Ted Turner put Hearst to shame as a master war propagandist. He had the American public enjoying and applauding the sanitized carnage. Indeed the most disturbing memory of the war, was how a large majority of Americans enjoyed it. CNN can sugar coat anything, even the bombing of civilian shelters. Ask a Palestinian or a Kurd about how the USA responds to complaints of gross violations of their rights as human beings.
Human rights are yet another issue that American governments have never been really for or against.
Middle Eastern people are viewed by the cynics at the State Department as nothing but incidental props on some giant Risk board that floats on oil. Their rights or legitimate aspirations are rarely a consideration in the formulation of policy. Neither can it be clearly demonstrated that the Gulf War was only about oil. The 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iran also jeopardized the world s oil supply. No one considered an arms embargo to stop the bloodshed that cost an estimated million Iraqi and Iranian lives.