A Look From the Right Back at the Gulf War (1990 – 1991)

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Arabic version here

“Regrettably ladies and gentlemen, I heard nothing today, in over six hours, I heard nothing that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility whatsoever in complying with the United Nations’ Security Council resolutions.[1]”

—Secretary of State James Baker, January 9, 1991

“There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”[2]

—Pat Buchanan, August 26, 1990

Although the Gulf War only lasted a few months, its impact was enormous and continues to be felt. Now that nearly three decades have passed since its end, one can look back upon the conflict with a deeper appreciation.

A Gift from Mars

From the perspective of the US Military, the Gulf War was a divine gift from the god Mars. The US Military emerged from the disasters of the Vietnam War and the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran determined to reform. The US Government ended the draft, the military selected better recruits, and the US Army focused its acquisition processes on “the big five”[3] equipment programs. The “big five” were all carefully designed to overpower Soviet technology based on lessons learned in battles fought by the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, and on lessons learned by the Israelis and others fighting the Soviet-equipped Arabs or other Soviet-equipped armies. The US Army’s fighting doctrine, called the AirLand Battle, was taught to every soldier, and the military’s training was intense, realistic, and effective. During the Gulf War, the Iraqi Army was facing an American force that was tailor-made to destroy them.

From the perspective of Western Civilization and the savage, backwards Arab monarchies of the Gulf States, the Gulf War also had the appearance of moral clarity. Saddam Hussein appeared to be another “Hitler” aggressively invading his neighbors.

Additionally, Saddam Hussein launched his invasion at a time when he couldn’t play the USA against the USSR. While the Soviet Union hadn’t yet imploded, the Cold War was rapidly winding down. Europe hadn’t been as peaceful and united since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Saddam’s 1990 gamble to end Kuwait’s loan sharking and slant drilling turned out, for Iraq, to be an ill-timed, reckless adventure.

A Few Warnings

During the Gulf War, the American public overwhelmingly supported the conflict. One could buy Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm T-shirts from Walmart. To add to the intensity, CNN added the dot, dot, dot, dash “V” for victory drum beat to its intro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG5j2gWg94c), making 24-Hour News mimic the musical themes in the 1962 movie, The Longest Day.

While the public supported the war, there was a tiny fissure within the American mainstream Conservative movement, then in power in the White House. On the one hand were gentiles such as Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Pat Buchanan, who were circumspect about involvement in the conflict. Robert Novak, a “self-hating Jew”[4] and convert to Christianity, was also cautious.[5] On the other hand, Jews in the Neoconservative movement – the movement itself is only a Jewish movement,[6] there is nothing “conservative” about it – supported a policy, back in 1990, of removing Saddam Hussein even before the shooting war in the Gulf started. The New York Times reports on two Jews endorsing full overthrow:

Columnists William Safire and A. M. Rosenthal.[7]

After the conflict there were Victory Parades, accolades, and documentaries about the modern “firepower” that worked so well in the desert. It all seemed so easy. But the fissure between pro-war and anti-intervention in the GOP would continue to grow. Jewish activists built on the lingering effects of Gulf War propaganda on the American Public to use the US Military to further the aims of Israel in the Mid-East.[8] Unfortunately, for America, those aware of the Jewish role in influencing US policy were unable to change the direction[9] of the US Government.[10]

Tripwire for More War

The Iraq War had the chance to be a limited war, like the conflicts between Italy and Austria in the 1850s, or Prussia/Germany and Denmark around the same time. In those conflicts, a piece of territory was either grabbed or defended, but there was no desire on the part of any party to overthrow one government and start things anew based on some revolutionary dogma. Additionally, in most cases in Europe, such as in Schleswig-Holstein, matters were deliberately settled to avoid future wars for all times. However, President George H. W. Bush, either by design or accident, laid a tripwire for further war.

This tripwire was continued economic sanctions against Iraq, and more importantly, a no-fly zone on Iraq’s northern and southern borders. From 1991 until 2003, the US Air Force, patrolled, and often bombed targets in the no-fly zone. America’s war with Iraq did not really end with the ceasefire brokered at Safwan.[11]

Was the War in America’s Interest?

