in focusing the media on thearmy’s successful attacks on enemy weapons rather than on Iraqi people, and thereby helped win near unanimous support from the American
people. The media thus contributed greatly to the American “triumph,”a victory said to have “exorcised the ghosts of Vietnam.”23
Douglas Kellner points out another reason for media cooperation withthe military: “interlocking connections between the military and television networks.” To cite one example of such connections, General Electric, which owns NBC, manufactured many of the weapons that the U.S.
military used during the Gulf War, including the Patriot and Tomahawk
Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, and the B-52 bomber. In Kellner’s
words, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television
praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment
made by GE, the corporation that pays their salary.”24 As the other major
networks also have ties to the military-industrial complex, similar con-

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clusions can be drawn on their tendencies to avoid unfavorable coverage of the military.
Daniel C. Hallin ﬁnds another reason for the media’s support for the
war in the business climate of the U.S. television industry. Television
had become “far more competitive than it was in the early days of theVietnam War,” and because “news divisions [were] under much greaterpressure to produce high audience ratings,” they tended “to give audiences what they [were] assumed to want, to play to strong popular sentiments.” Hallin regards this as one of the reasons for “television’s
intense patriotism during the Persian Gulf War.”25
As the issues surveyed above demonstrate, the U.S. government,
military, and mass media cooperated in conducting a public campaign
in support of the war, and indeed the American people responded withsympathy for the soldiers and approval of the war effort. An ABC/
Washington Post poll, taken hours after the war began, showed that 76
percent of Americans approved of the war effort, while 22 percent disapproved.26 According to another poll conducted on the eve of the war,
58 percent of women and 82 percent of men supported the war. After
U.S. bombs began falling on Baghdad, approval ratings rose overall to
71 percent of women and 81 percent of men.27 These polls clearly reﬂect
the efﬁcacy of the media campaign in inﬂuencing the American people,
including women. There follows a discussion of the speciﬁc contribution of major network TV news coverage to this campaign.
III
Although primary sources of Gulf War TV news coverage are nolonger readily available, a number of videos were released immediately
after the war that consist largely of footage and reportage drawn directly from news shows broadcast during the war period. These videos provide good evidence of how TV news coverage represented the war. A
close analysis of these videos will reveal the nature and means of theinﬂuence that the major television networks exercised over viewer
responses to the war.
In a ﬁne essay contributed to Seeing Through Media,28 Michelle
Kendrick observes how in their videos on the war, CNN and CBS emphasized the differences between the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Using
the Vietnam War “as a secondary, embedded narrative,” and represent-

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ing the Vietnam War as chaotic and nonlinear, CNN and CBS presented the Gulf War as, in contrast, a coherent narrative culminating in
American victory. Overall, Kendrick argues, the networks strove to“kick the Vietnam syndrome” and restore American pride.
Expanding the discussion to encompass other videos, additional noteworthy issues emerge. Of particular interest are images of “family”
invoked in the videos, that is, the portrayal of soldiers (including General
Schwarzkopf) not only as heroes but also as family members. The treatment of female soldiers in the videos, as well as the enshrinement of the
Gulf War as one of the great conﬂicts of American history, also bear consideration.
As might be inferred from its title, CBS’s three-videocassette collection Desert Triumph sings the praises of American victory in no uncertain terms.29 The series begins with CBS news anchor Dan Rather
intoning, “by February 28, 1991, it was over,” as images of the desert,
the wreckage of a tank, and abandoned boots play across the screen. Thus
at its outset the CBS video gives the impression that the war had been
decisively concluded and American troops withdrawn by that time. As
Kendrick points out, this impression conceals “the fact that the biggest
battle took place well after the cease-ﬁre.”30 Moreover, insofar as
Hussein remained president after the war “concluded,” America’s “triumph” was anything but clear-cut. However, by foregrounding the closure of the war and emphasizing the success of the American effort, theCBS video succeeds in implying that the Gulf War was distinctly different from the war in Vietnam.
The CBS video continues with an explanation of the causes of the conﬂict. According to Rather’s narration, the war was waged “not so muchagainst a nation as against a single person.” That person, of course, was
Saddam Hussein, who boasted that “if he was challenged, the American
soldiers would drown in their own blood.” Hussein was characterized as
the “unelected president of Iraq” who “had risen to power using murder
and terror to destroy his opposition and control his people.” Through his
unrestrained ambition to rule the entire region, he had prosecuted “a horrible eight-year conﬂict” with Iran, in which “a million people died.”
After failing to control Iran, Hussein found another victim—the tiny
kingdom of Kuwait. The narration continues in this vein, tracing the storyof the war chronologically from the dispatch of American troops to theMiddle East to the opening of the war. All blame is attributed to Hussein
and the historical and social context of the war is largely ignored, inSUPPORT OUR TROOPS

