Truth is not only the first casualty of war: it is put through a thousand agonies at the hands of propagan- dists. And no lie goes down as well as a really big lie.
So we should not be too surprised that the screeching headlines about Saddam's al- leged 'environmental terrorism' following the major oil leakage in Kuwait turned out to be an elaborate fabrication, and a fair- ly effective ploy to win naive *green" elements away from the anti-war movement.
Far from Saddam having tumed on the pumps to create the huge oil slick polluting the Gulf, the Observer revealed on January 27 that the leak was the result of an American bombing strike against the Kuwaiti ter- minal - and that in the process, the US planes damaged a British
submarine hiding beneath one tanker, and nearly killed agents of the Special Boat Squadron swimming on a secret operation underwater!
For many who have closed their minds to the human tragedy being caused by the massive allied bombing of Iraqi cities and military targets, the emotive pictures of cormorants and other wild life in the Gulf caught up in the oil slick was able to stir up anger and hostilly against the alleged culprit - Sad- dam.
As the actual perpetrators of the disaster, and with much of Vietnam still suffering the prolonged ecological dislocation from the systematic and deliberate US raids to defoliate its forests, it ill-behoves anyone in the State Department to denounce anyone else for "en- vironmental terrorism".
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NO
GULF
WAR
OUI UF THE GULF
Media lles attempt to confuse activists
In fact the war - and the oil slick, possibly even bigger than the many already created by US oil corporations around the globe - does threaten long-last- ing environmental damage to the Gulf, which has already suffered the consequences of the Iran- Irag war. As a relatively shal- low, closed sea, the Gulf is espe- cially vulnerable to pollution.
How cynical, therefore, of
frastructure of the very country they are supposed to be liberat- ing! The US forces are clearly sticking to the letter of the state- ment by the Kuwaiti royal fami- ly who insisted - from the seclusion of a luxury hotel thousands of miles from the fighting - they would be happy to see their country reduced to rubble, so long as Saddam is driven out and they can take
the US forces to bomb Kuwaiti oil installations - part of the in
I over again.
John Harris NUJ
War