November 2006 | Art & Soul
Believing Their Own Propaganda
The lies that took us to Iraq and that keep us there today
By Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are the co-authors of the benchmark 1995 muckraker Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. Their newest book looks to the role propaganda, PR and marketing played in our nation’s willingness to execute war in Iraq. Its detailed analyses address the high-profile topics leading up to the invasion: Ahmed Chalabi, Judith Miller and media distortion, WMD and Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N., and also PR strategies after the shooting started, including the military’s policy on corpses. There’s also behind-the-scenes revelations from the Pentagon, CIA headquarters, the White House, and secret PR firms that represent the government. Below is an excerpt from the final chapter of The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq.
Critics of the U.S. war in Iraq have often pointed to the contradiction between the idealism of America’s stated objectives—democracy, peace, freedom—and the sordid realities of war, human rights abuses, and corruption. Less frequently noted is the fundamental incoherence of U.S. policy, not just in Iraq under the Bush administration, but throughout the Middle East and for decades. To illustrate this point, here is a short list of some major episodes in American involvement:
• In the 1950s, the United States followed the lead of the British in supporting the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran. The British motive in this incident was clear: a desire to retain control of Iranian oil. The United States, however, got snookered. Americans accepted British claims that Mossadegh (a democrat and civil libertarian) was a closet socialist and treated Iran as a turf battle in the Cold War.
• The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran prompted alarm in Washington, which reacted throughout the 1980s by supporting the government of Saddam Hussein during the Iran/Iraq war. For policymakers during this period, Hussein’s Baathist regime (even though it professed socialist leanings and had a history of ties to the Soviet Union) was seen as a bulwark against the spread of Iran’s Shiite fundamentalism.
• Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait sparked a reversal in U.S. policy. Almost overnight, Hussein went from being an ally to “worse than Hitler,” and the United States led Operation Desert Storm to drive him out of Kuwait, followed by a decade of sanctions as well as military and political efforts to overthrow his regime.
• Notwithstanding the tilt against Iraq, after Operation Desert Storm, U.S. troops allowed Saddam Hussein to quell an uprising by Iraq’s Shiite majority population. The U.S. thus enabled Saddam to remain in power, largely out of fear of becoming embroiled in a quagmire, combined with fear of Shiite advances that would benefit Iran.
• In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, and paved the way for elections that brought a Shiite fundamentalist government to power in Iraq, which is expected to form friendly ties with Iran.
Each of these twists and turns in policy has been accompanied by a combination of triumphal rhetoric about America’s lofty aims and dire warnings about the consequences that will follow if America fails to act. Each time, the proponents of these policies have argued that the United States must intervene and win, and that victory will transform the Middle East into an oasis of democracy and peace. Yet each step toward that victory has ended in disappointment, followed by new plans for new interventions, accompanied by new promises that the oasis of victory is directly ahead. After several decades of wandering in this desert, perhaps the time has come to recognize that America has been chasing a mirage—an image that is based more on its own wishful thinking than on any realistic understanding of the region it seeks to lead.
As this book neared completion, American politicians and pundits had begun to talk about attacking Iran, using rhetoric very similar to the arguments that led to the current quagmire in Iraq. We can only hope that the American people remember how badly they were misled the last time they were told that preemptive aggression was necessary to neutralize an “imminent threat” in the Middle East. Expanding the war from Iraq into Iran would be madness.
Rather than an expansion of the war, we believe that public disillusionment and the growing civil war in Iraq will eventually force U.S. policymakers to withdraw American troops. When this happens, we can expect to hear a new round of rationalizations about the reasons for the latest failure to bring stability and democracy to the region:
• “If only the occupation had been planned better, it might have succeeded.” The absence of planning, however, is itself a consequence of the propaganda that was used to sell the war. Repeatedly, when faced with predictions of problems, White House officials dismissed the warnings of Iraq experts and adopted plans that were unrealistic because of their optimism—too few troops on the ground to maintain security; failure to anticipate the insurgency; oblivious disregard, even disdain, for those who attempted to assess the human and economic costs of war. These warnings went unheeded because giving them credence would have undermined the public relations effort to sell the war to the American people.
• “We didn’t really fight to win.” This argument was aired in February 2006 by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol.
• “The liberals betrayed us.” This argument is also beginning to circulate among conservative pundits.
In seeking alternatives to the disastrous course of recent history, we must begin by holding accountable the public officials who actually sold these policies to the American people. …The public has an absolute right to expect that government officials will find their way to the truth and lead accordingly, and America’s current leadership has demonstrated repeatedly that it either cannot or will not do so. If it remains in power, we cannot expect better in the future.
Reprinted from The Best War Ever by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber by arrangement with Jeremy P. Tarcher, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., © 2006 by Center for Media and Democracy. Available at local independent bookstores and thebestwarever.com
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