@@ How to sell War to the masses @@
Arash
June 27, 2004
SPECIAL REPORT:
The 'Prop-Agenda' at War
Miren Gutierrez
Contrary to what the U.S. government says, recently there has been an
intensive use of propaganda, perhaps more deceitful than ever.
ROME - In an interview with Arabic broadcaster al-Jazeera, President Bush's
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in 2001 that she did not
want U.S. networks to show Osama bin Laden tapes because "it was not a
matter of news, it was a matter of propaganda."
Is the U.S. government above propaganda?
Well, it is not. As former Salvadoran guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos
put it in an interview with IPS, winning wars is also about winning the
minds of people.
Throughout history, propaganda has been used in warfare to do exactly that;
and the United States has also practiced it extensively with its own twist,
that of a democracy that has a free press and therefore has to disguise
propaganda better.
It is one of history's ironies, for example, that former U.S. president
Woodrow Wilson, who was re-elected as a peace candidate in 1916, soon
thereafter led the United States willingly into the First World War. That
was achieved thanks to propaganda.
Contrary to what Rice's words suggest, two recent books imply that a more
intensive, perhaps more deceitful, use of propaganda was in place recently.
An embedded, Internet- age propaganda, piggybacking on brand name
credibility. Real-time transmission, real- time deceit.
It means that if you use CNN or The New York Times to selectively present
segmented realities, then the effectiveness of propaganda is tremendously
increased by these trademarks.
In their widely quoted book 'Weapons of Mass Deception', Sheldon Rampton and
John Stauber argued in 2003 that the U.S. government used the shock of the
9/11 attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq. Bush counter-terrorism
coordinator Richard Clarke further denounces President George Bush for using
the attacks as a pretext for the war in his book 'Against All Enemies'
published last March.
For propaganda expert Nancy Snow, in terms of purpose "not much has changed
(since Wilson's times). Propaganda is still used more as an antecedent to
war; in other words, if war is the paint, then propaganda is the paint
primer that makes possible the total devotion of the public to the just
cause of the state in wartime."
Once the masses have chosen sides, "propaganda is used to reinforce existing
attitudes more than it is used to change attitudes," Snow, assistant
professor at the College of Communications at California State University
told IPS in an e-mail interview.
"The primary change is in technology rather than method," says Randall
Bytwerk, a specialist in propaganda, and professor of communication at
Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "It is now possible to spread much
more information much faster."
A second change is that the mass of information has made it more difficult
for citizens to make sense of what is going on, he told IPS in an e-mail
interview. "The result is that, perhaps even more than in the past, we look
for shorthand ways of making sense of it all."
In their book Rampton and Stauber also imply that many independent media
cooperated in the deception.
Embedded journalism showed a partial, patriotic image of the "war on
terrorism" during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Almost 600 journalists
were "embedded" with the U.S. and British troops in the campaign against
Saddam, reporting what they saw from the coalition lines.
The "war on terror" was the starting point for a standardization of set
phrases like "weapons of mass destruction", "axis of evil", "shock and awe",
and "war of liberation". Simple, repetitious and emotional, so the
propagandistic concept does not get lost in the mist.
To forge the message, the Pentagon acknowledged hiring a Washington PR firm,
the Rendon Group. It was Rendon who provided the U.S. flags for hundreds of
Kuwaitis to wave when U.S. troops entered Kuwait City in the first Gulf War,
Rampton and Stauber say. In an article titled 'How To Sell a War' published
in the magazine 'In These Times' last August, the authors suggest that some
of the images of the war in Iraq may have been cooked by PR specialists
and "perception managers".
While that could be true, Bytwerk says "such an approach is usually not
necessary, and a bad idea. It is not necessary because there is usually so
much information that something can be found to fit. It is a bad idea
because, if found out, which it often is, it reduces the overall
credibility."
This war was more "about not seeing images," contends Snow. "People in the
U.S. didn't see the same war as people outside the U.S. or as did viewers of
al-Jazeera it's all about the disparate perceptions by the news media in the
U.S./Middle East and Europe."