With all American involvement in Middle-East conflicts, it is always uncertain if the fighting was in the interests of the United States or not. If the war were about oil, then yes, it is possible that a war to keep the Gulf Oil out of the hands of one dominant nation was in the national interest. However, if it were only about oil, the United States could also have eased the sanctions against Iran to be able to purchase that nation’s oil.[12] Furthermore, because of the racial differences between Aryan Persians and Semitic Arabs, it is unlikely that the Persian Gulf will ever truly be dominated by one particular nation.

Ultimately, the war seemed to be in American interests, however in the long term, if there had to have been a war in the early 1990s, it would have been better for the US to have invaded Cuba, rather than Iraq. An invasion of Cuba would have ended for all time the threat of Russian (or any other power’s) bombers based close to the US,[13] and would have likewise given an excuse to end the Cuban immigration and refugee policies that put Florida under demographic threat.

In short, Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm might have been in America’s national interest, but the continued antagonistic action against Iraq following the conclusion of the conflict was not. The lingering tensions with Iraq ultimately led to a second, useless war that was only in the interests of Israel.[14] Additionally, the de-Ba’athification policy of Ambassador Paul Bremer in 2003 delegitimized secular, Arab nationalism and allowed radical Sunni Moslems to replay the rapine and murder of the original Prophet Muhammad in the modern era.

The United States, and the Gulf War is not responsible for the instability in the Mid-East in general – that problem’s roots lie in the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the region following World War I.[15] Additionally, the Iranian Revolution, which did much to energize Iraq’s destabilizing adventures, did not need to take the anti-American direction which it did to achieve its aims. However, the United States’ inability to use its victory in the Gulf War to pressure Israel to cease its destabilizing influence, is a continuing destabilizing influence.

The Return of the Right in America

What is an unstudied aspect of the Gulf War is the resurgence of the racialist, anti-Jewish Right. Other than a few spectacular, but isolated incidents in the 1980s, this force had been ineffective, ignored, and unable to make any inroads into mainstream consciousness. This changed on March 6, 1991, when President George H. W. Bush gave a speech and mentioned the term “New World Order.”

In declaring a New World Order President Bush (41) was referring to the end of the Cold War. If he had any idea in which direction the new geopolitical situation would go, it was probably towards the “End of History” concept where all races, nations, and tribes on Earth would be able to live in liberty and be good consumers in “the economy.”

However, what actually happened was that the world became more complex. The war of ideas between Communism and other societies gave way to wars of basic identity. Race, religion, culture, etc. became all that mattered. The first people to recognize this were those on the race-realist Right.

President Bush’s remark about a “New World Order” immediately gave focus to those on the Right and their concern for the issues of identity, especially racial identity. There is also more to this than race. As the Gulf War consumed the Bush (41) Administration and the 24-Hour news cycle, the Republican Party failed to realize that the Reagan Coalition of white, blue-collar Democrats in the North with mainstream social conservatives had fractured. In June 1990, as the Iraqi Army massed on the border with Kuwait, President Bush renewed China’s “Most-Favored Nation” trade status, a situation that sucked manufacturing jobs from the North to Asia.[16] George H. W. Bush also laid the framework for NAFTA, which further damaged America’s blue-collar workers.

President George H. W. Bush was defeated in the 1992 Presidential Election due to the defection of blue-collar Northern voters. They stayed home, voted for third-party candidate Ross Perot, or switched over to Bill Clinton.

The American Domestic Conflict of the 1990s

Bill Clinton’s first term energized the far-right. The reasons for this haven’t fully been explored and probably need the long-term efforts of many historians. A quick exploration of the phenomenon is the following:

1. Clinton dodged the draft in Vietnam. Until the election of 1992, every president since Truman had been a veteran (although not all were combat vets).
2. In addition to the lingering bitterness over Vietnam, the Clintons became a focus for discontent (and support) for the other unresolved social issues of the 1960s – like abortion.
3. The Clintons were presiding over a dissolving industrial base.
4. Bill Clinton was a Southern president. The right-wing militia movement drew a great deal of support from the western parts of the Puritan North – there was the Michigan Militia, the Montana Freemen, etc.
5. Clinton was “the first black president” at a time when there had been three decades of African-fueled crime.