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accord with the ofﬁcial narrative promoted by the U.S. government andmilitary.
In the course of the narration, mention is also made of anti-war peacedemonstrators, but they are quickly dismissed as unimportant: “theirprotests never shook the nation like they had during the Vietnam conﬂict.” What the video does ﬁnd important is the superiority of the weapons, soldiers, and command system of the Gulf War relative to those of
the Vietnam War; the video largely revolves around the boasts of retired
army ofﬁcers in the roles of analysts.
In contrasting the Vietnam and Gulf wars, one retired Marine Corps
general representative of these analysts asserts that the soldiers of theVietnam War were “an army of draftees, an army taken off the streets ofghettos,” while the soldiers of the Gulf War are “a true professional’sarmy,” whose “ofﬁcers were graduates of school after school after
school.” As Kendrick points out, this remark contains a racial bias,
implying that “the Vietnam War was fought primarily by people of color
who lacked commitment, education, and dedication.”31 Another point
worthy of note here is that as a retired general, this analyst repeatedlyrefers to the army and the soldiers as “we,” a perspective which works
to encourage viewers to identify with them.
The CBS video also devotes a great deal of attention to the history of
weaponry from the world wars and Vietnam through the Gulf War. The
angle here is obviously to demonstrate the superiority of the weapons of
the Gulf War over those of the Vietnam War. Emphasizing the “pinpoint
accuracy” of smart bombs that strike nothing but military targets, thevideo claims that the American military kept civilian casualties in the
Gulf to the minimum. This point is driven home by contrasting footage
of indiscriminate bombing that resulted in high civilian casualties in pastwars. Beyond smart bombs, the CBS video presents each high-tech
American weapon in detail, demonstrating the superiority of theAmerican army, and implying how misguided “primitive” Hussein had
been in believing that he could defeat America.
A key aspect of the CBS video that Kendrick does not address is theportrayal of soldiers not only as heroes but also as family members. Since
the Gulf War was the ﬁrst in which female soldiers went to battle for
America, the network availed itself of the opportunity to craft an imageof the entire American family—male and female alike—joining forces
to vanquish evil. The CBS video features footage of mother-soldiers taking leave of their crying children, mother-soldiers in tears hugging their74

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children, and a child reading a letter from her mother in the Persian Gulf.
Such footage clearly aimed to elicit viewer—particularly female viewer—sympathy for the American troops. A military analyst is also presented observing that the female soldiers “proved to be as courageousand hard-working” as male soldiers, an impression that must also haveappealed to the pride of female viewers.
The father ﬁgure in this family drama was General Norman
Schwarzkopf, who expressed “enormous concern for the welfare” of hissoldiers. The CBS video features footage of Schwarzkopf strollingaround a military base and trading jokes with the soldiers, as if to demonstrate the unity of the great American family—parents and children
together—in its ﬁght against evil.
Evil, in this case, is of course represented by Saddam Hussein, presented in the CBS video in his role as “ecological terrorist.” The video
contains widely disseminated footage of oil spilling into the Persian Gulf
and a cormorant covered with oil. When ﬁrst distributed, this footage—
which attributed blame for the oil spill to Iraq—incited sensational anger
toward Hussein and support for the American troops around the world.
This footage furthermore contributed to winning approval of the war
from environmentalists, who had previously voiced opposition. However, it was subsequently revealed in a Japanese press report that this oil
spill originated in Saudi Arabia.32 In the post-war CBS video, Dan Rather
nevertheless asserts without qualiﬁcation that Iraq caused the spill bysabotaging the Kuwait Sea Island terminal, and adds that “nature itself
became another casualty of Saddam Hussein.” Throughout the CBS
video, large-scale destruction of the environment in the Gulf is repeatedly attributed to Hussein’s “holy war.”In general, the CBS video constructs its narrative of a nature-loving,peaceable America defeating the satanic dictator in perfect harmony withthe ofﬁcial narrative promoted by the U.S. government and military. The
extent to which this video (and the CBS news coverage it contains) conforms to this ofﬁcial narrative becomes even clearer in the video’s treatment of General Shwarzkopf’s climactic ﬁnal brieﬁng. In short, the video
presents Shwarzkopf’s brieﬁng without any critical commentary whatsoever, and thus adopts as its own Shwarzkopf’s narrative—that every
American operation was a success, that Hussein is a cruel but primitive
dictator, that Iraqi soldiers committed “unspeakable atrocities,” and thatthe number of American casualties was miraculously small.
The video ends with Bush’s declaration of victory and footage of

