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Selling a war

Convincing Westerners to back Iraq

by Peter Speetjens

“Even the most brilliant propaganda technique will yield no success, unless one principle is borne in mind: the message must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over,” said former Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

Goebbels may have committed suicide on May 1, 1945, but his golden rule of “simplicity and repetition” is still the backbone of any effective mass communication campaign, regardless of whether or not the slogans are true. As Goebbels said: “A message repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.”

So too was the case with Iraq. Time and again we were told that the war was needed to protect our freedom and security.Saddam had nukes, was in contact with Al Qaeda and threatened the stability of the world. Today, we know that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction, was not connected to Al Qaeda and that the intelligence on which conclusions were based was, at best, jaded. When the war started in March 2003, however, one poll showed that 66% ofAmericans thought Saddam was behind 9/11, while 79% though the was close to having nukes. How did they do it?

According to Laura Miller at PR-Watch Quarterly, the techniques used to sell the Iraq war were classic PR strategies. “The message is developed to resonate with targeted audiences through the use of focus groups and other types of market research and media monitoring. The delivery of the message is tightly controlled. Relevant information flows to the media and the public through a limited number of well-trained messengers, including seemingly independent third parties (read: think tanks).”

The campaign to sell the war in Iraq started in 2002, with the establishment of the Office for Global Communication(OGC) as part of the White House. According to White HouseCommunications Director, Dan Bertlett, its aim was to create the American foreign policy message, “so no one, not evenDick Cheney, can freelance on Iraq.” The Times of London reported that the OGC had a $200 million budget to unleash“a PR-blitz against Saddam.”

The message peddled by government officials and spokesmen was one of freedom and fear. Of course, the decision to goto war was taken as early as 9/11 (even earlier think many).At that point, however, the administration had other things on its mind: Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and the question: “why do they hate us so much?” To Washington, it was clear from the start that the latter was an image problem: people misunderstood America’s freedom, and its overwhelming support for Israel had nothing to do with it.

To deal with this, shortly after 9/11, Secretary of StateColin Powell appointed Charlotte Beers as Undersecretary forPublic Diplomacy. Her task, according to Powell, was the“branding of US foreign policy.” Known as the “Queen ofMadison Avenue,” Beers made her name with campaigns for Head& Shoulders and Uncle Ben’s rice before heading two ofAmerica’s biggest ad agencies.

Having defined America as “an elegant brand,” she received an estimated $500 million as her budget and set out to produce brochures, booklets and commercials emphasizing freedom in America, which included a TV campaign “MuslimLife in America,” which (falsely) claimed nothing had changed for Muslims after 9/11, and a glossy poster campaign entitled “Mosques of America.”

Most of her budget, however, went to polls and surveys, which by December 2002 showed that her campaign had failed miserably. All over the Muslim world, the US had gone down in popularity. Beers blamed the Arab media, which she found difficult to penetrate. “We only have one choice in theMiddle East,” she said. “We have to buy the media.” She resigned shortly before the Iraq war for “health reasons.”

Donald Rumsfeld had his own PR star: Victoria Clarke. She too headed several ad agencies and wrote the book Lipstickon a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game.

According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, authors of the book Weapons of Mass Deception, it was Clarke who emphasized that, for the American public to buy the war inIraq, it was essential to stress a link with rogue nation states as sponsors of terrorism. The shift from Al Qaeda to nation states was first made in Bush’s State of the Union speech on January 29, 2002, when he defined North Korea,Iran and Iraq as “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

In a later stage of the war, and a further attempt to control the message, Clarke masterminded the phenomenon of embedded journalism and established “Batallion Camera,” an army unit of 800 photographers and cameramen, which provided the world with (positive) imagery, but eventually causedClarke’s downfall when it staged the “heroic” rescue ofPrivate Jessica Lynch.

Finally, even the Pentagon itself worked with a PR firm, the shadowy Rendon Group, widely believed to be the brain behind the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi. According to the Chicago Tribune, since 2001, the Pentagon awarded the company at least $56 million in contracts.

It appears “wagging the dog” is now policy.

PETER SPEETJENS is a Dutch writer and freelance consultant

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Peter Speetjens

Peter Speetjens is a Dutch journalist & analyst based in Brazil.
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