Article 101

“The Incubator Lie, the WMD Fraud, and the Birth of ISIS”

America’s wars in the Persian Gulf were not wars of necessity but wars of deception, staged spectacles that weaponized lies, propaganda, and the cowardice of a pliant media to advance imperial aims. The so-called liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were not born out of noble principles or threats to American security. They were scripted by Washington insiders and sold with fraudulent tales that bypassed reason and appealed directly to fear and sentimentality. The result was not democracy in the Middle East but the annihilation of secular states, the rise of jihadist fundamentalism, and the death of ancient Christian communities that had endured in Mesopotamia and the Levant for nearly two millennia. This is not liberation but betrayal on a world-historical scale.

To understand the lie of 1991, one must first understand the cartographic crime that created Kuwait itself. The small emirate was not a timeless sovereign nation but a product of British imperial line-drawing in the aftermath of World War I. Iraq, born from the Ottoman carcass, was denied its natural access to the Persian Gulf by London’s cynical decision to carve out Kuwait as a separate protectorate, effectively a company state built on oil rents. Iraq always considered Kuwait historically part of its territory. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, his act was framed by Washington as a monstrous violation of international law, but in reality it was the eruption of an unresolved colonial wound. The American public did not need to know the complexity of imperial cartography; they were fed instead an atrocity story designed to bypass the intellect and target the gut.

That story was the now infamous “incubator babies” hoax. On October 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, introduced only as “Nayirah,” tearfully testified before a congressional caucus that Iraqi soldiers had stormed Kuwaiti hospitals, ripped babies out of incubators, and left them to die on the cold floor. The story electrified the nation, repeated on every major network, cited by President George H. W. Bush himself, and deployed as moral justification for war. It was a lie. Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to Washington, and her testimony was coached by Hill & Knowlton, a public relations firm hired by the Kuwaiti government to manufacture consent. Human rights groups later confirmed the atrocity never occurred. But by the time the truth emerged, it was too late—the bombs had already fallen, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were dead. The Gulf War was sold not by facts but by theater, an advertising campaign for bloodshed.

Twelve years later, the American government perfected the formula of deceit. After September 11, 2001, when nineteen hijackers—fifteen of them Saudi nationals—struck New York and Washington, the United States had the world’s sympathy and a legitimate target in Al-Qaeda’s Afghan bases. But the neo-conservatives in Washington, long obsessed with reshaping the Middle East, hijacked that moment of unity to settle scores with Iraq. Saddam Hussein, a secular tyrant who despised fundamentalists, had nothing to do with 9/11. His regime was not aligned with Al-Qaeda, and his military was crippled by sanctions and no-fly zones. Yet Americans were led to believe that Iraq posed an existential threat, armed with weapons of mass destruction and ready to strike. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz orchestrated the campaign, aided by pliant journalists like Judith Miller of The New York Times, who turned anonymous leaks into front-page certainties. The phrase “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” was enough to terrorize the public into compliance.

But the intelligence was fraudulent, cherry-picked, and in some cases fabricated. The CIA knew the aluminum tubes cited as nuclear centrifuge components were for conventional rockets. The story of Saddam seeking uranium from Niger was based on forged documents so crude they would embarrass a high-school forger. U.N. weapons inspectors on the ground, led by Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, repeatedly found no evidence of active weapons programs. The Bush administration dismissed them, smearing inspectors as naïve or complicit. What mattered was not truth but spectacle: Colin Powell, normally a man of caution, went before the United Nations with a slide show of doctored intelligence that history has since judged a disgrace. America knew Iraq was not behind 9/11. It knew the WMD case was flimsy. But it also knew fear is stronger than reason in a public sphere trained to worship the flag and distrust skepticism.

The consequences of this war of choice were catastrophic beyond calculation. Iraq, already battered by sanctions that starved civilians throughout the 1990s, was pulverized. The state apparatus was dismantled by Paul Bremer’s de-Baathification order, leaving half a million soldiers and bureaucrats unemployed and embittered. Into that vacuum poured the forces of sectarianism and jihad. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was born from the rubble, soon mutating into the monstrosity of ISIS. The American occupation did not birth democracy; it birthed an Islamic caliphate drenched in blood. This is the perverse irony: by toppling secular strongmen who repressed fundamentalists, Washington unleashed fundamentalism itself, turning Iraq, Syria, and much of the region into failed states.

Even more tragic was the annihilation of Christian communities. Iraq was once home to millions of Assyrian, Chaldean, and Armenian Christians, descendants of some of the earliest followers of Christ. They worshiped in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and survived centuries of Islamic rule. But they did not survive American liberation. Caught between jihadist terror and sectarian cleansing, they were driven into exile, their churches bombed, their villages emptied. Syria and Lebanon saw similar declines as war and extremism spread. For the first time in two thousand years, the cradle of Christianity is nearly empty of Christians. America claimed to fight for freedom, but it erased entire civilizations.

