Hussein, however, was no innocent bystander. He abetted the process, launching scud missiles toward Israel, adding ʻallahu akbar (“God is greater”) to the Iraqi flag, and claiming “to be the religious warrior or mujahid who was going to unfetter Mecca from its American shackles.” While “the whole world was watching” news coverage of the Persian Gulf War, the American audience was getting to know a dictator and the strategically crafted civilizational threat he allegedly represented, a civilizational threat it would meet again after 9/11 and the formal declaration of the war on terror. Hussein and his regime survived the first U.S. incursion against it. However, news coverage of the first war in Iraq would stay in the American public’s consciousness, and in 2003, George H.W. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, would tap into that consciousness and declare a second, and much more prolonged, war on Iraq.

XREF: Connects to post-9/11 framing of civilizational threats and the 2003 Iraq War, showing continuity in how American audiences were primed to perceive threats.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 256