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American soldiers coming home. Shwarzkopf addresses the soldiers as
they prepare to leave the Gulf, saying “the world is proud of you . . . God
bless you, and God bless America.” The soldiers return to America, theirfamilies meet them with American ﬂags in hand, and hug them amid
tears of joy. This footage is accompanied by the patriotic tune “WhenJohnny Comes Marching Home,” a song that was originally composedto celebrate the return of Union Army soldiers after the Civil War, andthat has been sung in every American war since. Thus in conclusion thevideo enshrines the Gulf War and its soldiers as equivalent in greatness
to every other American war and army. The ending of the CBS video isclearly designed to make every American feel proud to be American.
The basic narrative presented in the ABC video Saddam Hussein vs.
the Coalition is essentially same.33 Here too a great deal of attention isdevoted to explanations of U.S. military strategy and weaponry, withmilitary analysts boasting of America’s technological superiority relative to Iraq, and of the high quality of U.S. soldiers and ofﬁcers relative
to the Vietnam-era military. Like the CBS video, Saddam Hussein vs.
the Coalition also pronounces the legacy of Vietnam to have been overcome, declaring that through the Gulf War America has rid “itself of theghosts that have haunted it for a quarter of a century.” Focusing on the
Vietnam War connection, the ABC video offers footage of GeneralWestmoreland, the Chief of General Staff during the Vietnam War era,with the comment that “there was a widening gap between what was said
and what happened.” The video then cuts to Generals Powell and
Schwarzkopf and the narrator’s proudly delivered comment that “thistime there was no credibility gap,” and therefore “everything seemed towork.”
What is interesting about ABC’s response to the war is that they produced a video speciﬁcally intended for children. Originally broadcast on
January 26, 1991, War in the Gulf: Answering Children’s Questions is
a live call-in program in which ABC news anchor Peter Jennings ﬁelds
questions about the Gulf War from American children.34 Predictably
enough, in order to justify the American war effort in the most easily
comprehended terms, this video simpliﬁes the good-guy vs. bad-guy narrative even further than the adult version. When a child asks, for example, “can Saddam Hussein bomb us in the United States?” Jennings
immediately replies “no way,” and before explaining how far Iraq is fromthe United States, adds that “Saddam Hussein did a lot of bad things, but
he cannot bomb us in the United States.”

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In like manner, the ABC video for children continually directs attention to Hussein’s perﬁdy. When a child asks about the oil spill in the
Persian Gulf, the footage of cormorants covered with oil is shown, anda correspondent in Saudi Arabia takes the American perspective that
although “no one is quite sure,” it is likely that Hussein “purposely
dumped the oil into the Persian Gulf . . . to prevent the Marines from easily traveling over the water,” or “to set the oil on ﬁre to create a problem.” Jennings asks, “are we trying to ﬁght Saddam Hussein or Iraq?”
and answers his own question to the effect that Hussein is a dictator, so
Iraqis have no choice but to obey him. Jennings goes on to suggest that
Hussein might use chemical weapons, and an expert appears to explain
how dangerous these weapons are. Demonstrating to viewers how dangerous Hussein is, the ABC video justiﬁes the decision to ﬁght him to
American children.
Rounding out the emotional import of this video, taped interviews areincluded of children who have parents serving in the Gulf. The children
naturally say that they miss their parents and hope for their safe return,thus eliciting viewer sympathy not only for the children but for theAmerican troops as well. Jennings concludes by admonishing children
not to hate innocent Iraqis involved in the war, but he allows that children might have “good reason to hate Saddam Hussein.” The ABC video
ends with this comment, concentrating children’s hatred on Hussein.
CNN produced a six-videocassette collection entitled War in the Gulf
with themes similar to those of the videos discussed above.35 As in the
CBS and ABC videos, the CNN collection portrays Hussein as a bad
guy, focuses attention on Iraqi atrocities, and elicits sympathy for theAmerican troops. Hussein is accused of dumping oil into the gulf, as well
as of setting oil wells aﬁre. American and Iraqi weapons are compared,
with emphasis on how “inaccurate” the Iraqi Scud missiles were;
America’s technologically superiority is asserted with pride.
Also as in the CBS and ABC videos, the CNN collection invites viewers to empathize with soldiers and their families by means of footage ofthe daily lives of soldiers in the ﬁeld and interviews with their families
in the United States. An interview with a female soldier who was subsequently killed in action naturally evokes sympathy, particularly fromfemale viewers. Soldiers returning home are represented sentimentally,
hugging their families amid tears, and as in the CBS video, “WhenJohnny Comes Marching Home” is featured as accompanying music.
Also as in the other network’s videos, the CNN collection devotes con-