When on April 9, 2003 the statue of Saddam was finally brought down in
Baghdad's Firdos Square, U.S. media commentators rushed to assign iconic
connotations to the toppling, ranking it alongside the fall of the Berlin
Wall or the protesters opposing tanks at Tiananmen Square.
"Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital", Rampton and Stauber quoted
The New York Times as saying. The main papers and television channels in the
U.S. showed the same scene, proffered similar comments.
But a BBC photo sequence of the statue's fall displayed a sparse crowd of
approximately 200 people, they observe; a Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos
Square showed that it was nearly empty, sealed off by U.S. tanks.
Their article also cites various examples of slapdash reporting, including
The New York Times' Judith Miller's, which came under scrutiny since it was
revealed that now out-of- favour Iraqi leader Ahmad Chalabi was one of her
primary sources.
The New York Times admitted in a May 26 editorial that after reviewing their
Iraq coverage "we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not
as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was
controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified
or allowed to stand unchallenged."
The awkward articles depended at least in part on information from Iraqi
informants, defectors and exiles set on "regime change" in Iraq, people
whose integrity has come under public debate in recent weeks, the paper
said.
There are many types of propaganda, and people related to it. There are "
spin doctors" who seek to ensure that others interpret an event from a
particular point of view. The U.S. Department of Defence Dictionary of
Military and Associated Terms speaks of "perception managers" in charge of "
psychological operations", a concept originated by the U. S. military that
combines "truth projection", security, and deception, designed to "convey or
deny selected information to foreign audiences" and their leaders to "
influence their emotions and objective reasoning" ultimately resulting in
actions favourable to the originator's objectives.
"We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of
the front is always propaganda, and what is said on our side of the front is
truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace,"
said Walter Lippmann, former advisor to President Wilson.
Lippmann, a journalist and a renowned expert on modern mass communications
theory, believed that perception often is more important that reality. Many
followed suit.
There are also differences between the propaganda deployed in totalitarian
regimes, where the sole source of information is the state, and in
democracies, where the media and other sources, including non-governmental
organisations, can counterbalance the government propagandistic efforts.
But Bytwerk, author of several books on Nazi and Marxist propaganda, says
that "even Joseph Goebbels lied rarely. He preferred to mislead by selection
or by ignoring unfavourable information rather than by outright fabrication.
I think fabrication can sometimes be justified to deceive the enemy, but not
to deceive one's own public."
With satellite and cable television, and the Internet, both one's own public
and foreign audiences have access to almost the same information, language
being sometimes the sole barrier.
Bytwerk says also one must distinguish between "incomplete" and "inaccurate"
.
"That is, it is surely a bad idea for even independent media to publish
information that would reveal military plans or provide useful information
for the 'enemy'. Incompleteness is probably a good thing at times (of war),"
he says.
"On the other hand, inaccurate information is usually bad for everyone
concerned," he adds. "The hard thing, even for journalists, is to digest the
huge amount of complicated information in a way that is both accurate and
fair. Independent journalists often have their own biases."
What has been the case here? Incompleteness or inaccuracy?
The government rationale behind the invasion was: Saddam had backed the 9/11
attacks; he was also hiding weapons of mass destruction; the Iraqi people
would eventually see the United States as their rescuer. Now the bipartisan
commission investigating the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks reported "no credible
evidence" that al-Qaeda and Iraq cooperated in attacks against the United
States. Banned biological, chemical and nuclear weapons are yet to be found.
Questioned by the commission, Clarke said that Bush was so anxious with
launching a war on Iraq that they missed the growing terrorist threat from
al-Qaeda. But in an April 2003 opinion survey by the Pew Research Centre for
People and the Press, 63 percent of people interviewed said they believed
the war in Iraq would help the war on terrorism.
"You may wonder why it is that a majority of Americans still link Saddam to
9/11," says Snow. "The reason for such a belief is because the American
people were repeatedly told by the President and his inner circle that
Saddam's evil alone was enough to be linked to 9/11 and that given time, he
would have used his weapons against us. With propaganda, you don't need
facts per se, just the best facts put forward. If these facts make sense to
people, then they don't need proof like one might need in a courtroom."
