The Power of Story

I recently attended a class at the University of Colorado. I know what you may be thinking why go back so soon, but believe me my friends, when you take a little time off and don't have to do the homework associated, college is quite worthwhile. What got me going was the subject of an English class on folklore, specifically the day's topic on the power of the story.

Prior to the first Gulf intrusion (1991), it seemed that politicians were having a hard time selling an international invasion of Iraq. It seemed that the public cared that Kuwait was being raped economically and politically, but was not important enough to use American and other Western force in order to intervene. The first Bush administration continued to push the issue however, and when it came to the final attempt to coax the Senate into approving the use of force in Iraq a certain story surfaced.

According to a young woman who had been visiting a hospital in Kuwait City, Iraqi soldiers had been removing pre-mature babies from their incubators and allowing them to die on the cold ground. This young woman just happened to be the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States and Canada. This single narrative became the leading reason that justified the US-led military campaign into Baghdad, an action that troops had been preparing for in Saudi Arabia for months. It is quite clear that the American President fully intended to invade the country, he simply needed a piece of "information" that would allow the bureaucratic process of war to continue.

This got me thinking about the power of story in the realm of international politics. This has been a tool of propagandists for centuries. Just look at the history. Consider the story of Filipinos who were complete savages and obviously couldn't govern themselves. The story of the international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world if the true Aryan race didn't do something about it. The story of Communist Gooks bayoneting pregnant women in Southern Vietnam. The story of the subversive West deserving attacks on civilian populations because of their immoral behaviour worldwide. Or the story of WMD's falling into the hands of an evil dictator or three.

I find it appalling that an the oral tradition, now a written tradition of storytelling has become a political tool to influence the demos. Stories were the transmitters of culture. They became ways to escape the external shit that life brings along with it. And now stories make sure that you vote the way that someone else sees as moral. This is wrong. I think political decisions are supposed to be made along calculated empirical evidence, not the heartfelt testimony of some crying girl or the hunch of a high-up security official. Apparently this is what the political process has come to.

In order to sell the Desert Storm operation to the Senate and the UN Security Council, the incubator story killed up to 312 babies. The heartfelt testimony of that 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl attributed 14 of these deaths. After further investigation, somewhere between 4 and 17 babies that were in incubators died, and not necessarily at the hands of Iraqi soldiers. Two incubators were missing. After a second interview, the Kuwaiti girl admitted that she only witnessed one child killed, and was only at the hospital for a matter of moments.

Today we continue to see these stories fall apart. After six years in Afghanistan, we still don't have the head of 'Mr. Terrorism,' Osama bin Laden. After five years in Iraq, we still don't have the WMD's we were promised existed. Now we are made to believe that Iran is developing weapons grade plutonium despite an utter lack of actual intelligence evidence.

I have had several professors make sure that their students refrain from using personal anecdotes as empirical evidence, in both class discussions and papers. Just because something happened to one person, one time, it is not automatically a social trend. It is quite easy for personal experiences to become fact to a person, but these experiences may contradict what is actually going on. One person seeing one child killed is sad, but it certainly does not add up to become a wartime atrocity. The fact is, several of these 4 to 14 premature babies that died may have died as a result of a weak heart, or lungs, or doctor's error. And yet these deaths became the leading evidence for military action within a sovereign nation. Shouldn't we hold the political elite to at least the same standards that we hold undergraduate students to?