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siderable attention to differences between the Gulf War and the Vietnam
War. Similar conclusions are drawn: where the Vietnam War was shapedby confusion in the command system and weapons that did not matchthe terrain, everything worked well in the Gulf.
Despite the similarities, several points distinguish the CNN videos
from those of ABC and CBS. First, CNN was the only network to keep
its reporters in Baghdad during the air strikes, and when the bombing
began three CNN reporters in a hotel in Baghdad provided live coverage of what they saw. One video in the CNN collection, entitled The Air
War, features interviews with these reporters as well as footage fromtheir live broadcasts, footage that still conveys the excitement thesebroadcasts must have conveyed, as well as a sense of concern that viewers must have felt for those reporters’ lives. Mimi White points out that
although it was American missiles causing the danger, the CNN reporters
were perceived as heroes resisting the enemy, Iraq. The broadcasts thus
worked to elicit viewer empathy for the reporters consonant with theirempathy for American soldiers. White also points out that the live broadcasts from Baghdad were used by the Pentagon to demonstrate to the
public how accurate and successful their bombings were.36 On all of thesepoints, the CNN live broadcasts clearly worked in the interests of the
U.S. government and military.
Another distinguishing feature of the CNN collection is the level ofattention devoted to General Norman Schwarzkopf, including one video,
entitled The General, dedicated to him exclusively. The General begins
with interviews of those who have known Schwarzkopf singing his praises; classmates from West Point and ofﬁcers who have worked with him
offer such comments as “Norm is this generation’s Doug MacArthur”;“he’s a good guy to go to war with because he’s a good solid commander”; “he’s a superb strategist, a brilliant tactician”; and “he’s a ﬁghter’sﬁghter.” CNN anchor Bernard Shaw then appears on screen, remarking
by way of introduction that Schwarzkopf is now added to the “gallery ofgreat generals” that also includes Washington, Jackson, Grant, Patton,
Eisenhower, and MacArthur.
The video goes on to proﬁle Schwarzkopf’s life from his birth to theGulf War, admiring him not only for his leadership and military insight,
but also for being a good family man, an opera and ballet fan, and a ﬂuent speaker of French and German. Overall, this proﬁle constructs animage of a man who is competent, friendly, and trustworthy—in shortthe ideal American father.

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The next segment of The General consists mainly of Schwarzkopf
interviews and ofﬁcial brieﬁngs, including the same ﬁnal brieﬁng featured in the CBS video. Since here as in the CBS video this brieﬁng ispresented without critical comment, the same analysis applies: the CNN
video adopts Shwarzkopf’s narrative as its own, and in so doing helps topropagate the ofﬁcial military and government line.
The last segment of the video shows Shwarzkopf returning to America
to the welcome of “admiring fans” and the embrace of his wife and threechildren; the American father has come home to his family. The video
concludes with Shwarzkopf’s homecoming address to a joint session ofCongress on May 8, 1991. The general is enthusiastically received bycongressmen—“accorded a hero’s welcome seldom seen on Capitol
Hill,” in the words of The New York Times.37 Shwarzkopf’s address
begins with thanks to the Congress, thanks to the soldiers for their “dedicated service,” and an assertion of army solidarity extending beyond
race, religion, and gender: “when our blood was shed in the desert, it
didn’t separate by race.” Shwarzkopf then relates the Gulf War to thewar in Vietnam: “we feel a particular pride in joining ranks with that special group who served their country in the mountains, jungles and deltasof Vietnam.” He continues with a comment clearly intended to ease thepain of Vietnam era soldiers (and of America itself): “they served justas proudly as we served in the Middle East.” By thus admiring the soldiers of the Vietnam War and equating them with those of the Gulf War,Schwarzkopf places the theme of Vietnam closure at the center of theofﬁcial Gulf War narrative. The General ends showing members ofcongress shaking Schwarzkopf’s hand and sending him off with a standing ovation.
As close examination of the CBS, ABC, and CNN videos has demonstrated, the major U.S. TV networks cooperated in propagating the ofﬁcial U.S. government and military narrative of the Gulf War. All offereduncritical admiration of the American victory, and all offered idealized
images of American solidarity. Portraying soldiers as members of an
American national family—with a special emphasis on sentimentalizing
female soldiers—the networks all sought to elicit empathy from bothmale and female viewers. Finally, by simultaneously stressing differences between the Gulf War and the Vietnam War and admiring the heroism of American soldiers of all wars, the networks sought to exorcise theghosts of Vietnam. Thus did the U.S. military, government, and mass