According to Snow, the U.S. government succeeded in "driving the agenda"
and "milking the story" (maximising media coverage of a particular issue by
the careful use of briefings, leaking pieces of a jigsaw to different
outlets, journalists gradually piece together the story and their sense of
discovery drives the story up the news agenda).
"That's also very commonly practice," she says. "When a country goes off to
war, so goes its media with it. The news media were caught up in the rally
round the flag syndrome. They were forced to choose a side, and given the
choices, whose side did they logically choose but the U.S.?"
For Snow, the funny thing is that "the American public succumbed more to the
stupid propaganda tricks than did the rest of the world. I think we are a
gullible public. We wanted to believe the best about ourselves and it seemed
beyond our capacity to imagine that we would go to war with a country
without a solid reason."
"At the beginning of the conflict, there was a less critical examination of
the facts because we were a nation still overcoming the 9/11 syndrome and
seeking vengeance," she says. "You did not have a vigorous public demanding
the truth. If anything, I think we tend to point the finger too quickly at
the news media when the rest of us should have been putting pressure on the
media and the government to provide us with a well-grounded rationale for
war with Iraq other than that Saddam is evil and must go. The public
accepted Bush's simplistic rationale and so the media skipped along to the
same tune.."
While the U.S. government campaign had an impact on the U.S. public, the "
perception management" was a failure at influencing foreign audiences.
According to Bytwerk, "it is far easier to make propaganda at home than
abroad. One has more credibility at home, and much more in common with the
audience. Although Nazi propaganda was not completely believed by Germans,
they believed what their government said far more than the British believed
German propaganda, for example. All things being equal, most people want to
believe they live in a good country."
In spite of the worldwide sympathy caused by the 9/11 attacks, "given the
U.S. influence in the world, a fair percentage of the world's population
will be suspicious no matter what the U.S. does, whether for good or bad
reasons," he says. "For example, many people are quite willing to believe
that the U.S. government itself knew of or planned the Sep. 11 attacks."
Events also conspired to create a PR catastrophe.
Iraqis started rallying to oppose the U.S. military presence; the Shias
joined the Sunni Muslims in fighting against the U.S. occupation (when news
reports made us believe that the Shia majority in Iraq, crushed by Saddam's
regime, would welcome the U.S. troops); then Chalabi, previously tagged by
some "analysts" as the "George Washington of Iraq", fell into disgrace when
it was reported that he had leaked information to the Iranians. Finally,
pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, showing U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi
prisoners, created a global outrage.
Both the Bush administration and al-Qaeda typecast the struggle for the
mindset as a fight between good and evil. And it looked like U.S. opponents
learnt a few communication tricks, including the well-timed release of
Saddam and bin Laden tapes.
Last April four Italians were captured in Iraq. The Arabic television
channel al-Arabiya showed three of the hostages (one of them, Fabrizio
Quattrocchi, had already been executed) apparently in good health. In the
footage, the kidnappers promised to liberate them if the Italians joined in
a demonstration against the presence of foreign troops in Iraq and against
Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi's stand on Iraq.
"The kidnappers' message seeks not to influence Iraq but Italy," said ruling
party Forza Italia's leader in the Senate, Renato Schifani. Through "terror"
and "barbaric behavior" the captors "are trying to manipulate the next
(European) elections" and "divide the country."
On the eve of Bush's visit to Rome and the European parliament elections,
thousands of people gathered in Rome headed by the kidnapped soldiers'
relatives to protest against the war.
Snow thinks they are "not necessarily using propaganda techniques more
successfully, but rather they are waking up to the reality that if you want
to challenge the status quo, then you need to study and apply similar
techniques of mass persuasion."
Some of the most effective propaganda campaigns are the prop-docs like
'Fahrenheit 9/ 11', she says. "Michael Moore and other filmmakers have
figured out that in order to try to beat them, you need to use the same game
board playing pieces. All of the rightwing critics of Moore's latest film
say that he plays loose and fast with the facts, as if government leaders
don't do the same when it's convenient to them."
* Miren Gutierrez is IPS Editor-in-Chief
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=24387