Meanwhile, the refugees came—not to Washington, which created the mess, but to Europe’s shores, overwhelming fragile social systems, fueling the rise of xenophobic populism, and destabilizing the very liberal order America pretends to defend. Millions dead, millions displaced, an entire region destabilized—and for what? For lies told with a straight face by men in suits who never saw combat and never paid the price of their own deceptions. American hypocrisy is not a footnote in history; it is the central engine of global chaos in the 21st century. By turning secular republics into jihadi battlefields, by selling wars on incubator babies and phantom weapons, the United States has discredited the very idea of democracy it claims to export. It has taught the world that freedom is a slogan, truth a disposable commodity, and empire a confidence game.

The American lie did not end with the fall of Baghdad in 2003; it metastasized. Having pulverized the Iraqi state, Washington and its neo-conservative architects congratulated themselves on a quick victory, only to discover that they had opened a wound that would bleed for generations. The occupation, incompetently managed, was the purest expression of imperial hubris: dismantling ministries, purging anyone with Baath Party affiliation from public life, and treating a traumatized society as a laboratory for free-market shock therapy and half-baked fantasies of democracy at gunpoint. They believed they could remake Mesopotamia into a neoliberal showcase; instead, they created a graveyard.

The blood price was astronomical. The Lancet study estimated hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths by 2006 alone, with later counts surpassing a million. Entire cities like Fallujah were reduced to rubble, where the U.S. military deployed white phosphorus munitions that burned through flesh to the bone. Torture chambers in Abu Ghraib prison, photographed and leaked, exposed the grotesque underbelly of the so-called liberators, with American soldiers grinning beside naked, hooded detainees stacked like animals. The moral capital of the United States collapsed in real time. Yet the architects of the war remained on Sunday talk shows, feted as experts, untouched by prosecution or shame. If a small power had committed such crimes, the architects would be in The Hague. But America writes its own rules, and crimes that would hang others are treated as policy missteps when committed under the Stars and Stripes.

Even more grotesque is that the war did not weaken the forces of terror but armed and energized them. Before 2003, Al-Qaeda had no real foothold in Iraq. Afterward, it flourished like bacteria in an open wound. The invasion and occupation created the very conditions jihadists had dreamed of: a broken state, a humiliated population, and an occupying infidel army to rally against. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq fed off Sunni resentment, perfected the spectacle of televised beheadings, and turned suicide bombing into a daily fact of Iraqi life. From this crucible was born the so-called Islamic State, which swept across Iraq and Syria a decade later, creating a caliphate that at its height controlled territory larger than Britain. In the name of fighting terrorism, America had created a monster that rivaled the worst nightmares of the 21st century.

The hypocrisy is total. Washington claimed to be promoting democracy, yet it toppled secular republics while embracing absolute monarchies. The Saudi royal family, whose madrassas had exported Wahhabi fundamentalism for decades, remained untouchable. Fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudis, yet the United States invaded Iraq. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi, yet Washington’s military shield remained wrapped around Riyadh. Why? Oil and arms. The world’s richest petro-state bought American weapons by the hundreds of billions, and in return Washington looked away from public beheadings, repression of women, and persecution of religious minorities. Iraq, Syria, and Libya—all secular, however dictatorial—were destroyed. Saudi Arabia, the global factory of jihadist ideology, was exalted as an ally. Hypocrisy is not a byproduct of U.S. foreign policy; it is its core principle.

The destruction of secular republics opened the floodgates of human misery. Libya, once a functioning if eccentric dictatorship, was bombed into chaos in 2011 under the pretext of humanitarian intervention. Its leader lynched in the street, its arsenal looted, the country became a highway for arms and migrants across the Mediterranean. Syria, targeted by American and Gulf-backed insurgencies, collapsed into civil war, spawning ISIS and sending millions of refugees into Europe. Iraq, the original domino, became a battlefield of militias, warlords, and external powers. The result: a region once dominated by flawed but functioning states was transformed into a patchwork of failed states and jihadi playgrounds. The dream of neo-conservative democracy promotion proved to be a nightmare of endless war.

The cultural toll is less discussed but no less catastrophic. The Middle East was once a mosaic of faiths and peoples: Christians, Yazidis, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, Druze, Sunni, Shia, and secular Arabs. By dismantling states that kept the fundamentalists in check, America enabled the cleansing of this mosaic. Iraq’s Christian population, once numbering over a million, has been reduced to a few scattered remnants. In Syria, Christians who had coexisted for centuries now face extinction. Lebanon’s Christian community, already weakened, shrinks further under the weight of war and economic collapse. The very lands where Christianity was born—Mesopotamia, Antioch, Damascus—have been emptied of Christians because America, in its arrogance, destroyed their protectors and empowered their enemies. A civilization two thousand years in the making was erased in two decades of lies.

