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Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq – By Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber As the Bush Administration’s rationales for going to war with Iraq continue to unravel, questions are ‘finally’ being asked about how they got into the mess in the first place. How could an invasion of Iraq – based on administration-orchestrated misinformation, disinformation and outright lies – have been sold to the American people? Who did the selling? And what are its ramifications for democratic discourse and/or future American overseas adventures?
These are just some of the issues tackled in “Weapons of Mass Deception. ” Weapons of Mass Deception, gives a deconstruction of the layers of a complex propaganda machine that transcends administrations and political parties and profoundly shapes our perception of reality. This book is dangerous; Rampton and Stauber see through the spin and the spin around the spin. They run PR Watch (www. prwatch. org), an on-line publication that documents how governments and corporations daily insinuate themselves into our psyches???or try to.
In this remarkably equitable, well-documented book, one learns about the people and the motivations behind the multiple messages, repeated phrases, and battles for global hearts and minds that make up a huge part of the War on Terrorism. While most Americans assume that the truth is slippery in the hands of politicians, few realize the role of public relations firms, doublespeak, and branding enumerated in this book. Yet the corporate-style marketing, Disney- designed sets, and Hollywood-influenced messages that work so well to sell products???the buying of which is sold to us as patriotic???aren’t working so well on the global stage. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century,” write Rampton and Stauber, “attempts to market the United States [abroad] as ‘brand freedom’ came into conflict with a U. S. tendency to talk rather than listen, combined with U. S. support of undemocratic regimes whose own political objectives contradicted America’s stated principles. ” One may be familiar with some of the issues discussed in “Weapons of Mass Deception,” but the books drops the veil on a number of stories that have not been covered adequately — or not reported at all — by the mainstream media.
Of particular interest is the book’s focus on the critical role of public relations companies hired by the government to sell the war. For starters, Rampton and Stauber remind readers about the PR campaign masterminded by Hill & Knowlton for the first war in the Gulf. Though the babies-torn-from???incubators story has become infamous within the PR community, few Americans understand how (much less why) their perceptions were managed at that time and how their perceptions about various Islamic states and leaders have been managed ever since.
As recently as January 2003, for example, in an opinion poll conducted by Knight-Ridder newspapers, half of the people surveyed still believed that one or more of the September 11 terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens. In fact, none were from Iraq. The Rendon Group’s information war “Weapons of Mass Deception” takes a close look at the Rendon Group, a relatively unknown yet powerful public relations outfit that has had its imprint all over U. S. -Iraqi affairs for more than a decade. Founded by John Rendon, a former consultant to the campaigns of Democratic Party politicians Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, the company “has worked… uring the past decade on behalf of clients including the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. ” In 1996, Rendon boasted to an audience of cadets at the U. S. Air Force Academy that during the first Gulf War he had been responsible for providing the hand-held American flags and flags of other coalition countries to the people of Kuwait City so they could greet the U. S. Marines when they arrived. “Saddam Hussein was the beloved ally of the senior Bush Administration right up until the point he decided he could go in and take over the oil fields in Kuwait,” John Stauber told Amy Goodman, in a recent interview. Part of the PR campaign against Saddam twelve years ago was, the relatively easy task of, turning him into an evil dictator. ” According to the book, after the war, “during the first year of Rendon’s post-war contract with the CIA… It spent more than $23 million, producing videos, comic books ridiculing Saddam, a traveling photo exhibit of Iraqi atrocities, and two separate radio programs that broadcast messages from Kuwait into Iraq, mocking the regime and calling on Iraqi army officers to defect. The Rendon Group’s “most significant project” was helping to organize the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in 1992. The INC is described as a coalition of “Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites Arabs, secularists and Islamists, liberal democrats, old-style nationalists and ex-military officers. ” Ahmed Chalabi, the “colorful” Rendon protege was appointed to head the group in October 1992. ABC News’ Peter Jennings reported in 1998 that the Rendon Group not only came up with the [group’s] name, but also passed along more than $12 million of CIA money to the organization.
In the fall of 2001, barely a month after 9/11, the Pentagon gave the Rendon Group “a four-month, $397 thousand contract to handle PR aspects of the U. S. military strike in Afghanistan. ” Within a few months Rendon was assisting the Pentagon’s “new propaganda agency, the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). ” Although the OSI was forced to disband over a spate of bad publicity, Rendon kept its Pentagon contract. Rendon Group staff refused to discuss its Pentagon work with the press, claiming it was operating under a “confidentiality/nondisclosure agreement. One incident “during the war itself provided a rare breach in the wall of secrecy. ” The incident involved the murder of TV cameraman Paul Moran by a suicide bomber in northern Iraq in late March. His obituary, published in his hometown of Adelaide, Australia, noted that Moran’s activities “included working for an American public relations company contracted by the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency to run propaganda campaigns against the dictatorship. ” John Rendon attended Moran’s funeral in Adelaide. September surprise From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August,” White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. told the New York Times in September 2002. Rampton and Stauber write: “Card was explaining what the Times characterized as a ‘meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies, of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein. ‘ ” From that point forward, the administration rolled out a heavy arsenal of misinformation, disinformation, and highly dubious intelligence to sell the war to the American people”.
