To the Editor:

Hold on to your hats. The grand campaign to rewrite the history of the Persian Gulf war is on. And the campaign of revisionist history begins with rewriting the causes of that war.

If you thought that the cause of the war was the brutal invasion of Kuwait by President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, you are wrong. If you thought that the cause was Saddam Hussein's reckless and premeditated aggression that gave him control of Kuwait's vast oil resources and imminent domination of the giant Saudi oil fields -- giving him mastery of the energy jugular of the world -- you are wrong. If you thought the cause of the war was his horrendous human rights violations -- the verified poison-gassing of his own citizens, and verified torture and murder -- you are wrong. If you thought the cause of the war was Saddam Hussein's growing nuclear capability, his huge stock of biological and chemical weapons and missile capabilities -- you are wrong.

The real cause of the war, according to John R. MacArthur (Op-Ed, Jan. 6), was a concocted story by the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington! She allegedly fabricated a story about premature infants' being taken from their incubators by the invading Iraqi military and left to die. The article's sinister innuendo suggests that the girl was not even in Kuwait at the time of the Iraqi invasion, and that the whole gruesome incident was a diabolical plot by an American public relations firm. So much for revisionist history; now for the facts.

The Congressional Human Rights Caucus decided to hold a hearing on Iraqi human rights abuses in Kuwait, and it sought individuals who could give eyewitness accounts of what was happening there. Among several individuals brought to its attention was a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, Nayirah.