And then came the refugees. Millions poured out of the Middle East and North Africa, desperate for safety. But they did not head to Washington or Dallas or Houston, the cities of the nation that unleashed the storm. They came to Europe, overwhelming social systems, triggering political crises, and fueling the rise of right-wing populists from Italy to Germany, from France to Sweden. Politicians who once lectured the world about liberal values now ride to power on anti-immigrant hysteria, while the United States absolves itself of responsibility. The very war makers who lit the fuse now denounce the fire, blaming refugees for destabilizing the West when it was American bombs that set their homes aflame. This is the final hypocrisy: creating refugees abroad and then demonizing them at home.

Through it all, the same pattern emerges: America never fights for freedom, only for advantage. The slogans shift—incubator babies, weapons of mass destruction, humanitarian intervention—but the outcome is the same: destruction abroad, profits at home, and lies in between. The Gulf Wars were not aberrations but archetypes. They showed how a superpower manipulates narratives, silences skeptics, and sells bloodshed as morality. They revealed a press that no longer investigates but stenographs, repeating government talking points until they become gospel. They exposed a public so easily frightened, so quick to wave the flag, that it cannot distinguish between defense and aggression. And they proved that when lies are exposed—when the incubator story collapses, when the WMDs are revealed as phantoms—there is no accountability. The war criminals retire to think tanks, write memoirs, and collect speaking fees, while the dead are buried in silence.

The Gulf Wars were not about Kuwait or 9/11 or democracy. They were about power, oil, and the imperial compulsion to dominate the Middle East. They were about securing military bases from which to project force, about rewarding defense contractors and lobbyists, about bending the region to Washington’s will. And they were about lying—lying to Congress, lying to the United Nations, lying to the American people. Those lies destroyed nations, erased communities, and killed millions. They are not just stains on America’s conscience; they are indictments of the entire liberal order America claims to lead. If freedom is built on fraud, if democracy is exported through deception, then the world has learned the lesson: America is not a guardian of liberty but its gravedigger.

The disasters of the Gulf Wars cannot be quarantined to Iraq and Kuwait; they detonated across the entire region, unleashing chain reactions that continue to convulse the world. The first war normalized the idea that America could launch massive bombing campaigns in the Middle East without consequence, and the second convinced Washington that regime change could be manufactured through lies and still be called liberation. The consequences were not temporary shocks but structural ruptures: failed states, sectarian bloodletting, terrorist networks metastasizing across continents, and the erosion of the very liberal order America claims to defend. This is not a foreign policy of errors but a pathology of empire, a deliberate strategy of chaos disguised as altruism.

Afghanistan is the shadow that haunts these wars. Long before the tanks rolled into Baghdad, the United States had nurtured jihad in the mountains of Afghanistan as a Cold War weapon against the Soviets. It trained and armed Islamist fighters, lionizing them as freedom warriors. When the Soviets withdrew, America abandoned the country, leaving the Taliban to seize power and turn Afghanistan into a theocracy. After 9/11, Washington returned, claiming it would liberate Afghan women and destroy terror. Twenty years later, after trillions of dollars and rivers of blood, America fled in humiliation, leaving the Taliban stronger than ever. Here is the cruel symmetry: America fought two wars in the Gulf supposedly to prevent terror, yet its policies created the Taliban, emboldened Al-Qaeda, and birthed ISIS. What it destroyed was secularism; what it nurtured was jihad. This is not liberation but self-inflicted damnation disguised as strategy.

The rise of ISIS was not an accident but the direct child of American hubris. When Paul Bremer dissolved the Iraqi army in 2003, hundreds of thousands of trained men were left jobless, humiliated, and angry. Many joined the insurgency. When the CIA established prisons like Camp Bucca to house insurgents, they created universities of terror where men like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi forged networks and ideology. Out of these cells emerged the Islamic State, far more lethal and sophisticated than Al-Qaeda. Its black flag flew over Mosul and Raqqa, its videos of beheadings spread terror worldwide, and its attacks reached Paris, Brussels, Istanbul, and beyond. America declared a war on terror but created the most terrifying organization of the 21st century. This is the true cost of the lie: by breaking a state, America birthed a caliphate.