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media join forces to accomplish a shared national goal: recovering the
conﬁdence that America had lost through the Vietnam War.
IV
As we have seen, the narrative of the Gulf War was constructed to cure
Americans of the pain they had suffered in losing the Vietnam War. Thisnarrative was intended to restore American conﬁdence and reunite a people who were divided over lingering Vietnam War issues. Perhaps themost signiﬁcant goal of this narrative was to convince the majority ofAmericans to once again believe that the United States was and had
always been on the side of right. The U.S. had been right to interfere in
Vietnam; the only mistake—rectiﬁed in the Gulf—had been to lose. The
right to make war lay in winning, and in doing so with minimum casualties. This is the narrative that the U.S. government and military wanted the American people to accept, and the majority seems to have done
so through the agency of this ofﬁcial narrative.
The mass media contributed greatly to the construction and deliveryof this narrative. Major TV network news coverage was clearly biased
in favor of the war, and by both attributing all blame for the conﬂict toHussein and representing America as morally and technologically superior, the networks put viewers—as war-supporting Americans—on theside of right. By portraying soldiers as family members, the networks
evoked sympathy for the war effort that made viewers uncritical and thatencouraged viewers to pray for and later praise the American victory.
Thus did the major network news coverage function effectively in propagating the ofﬁcial narrative of the war.
In 1992, President George Bush accused Democratic presidential
candidate Bill Clinton of seeking to escape military service in the
Vietnam War. As Bush characterized it, Clinton had protested theVietnam War in the 1960s, then ﬂed to Europe to evade the draft. Bush’s
attack, however, found little traction with the American public, and ultimately Bush lost to Clinton. The draft issue most likely did not resonate
with the majority of Americans because it was outdated; by means of the
Gulf War America had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” America had
always been on the side of right, and was entitled to make war if it could
win; the Vietnam War had been a historical aberration because America
had lost, so having protested it was acceptable. As Bush himself had

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propagated this narrative in prosecuting the Gulf War, his attacks on
Clinton’s resistance to the Vietnam era failed to convince.
Beneﬁting once again from Bush’s narrative, President Clinton—aformer draft evader—ordered the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and
met with little public resistance. It seems to demonstrate how ﬁrmly theAmerican narrative of the Persian Gulf War had been entrenched.
NOTES
1

Quotations from Bush’s statement are from “Transcript of the Comments by Bushon the Air Strikes Against the Iraqis,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 1991.
2
Ella Shohat, “The Media’s War,” in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf
War, eds. Susan Jeffords & Lauren Rabinovitz (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1994), 149; Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder: Westview Press,
1992), 66.
3
Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf (New York:Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), 3. Clark further asserts:“It was not Iraq but powerfulforces in the United States that wanted a new war in the Middle East: the Pentagon, tomaintain its tremendous budget; the military-industrial complex, with its dependence on
Middle East arms sales and domestic military contracts; the oil companies, which wanted more control over the price of crude oil and greater proﬁts; and the Bush administration, which saw in the Soviet Union’s disintegration its chance to establish apermanent military presence in the Middle East, securing the region and achieving vastgeopolitical power into the next century through control of its oil resources” (12).
4
Cf. Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, 24.
5
Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, 92. See also Chapter 7 “The Role of the American
Media in the Gulf Crisis” in Clark, The Fire This Time.
6
Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1994), 23.
7
Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, 71; Ella Shohat, “The Media’s War,” 153;
Therese Saliba, “Military Presences and Absences: Arab Women and the Persian Gulf
War” in Seeing Through the Media, eds. Jeffords & Rabinovitz, 271.
8
Masami Asano, Eigo Media ni Miru Hyougen to Ronri [Expressions and Logic in
the English Media] (Tokyo: Kenkyu-sha, 1992), 14–15.
9Shohat, “The Media’s War,” 148.
10Lauren Rabinovitz & Susan Jeffords, “Introduction,” in Seeing Through the Media,
eds. Jeffords & Rabinovitz, 12; Shohat, “The Media’s War,” 149.
11
Victor J. Caldarola, “Time and the Television War,” in Seeing Through the Media,
eds. Jeffords & Rabinovitz, 101–02.
12
Shohat, “The Media’s War,” 153.
13
Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, 67–68.
14
Caldarola, “Time and the Television War,” 104.
15
Cynthia Enloe, “The Gendered Gulf,” in Seeing Through the Media, eds. Jeffords& Rabinovitz, 217; Saliba, “Military Presences and Absences,” 263.
16
For instance, see Caldarola, “Time and the Television War,” 103:“Indications of thetrue destructive consequences of the conﬂict received little attention until after the war
ended, and were thus removed from the real-time loop of war-related imagery. Amongthese postscripts was a U.S. Air Force revelation on March 15 that precision-guided

