This is part of my final essay in a creative writing class I'm taking:
"Strictly speaking, a message does not have to be untrue to qualify as propaganda, but it may omit so many pertinent truths that it becomes highly misleading." (Wikipedia, 2006) The United States government exerts considerable influence on the mainstream media as well as the common citizenry using propaganda. It is difficult to reliably ascertain the difference between investigative journalism and intentionally deceptive "news" disseminated from the printed media as well as televised news. The United States of America is at war in Iraq because the citizens as well as the Congress were intentionally deceived by the administration's propaganda campaign.
Propaganda works on the minds and the hearts of the populace, and it is rarely known at a given time that the citizens are being propagandized. Facts come out after some time has passed, then the propaganda may be identified for the misleading statements they are.
Propaganda can be difficult to recognize and rarely are we warned that the information we receive from newspapers and television is not credible. Neither a democratic government nor a free press should deliberately promulgate the kind of misinformation we have been exposed to since September of 2001. There is a lack of a mainstream watchdogs alerting readers or viewers to instances of media manipulation. We are left to ourselves to decide the credibility of our sources using critical reading skills.
Candidate Bush, in a 1999 interview with Michael Serazio of the Houston Press talked of his desire to be a commander in chief during wartime. The son of a former president that presided over a successful war to remove Iraq from Kuwait said:
"One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." (Serazio, 2004)
Chilling in its foreboding prescience, this statement makes one wonder if the events of September 11, 2001 were a tragedy for Mr. Bush or an opportunity to implement his desire for a successful presidency. This hints that there was a public case for war in Iraq, as well as a private agenda. Considering that all the justifications given for war in Iraq have since been proven false, it is apparent that the Bush Administration used propaganda to manipulate the country into support for a war that was not necessary.
After the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the current administration began abusing the cloak of national security as a convenient rationalization to churn out false information, with mainstream media complicity. Peter Hart and Seth Ackerman reporting on the Web site F.A.I.R. (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) reported:
War fever in the wake of the September 11 attacks has led to a wave of self-censorship as well as government pressure on the media. With American flags adorning networks' on-screen logos, journalists are feeling rising pressure to exercise "patriotic" news judgment, while even mild criticism of the military, George W. Bush and U.S. foreign policy are coming to seem taboo. (2001)
In the years since the terrorist attacks, the administration has used this jingoism to exploit their positions of power to influence the media. The public case for "regime change" in Iraq started with a 2002 State of the Union presidential address to the nation when George W. Bush began to make his case for war. At that time, the most compelling rhetoric to justify the war was Iraq's willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, and the imminent threat to the United States those weapons posed to national security. Mr. Bush seemed particularly adept at creating a link between the war on terror in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In the State of the Union Address President Bush said:
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. (Bush, 2002)
These statements made by the president are some of the earliest public examples of propaganda used to support the war. There were private meetings concerning intelligence, or the lack of intelligence, and recent revelations by now retired C.I.A. agents are reporting that the administration deliberately ignored evidence that did not support the case they were making for the war. CBS reported on April 23, 2006 that a former CIA officer from Europe, Mr. Tyler Drumheller, admitted that
"while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence which the administration chose to ignore...The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy." (2006)
It should be pointed out that Iraq did not support terror at this point in time; in fact, Iraq was not on the United State's list of terror nations in 2002. The regime may have plotted to develop the weapons the president mentioned but we now know they had no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons capable of posing a threat to the United States. The Iraqi regime did not "kick out the inspectors", in fact; the United Nations inspectors left Iraq at the behest of the United States Government. These are three misleading statements in one paragraph of the State of the Union Address. There were misleading statements made by the President's cabinet members as well. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN,
"Clearly, we do have evidence, historical and otherwise, about the relationship of the al-Qaeda network to what happened on September 11." (Rice 2001)
When Colin Powell addressed the United Nations in February of 2003 with a seemingly convincing set of charts and graphs with satellite photos of mobile chemical weapons in Iraq it seemed war was inevitable. Mr. Powell spoke eloquently and convincingly about mobile weapons labs, satellite photos, weapons locations, and most importantly, evidence of Iraq's intent to purchase "yellow cake" (2003) from the African country Niger. The Secretary of State had apparently changed his view of Iraq as he had stated two years earlier