The late-March invasion of Iraq was clearly the culmination of this campaign of “perception management. ” Post-war planning was obviously not nearly as attentive to details. After manufacturing pre-war consent, the administration has been confronted with a number of unexpected challenges including chaos and instability, a burgeoning guerilla resistance, and mounting U. S. casualties. At home, the Bush Administration continues to receive criticism about ginned up intelligence and the failure to find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
Among the lessons gleaned from “Weapons of Mass Deception” is how this administration readily pulls together a dream team of spin masters and storytellers — government agencies, highly paid public relations firms, political hacks, and a willing media — to market its message. Effective Public Relations In their eye-opening new expose, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, Rampton and Stauber reveal ??? headline by headline, news show by news show, press conference by press conference ??? the deliberate, aggressive, and highly successful public relations campaign that sold the Iraqi war to the American public.
April 9th seemed to confirm what Washington and pro-war pundits had been saying for months: that the Iraqi people would eventually come to see America as their liberator, not their enemy. Yet the American media chose to focus on headlines such as “Iraqis Celebrate in Baghdad” (Washington Post) rather than on a Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos Square showing it to be nearly empty, or the Muslim cleric who was assassinated by an angry crowd in Najaf for being too friendly to the Americans, or the 20,000 Iraqis in Nasiriyah rallying to oppose the U.
S. military presence. We’ve always known what good PR and advertising could do for a new line of sneakers, cosmetics, or weight-loss products. In Weapons of Mass Deception, Rampton and Stauber show us a brave new shocking world where savvy marketers, “information warriors,” and “perception managers” can sell an entire war to consumers. Indeed, Washington successfully brought together the world’s top ad agencies and media empires to create “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” ??? a product no decent, patriotic citizen could possibly object to.
With meticulous research and documentation, Rampton and Stauber deconstruct this and other “true lies” behind the war: ??Top Bush officials advocated the invasion of Iraq even before he took office, but waited until September 2002 to inform the public, through what the White House termed a “product launch. ” ??White House officials used repetition and misinformation ??? the “big lie” tactic ??? to create the false impression that Iraq was behind the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, specially in the case of the alleged meeting in Prague five months earlier between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials. ??The “big lie” tactic was also employed in the first Iraq war when a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah told the horrific ??? but fabricated ??? story of Iraqi soldiers wrenching hundreds of premature Kuwaiti babies from their incubators and leaving them to die. Her testimony was printed in a press kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a PR front group created by Hill and Knowlton, then the world’s largest PR firm. In order to achieve “third party authenticity” in the Muslim world, a group called the Council of American Muslims for Understanding launched its own web site, called OpenDialogue. com. However, its chairman admitted that the idea began with the State Department, and that the U. S. government funded the group. ??Forged documents were used to “prove” that Iraq possessed huge stockpiles of banned weapons. ??A secretive PR firm working for the Pentagon helped create the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which became one of the driving forces behind the decision to go to war.
What Rampton and Stauber would like Americans to know is that the freedom of speech that is seen to be the essence of democracy also grants the freedom to lie. Thus, a necessary skill for those who aspire to a better, livable world is to be able to discriminate between fact and fabrication. Weapons of Mass Deception also makes it clear that it is important to know who is footing the bill for the vast amount of misinformation that is broadcast???be it the Pentagon, the CIA, a client state, multinational corporation, or other entity. The authors also take us on a tour of the propaganda tactics used by the U.
S. government on its own people. This effort has been more effective than its propaganda abroad, thanks to a largely docile domestic press. They make clear that the 2003 Iraq war (as well as the one in 1991) was sold to the public based on questionable distortions and sometimes outright lies planted by public relations firms. Once these lies are repeated in the echo chamber of the media, they become “truth. ” Conclusion While the book is a meticulous snapshot of what lay beneath the surface of Operation Iraqi Freedom, it invites further exploration.
It gives citizens???including those who may disagree with the authors’ assumptions???useful tools to understand the war on terrorism and its relationship to products such as SUVs, marketed as “urban assault luxury vehicles” to make the reptilian part of our brain feel more safe, even though the vehicles are not so safe, and even as our increased gas guzzling fuels the terrorism we say we’re fighting. The book invites viewers, listeners, and readers to examine how various media filter points of view, and whether media actually offer opportunities for dialogue between multiple points of view.
It notes how many “experts” tend to be from think tanks sponsored by corporations or foundations whose allegiances give them a common perspective on current power structures. After a description of government secrecy (even between government agencies which “need to know” if they are to protect us) and the fear-based (and fear-inducing) Patriot Act, Rampton and Stauber conclude: “Democracy and the free sharing of information … may offer our best protection against future terrorist threats.
Paradoxically, this is precisely what we may surrender if we allow fear to rule our lives. ” As we figure out for ourselves what it means to be “we the people” fighting terror that comes from inside and outside our government in these dark days, books like this cut through the misinformation haze to help us determine our own best take on truth???by exploring multiple perspectives and learning from each other’s experience.
The new information environment, exploited to a limited degree by government and corporate propagandists, can be wielded by citizens to find our way out of our current propaganda quagmire. Reviews Weapons of Mass Deception is the first book to expose the aggressive public relations campaign used to sell the American public on the war with Iraq, why and how the American public was made to buy the war. Reviews: ??”No more bed-time stories… hese guys are here to wake you up. ” Greg Palast ??”A major contributions for those who want to take control of their own future not be passive subjects of manipulation and control. ” Noam Chomsky About the book ??Publisher: Jeremy P. Tarcher (July 1, 2003) ??ISBN: 1585422762 ??Average Customer Review: ***** based on 51 reviews. ??Amazon. com Sales Rank in Books: #50,736 References: ??www. amazon. com ??www. prwatch. com ??www. inthesetimes. com