THE MORAL was simple. Act like a beast and the B-52s will come winging in from Guam, just like they did yesterday.
"When you abuse your own people ... you must pay the price," President Clinton told Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein is a wicked man. His prison cells are filled with torture victims, his hangmen on 24-hour duty - women are executed on Wednesdays and Saturdays - and his secret police maintain raping rooms below their offices. But if the military targets were specific, the moral indignation was also highly selective. If iniquity was the trigger for air attack, the B-52s would be carpet-bombing the Middle East for weeks.
Gen John Shalikashvili, we are told, held a friendly conversation with President Moubarak just before the Cruise missiles were launched, to test the Egyptian leader's reaction to the forthcoming blitz. Neither side would discuss their talks but we can be sure that there was one subject upon which Gen Shalikashvili did not question Mr Moubarak: the systematic use of torture by the Egyptian state security police on those suspected of violently opposing the regime. Electricity applied to genitals, beatings and cigarette burns are routine in the intelligence offices at Lazoughly Street in Cairo and in Alexandria, where the general and the president were chatting. In two Egyptian jails, warders punish prisoners by forcing them to rape each other. More than 20 have been killed in one prison complex alone. But we can be sure that loyal Egypt will see no B-52s.
The Americans also called on the Saudis during their pre-bombardment tour of the Middle East. And here again, we can be sure they did not raise Saudi Arabia's habit of subjecting men and women accused of murder, rape or drug dealing to secret trials in which they often have no defence counsel - followed by public beheading outside mosques on Friday mornings. Women have their scarves removed before male executioners slice off their heads.
But Saudi Arabia still plays host to 5,000 US servicemen and just happens to hold the world's largest oil reservoir. Very definitely no B-52s over Saudi Arabia.
Then there is the friendly little island of Bahrain home base of the US Gulf fleet from where its admiral was yesterday directing two of his warships to fire their Cruise missiles at Iraq. Less than a mile from the admiral's wardroom stands the headquarters of Bahrain's security police where the regime's opponents - who demand a return to parliamentary democracy but stand accused of trying to overthrow the regime - are routinely tortured with beatings and sexual abuse. Chief torturer is a Jordanian army colonel who acts as translator for the man who runs the security police, former British special branch man Ian Henderson. So no B-52s en route for Bahrain.
Israel was also forwarned of the US attack on Iraq. Yet it is more than a certainty that no American raised the question of Israel's notorious Khiam jail in southern Lebanon - in which hundreds of Shia prisoners have been routinely tortured with electricity applied to fingers and genitals - nor the massacre of 105 refugees in a UN safe haven in southern Lebanon last April. Absolutely never - ever - will B-52s head for Israel.
Iraq's neighbour Syria has a dodgy record on human rights. The massacre of prisoners at Palmyra and the slaughter of thousands of Islamists at Hama in 1982, along with ferocious torture in the dungeons of five security organisations, is mentioned from time to time though not by President Clinton when he paid a state visit to Damascus in 1994. US commentators do suggest that if Syria doesn't stop "supporting terrorism" and sign up for peace with Israel, it may receive a Cruise or two.
How Saddam must look back at the golden days when the west sold weapons to his army of torturers, supported his invasion of Iran, armed his artillerymen. When you are a friend, you don't have to pay the price.