Meanwhile, the refugee crisis swelled into a biblical exodus. Millions of Iraqis fled sectarian war, millions of Syrians fled barrel bombs and jihadists, millions of Libyans fled militias and anarchy. The camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey swelled beyond capacity, while Europe became the reluctant destination of a tidal wave of displaced humanity. The images seared into conscience were of drowned children on Mediterranean beaches, of desperate families crossing borders on foot, of barbed wire and riot police in Hungary and Greece. But absent from the images were the men who caused it—the policy makers in Washington and London who destabilized entire societies with their lies. Refugees became Europe’s burden, America’s denial, and the world’s indictment. The hypocrisy is absolute: America bombs nations into rubble, then builds walls against those who flee.

The ripple effects did not stop at the borders of the Middle East. Europe itself was reshaped by the crises unleashed by American wars. Right-wing populists rose to power by weaponizing fear of migrants, railing against refugees as invaders while ignoring the fact that Western bombs had driven them from their homes. Brexit, Trumpism, Marine Le Pen, AfD in Germany—all were fueled, at least in part, by the refugee tidal wave that followed America’s Middle Eastern crusades. The supposed champions of liberal democracy unleashed forces that are now dismantling liberal democracy at home. This is the ultimate irony: in exporting chaos abroad, America imported authoritarianism back into the heart of the West. The incubator baby hoax and the phantom WMDs are not just lies of the past; they are the roots of populist demagoguery in the present.

And yet, no one is held accountable. George W. Bush paints watercolors of dogs. Tony Blair gives speeches on democracy. Paul Wolfowitz, the intellectual arsonist of the war, still writes op-eds. Judith Miller, who laundered lies into newsprint, returned to television as if nothing happened. Not a single architect of the Iraq disaster has faced trial, while the victims—dead Iraqis, exiled Christians, bombed-out families—remain voiceless. The International Criminal Court, quick to prosecute African warlords, dares not touch Western leaders. Justice is selective, morality conditional, law subservient to power. This is not democracy but oligarchy draped in patriotic bunting.

The destruction of the Middle East’s secular republics also destroyed the possibility of alternative modernities. Whatever their flaws, regimes like Iraq and Syria offered a model of secular Arab nationalism, where religion was subordinated to state power. These models were authoritarian, often brutal, but they kept sectarian fanaticism at bay. By dismantling them, America turned the Middle East into a laboratory of sectarian chaos where militias, clerics, and warlords replaced states. Instead of pluralistic secular societies evolving over time, we now see fractured landscapes where fundamentalists dominate. In Iraq, Shia militias loyal to Iran control swaths of territory. In Syria, jihadists carve enclaves from ruins. In Libya, rival governments and militias fight endlessly. This is not the dawn of democracy but the twilight of civilization.

And what of the Christian communities that once flourished there? They are gone. In Iraq, once home to over a million Christians, fewer than a quarter remain, many in exile. In Syria, Christian towns like Maaloula, where Aramaic was still spoken, were besieged and emptied. In Lebanon, the Christian share of the population declines every year under pressure of migration and economic collapse. In Egypt, Copts face relentless persecution. The oldest Christian communities on earth—older than Rome, older than Constantinople—were extinguished under the watch of a superpower that still pretends to be the defender of Christianity. The hypocrisy borders on blasphemy. America claims to defend faith, yet it destroyed the cradle of faith itself.

The long arc of these wars points to a simple, damning truth: American foreign policy is not a force for stability but for entropy. It does not spread democracy but dismantles it. It does not export order but chaos. It does not defend freedom but annihilates the conditions for it. The Gulf Wars were not accidents of history; they were deliberate projects built on lies, executed with arrogance, and defended with hypocrisy. Their legacy is a Middle East in ruins, a Europe destabilized, and a world where truth is the first casualty and power the only god.

Citations

1. John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
2. “Kuwaiti Testimony Exaggerated,” The New York Times, January 15, 1992.
3. Middle East Watch (Human Rights Watch), Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991).
4. Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2004).
5. Mohamed ElBaradei, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011).
6. Colin Powell, “Remarks to the United Nations Security Council,” U.S. Department of State, February 5, 2003.
7. Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” The New Yorker, May 12, 2003.
8. Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” The New York Times, September 8, 2002.
9. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004).
10. The Lancet, “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” The Lancet 368, no. 9545 (October 2006): 1421–1428.
11. Human Rights Watch, No Blood, No Foul: Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq (New York: HRW, 2006).
12. Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 10, 2004.
13. Joby Warrick, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (New York: Doubleday, 2015).
14. Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (London: Verso, 2015).
15. International Organization for Migration, Global Migration Data Analysis Centre: Displacement in Iraq and Syria (Geneva: IOM, 2016).
16. Pew Research Center, Middle East’s Christian Population in Decline (Washington, DC: Pew, 2011).
17. Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002) — an example of pro-war argument later discredited.
18. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
19. Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).
20. Phyllis Bennis, Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the War on Terror (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2003).
21. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).
22. Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016).