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bombs made up only seven percent of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq andoccupied Kuwait during 43 days of war, and that the remaining “dumb” bombs managed to hit their assigned targets only twenty-ﬁve percent of the time. As for Iraqi deadand wounded, post-war estimates ranged from the tens of thousands to more than a hundred thousand people, not including the estimated 170,000 Iraqi children who were
expected to die from malnutrition and gastrointestinal infections within a year of the
war’s conclusion.”
17
Dana L. Cloud, “Operation Desert Comfort,” in Seeing Through the Media, eds.
Jeffords & Rabinovitz, 161.
18
Ramsey Clark reveals how his anti-war remarks were always interrupted on TV, andhis taped ﬁlm of Iraq badly damaged by the American military was refused by TV networks. See Chapter 7 “The Role of the American Media in the Gulf Crisis” in Clark,
The Fire This Time.
19
Lauren Rabinovitz, “Soap Opera Woes: Genre, Gender, and the Persian Gulf War,”in Seeing Through the Media, eds. Jeffords & Rabinovitz, 190–01.
20
Rabinovitz, “Soap Opera Woes,” 194–95.
21
Rabinovitz, “Soap Opera Woes,” 199.
22
Leonard Rifas, “Supermarket Tabloids and Persian Gulf War Dissent,” in Seeing
Through the Media, eds. Jeffords & Rabinovitz, 232–34.
23
Daniel Hallin, “Images of the Vietnam and the Persian Gulf Wars in U.S.
Television,” in Seeing Through the Media, eds. Jeffords & Rabinovitz, 52.
24
Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, 59–60.
25
Hallin, “Images of the Vietnam and the Persian Gulf Wars in U.S. Television,” 53.
26
Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, 132.
27
Enloe, “The Gendered Gulf,” 219
28
Michelle Kendrick, “Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome: CNN’s and CBS’s Video
Narratives of the Persian Gulf War” in Seeing Through the Media, eds. Jeffords &Rabinovitz, 59–76.
29
Desert Triumph, prod. Joel Heller, CBS Video, 1991.
30
Kendrick, “Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome,” 75.
31
Kendrick, “Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome,” 7132
Asahi Shimbun Shakaibu, Media no Wangan Sensou [The Media’s Gulf War]
(Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1991), 120–22. Ramsey Clark also attributes this oil spill
to U.S. bombing on Iraqi oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. See Clark, The Fire This Time,
100.
33
Saddam Hussein vs. the Coalition: Behind the Military Strategies, ABC News, MPI
Home Video, 1991.
34
War in the Gulf: Answering Children’s Questions, ABC News, MPI Home Video,
1991.
35
War in the Gulf, Cable News Network, CNN Video, 1991. The six tapes are respectively entitled “The Conﬂict Begins,” “The Air War,” “The Ground War,” “TheAftermath,” “Saddam,” and “The General.”36
Mimi White, “Site Unseen: An Analysis of CNN’s War in the Gulf,” in Seeing
Through the Media, eds. Jeffords & Rabinovitz, 133.
37
“Congress Members Hail Schwarzkopf: Homecoming Address Brings Loud
Standing Ovations in Crowded Chamber,” New York Times, May 9, 1991.