"He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq..." (Kick 2003)
This statement has been removed from the official U.S. Department of State website but can be verified independently
here. This website is complete with audio and video of Colin Powell making the statement above. All the claims made during the Security Council presentation have since been disproved according to an article in the Washington Post:
"Piece by piece, the intelligence presented that day by Powell has been shown to have been wrong" (Pincus, 2006) Additionally, Mr. Powell's statement concerning the "yellow cake" purchased from Niger was based on an obviously forged document, according to Wikipedia:
...in February 2002, three different American officials had made efforts to verify the reports. The deputy commander of U.S. Armed Forces Europe, Marine Gen. Carlton Fulford, went to Niger and met with the country's president. He concluded that, given the controls on Niger's uranium supply, there was little chance any of it could have been diverted to Iraq... At roughly the same time, the CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to investigate the claims himself....Reportedly, it took IAEA officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. Using little more than a Google search, IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerien [sic] officials. As a result, the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents were "in fact not authentic." (2006)
As the case for shifting the war effort from Afghanistan to Iraq intensified, administration officials often repeated that Iraq was a danger to the United States due to their weapons of mass destruction programs deliberately using the misleading image of a mushroom cloud to punctuate their propaganda. According to CNN, the president's National Security Advisor at the time, Condoleeza Rice famously said:
"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." (2003)
Some believe that President Bush's administration was dead set on going to war in Iraq even before the election in 2000. In a recent book titled The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their Country by Chalmers Johnson, the author states:
In the hours immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked for plans to be drawn up for an American assault on Iraq. The following day, in a cabinet meeting at the White House, Rumsfeld again insisted that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism." The president allegedly replied that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible," and instead chose Afghanistan as a much softer target. (Johnson, 2004)
After all the talk of a "smoking gun" and a "mushroom cloud", the real smoking gun turned out to be a leak in the British newspaper The Sunday Times which brought the "Downing Street Memo" into the public discourse. Wikipedia states: " `the intelligence and facts were being fixed [by the US] around the policy' of removing Saddam Hussein from power..." (2004) This statement suggests the Bush Administration directly manipulated intelligence to persuade Congress to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. It is possible that the entire case for war in Iraq was a propaganda campaign. We have many excuses for invading and occupying Iraq but no compelling reason that holds up to scrutiny. Through the use of propaganda, the United States is now embroiled in the middle of an Iraqi civil war, a situation that would have been avoided if Congress, and the people, had not been subject to a governmental propaganda campaign.
Propaganda is a tool usually employed by those in positions of power to sway public opinion. It is demonstrated that George W. Bush, the president of the United States of America used propaganda to sway public opinion to support a war in Iraq. The facts that have been revealed in the ensuing years show that all the justifications for war were misleading. Intentionally misleading is a subject for a jury to decide. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had no nuclear capability. Iraq was crippled militarily due to years of sanctions. Iraq was not a terrorist nation. Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of September 11, 2001. To believe otherwise, one must have been successfully manipulated by propaganda.
References
Bradley, E.(Gelber, David). (2006 April 21). A spy speaks out [Television series episode]. In 60 Minutes. New York: CBS.
Bush, G. W. (2002). State of the Union Address. Retrieved Apr. 14, 2006, from The White House Web site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/....
Downing Street Memo. (2006). In Wikipedia [Web] Retrieved Mar 17, 2006 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Hart, P. & Ackerman, S. (2001). Patriotism & Censorship. Retrieved Apr. 3, 2006, from http://www.fair.org/....
Johnson, C. (2004). The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their Country. New York, New York: Metropolitan.
Kick, R. (2003). 2001: Powell & Rice declare Iraq has no wmd and is not a threat. Retrieved Apr. 14, 2006, from http://www.thememoryhole.org/...
Powell, C. (2003). U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council. Retrieved Apr. 14, 2006 from the White House Web site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/...
Pincus, Walter (2006, March 14). U.S. said to have misread Hussein on arms report cites suspicions of ruse.. The Washington Post, p. A15.
Propaganda. (2006). In Wikipedia [Web]. Retrieved March 17, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Rice, C. (2003, January 10). Search for the smoking gun. CNN Live with Wolf Blitzer, Retrieved Apr 14, 2006
Yellowcake Forgery (2006). In Wikipedia [Web] Retrieved Apr. 14, 2006, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/...