Another reason is that the racialist Right was beginning to develop a solid base. There was the Christian Identity movement with many adherents in Idaho (See Point 4 above), and other prophets like Ben Klassen, Matthias Koehl, and William Luther Pierce, had developed a considerable body of thought. American Renaissance had been founded in 1990.

However, the right-wing was not just its racially-aware portion. The right-wing should be seen as something like a vineyard, where a group of separate, but related plants are grown next to each other with intertwined vines. The different plants of the right cross-pollinate, connect in some ways, but are fundamentally different. Among the vines of the Right was also an extreme libertarian branch that distrusted all things government. That branch produced Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh was influenced by William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, but otherwise denied being a “racist.” Nonetheless, the government and mainstream lumped him in with the rest of the Right. Clinton cruised to re-election in 1996.

The racially-aware Right suffered a severe set of misfortunes throughout the rest of the decade, but their ideas of Jewish Control over much of the US Government became impossible to ignore when the tripwires laid at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, were tripped by Jewish Neoconservatives leading to the disastrous Iraq War. Additionally, if anything, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, followed by a great many others made the racially-aware Right’s criticism of non-white immigration impossible to ignore. The ripples of the Gulf War continue to spread indeed.

Notes

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/jan-1991-us-iraq-fail-reach-resolution-15322979

[2] http://www.vho.org/tr/2000/2/tr02buchanan.html

[3] Abrams main battle tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Apache attack helicopter, the Black Hawk utility helicopter, and the Patriot air defense missile system http://www.benning.army.mil/Library/content/NS%20P-4889.pdf

[4] http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=384

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/06/world/confrontation-gulf-thunder-right-us-role-gulf-splits-longtime-conservative.html

[6] http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/UnderstandJI-3.htm

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/06/world/confrontation-gulf-thunder-right-us-role-gulf-splits-longtime-conservative.html

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20140125123844/http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

[9] http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-where-are-we-going-in-the-gulf-229 See also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/02/25/bush-ad-attacks-buchanan-over-gulf-war/7fab0891-8095-45c3-8257-90a8b9d67b8e/?utm_term=.29125251b4bf

[10] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/20/us/newspaper-faults-columnist-for-remarks-on-jews.html

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safwan_Airfield_standoff

[12] One remarkable thing about our distant Aryan cousins in Persia is that the US and Iran have the same enemies. Obviously Iraq comes to mind, but the Iranians had enemies in Afghanistan also. Iranian support US efforts against the Pashtun after the 2001 9/11 attacks. http://www.mepc.org/us-iran-engagement-through-afghanistan

[13] https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0315/a-new-cuban-missile-crisis-russia-eyes-bomber-bases-in-latin-america

[14] William Luther Pierce deserves to be quoted here (November 21, 1998): “This crusade against Iraq isn’t about the United Nations or international security or stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It’s about making the Middle East safe for Israel to continue bullying its neighbors and stealing from them. Every other explanation is lies and hypocrisy. And we really can expect a bigger dose of lies and hypocrisy than usual as the warmongers work to get this war against Iraq started. The media bosses will trot more generals and politicians in front of the TV cameras and have them bluster patriotically about how we’re not going to let Saddam Hussein get away with it any longer, by god, and they’ll show groups of military personnel cheering when they’re told that they’re being shipped out to the Persian Gulf to kick Saddam Hussein’s behind and keep him from getting away with whatever it is he’s getting away with, which mainly seems to be running his country the way he wants to instead of the way the United Nations tells him.”

[15] All empires leave conflicts when they leave. The fall of the British Empire led to the long running conflict with India and Pakistan. Furthermore, the former Japanese Empire was a complete war zone in the 1950s. During that decade there were wars or insurgencies in French Indochina, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and a vicious rebellion in the Philippines.

[16] http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-03/opinion/op-670_1_most-favored-nation-bush-administration-favored-nation-trading-status