Weapons of Mass Deception: The uses of propaganda in Bush’s war on Iraq
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
London: Robinson, 2003, p/b, £6.99
Regime Unchanged: Why the war on Iraq changed nothing
Milan Rai
London: Pluto, 2003, p/b, £10.99
The Rampton/Stauber book appeared about 6 weeks after the attack on Iraq ended and concentrates on how the war was sold in the United States; the authors are specialists in analysing PR. Some of it will be familiar to anyone who has kept an eye on the Iraq material on the Net or in the left media for the past year or so. Though there are few surprises – and even fewer now than there were when it was first published – there is a lot of detail in their analysis of the American media and its collaboration with the Bush regime’s various psy-ops.
Rai’s book is much bigger, more detailed and with a broader scope – and a thesis. The thesis is that the US wants Ba’athism without Saddam; a more cooperative, less troublesome dictator with whom the US can deal. Rai sees the restoration of the Ba’ath regime in Iraq in progress and draws comparisons with the failure to denazify Germany after World War 2. (1) I’m not quite convinced by this thesis but it doesn’t take up much of the book and doesn’t affect the analysis of the events leading up to the war. In enormous, footnoted detail Rai shows how the US manoeuvred to frustrate the UNSCOM inspectors and bypass the UN to ensure that it got its war.
The books complement each other: Rai shows some of the key political moves; the others show how the lies were sold in America. The UK doesn’t feature much: as usual the UK was just part of the US PR operation, the ‘we are not alone’ factor. As has been frequently pointed out in these pages, New Labour was coopted by the US long before it took office.
As for the events leading up to war, there isn’t much left to say. In the absence of evidence of the Iraqi regime’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, to the distress of the professional diplomats and most of their intelligence services, the Bush-Blair ‘allies’ used dodgy information from defectors, selectively edited what other information they had, or simply made it up as part of the ‘perception management’ of their populations.
What they didn’t seem to factor into their calculations was the speed with which the Net would circulate the views of their critics. ‘Perception management’ in the age of the Internet looks increasingly like a major problem for Blair, Bush and their ilk.
Notes
1 In his column in the Evening Standard 22 September 2003 the novelist A.N. Wilson comments on the ‘sickening’ news that the CIA in Iraq is recruiting former members of the Iraqi secret police to hunt for ‘the resistance’.