This ominous blockquote from Dr. Barnett Rubin’s excellent Aug. 29 diary Post Labor Day Product Rollout: War with Iran (Cross-Posted at Informed Comment Global Affairs)! really got my attention, so I filed it away...
They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."
...but at the time, I just couldn’t bring myself to believe the administration could really be that insane. However, over the last few days, I’ve seen some things that look to me like an implementation of these "instructions". More after the fold--
I know that beating the Iran war drum is nothing new for the Fox "News" Channel, but I thought this video clip was exceptionally disturbing even by Fox standards—a video showing what an attack on Iran would (not might) look like.
Now how about the slick production values in that video; looks like a lot of effort went into it. And look at how neat and clean it will all be; no mention WHATSOEVER of any casualties, whether US or Iranian. Just a "surgical" strike and then we’ll all be safer.
This video was scary in the thoroughness of its detail, and scary because, according to the channel from which a majority of Americans still get their "news", an attack on Iran would look...well, actually pretty freakin' cool.
This was followed by "analysis" with überneocon (and leading Iraq War proponent) Michael Ledeen, and a Fox News military analyst, who actually refers to the video as a "promo piece". Promotional, huh?
What you don’t see in either clip is that the "Target: Iran" graphic behind Hannity was actually displayed on three different screens arrayed behind the panelists. A friend of mine who has a marketing degree, once told me you have to repeat something three times before the message sticks (think of the annoying "Head On apply directly to the forehead" commercials). Coincidence?
This was also an opportunity for Ledeen to promote his newest book, The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction, in which he writes that this "administration or the next will likely face a terrible choice: appease a nuclear Iran, or bomb it before their atomic weapons are ready to go."
This book was released September 10 (I guess the 11th would have been too obvious), just days after the Sept. 6 launch of the American Enterprise Institute’s "All or Nothing" campaign to "save the surge". (Which I’m sure was itself planned completely independently of the Petraeus testimony and 9/11 anniversary).
Speaking of connections between "Saving the Surge" and whipping up support for war with Iran, check this out:
Did anybody catch this in Monday’s New York Times?
It's brought to you by our friends at Freedom’s Watch, who recently came to our attention by their "Save the Surge" TV ads. Guess they’ve moved on to a new message, and criticizing Columbia University isn’t really it, as their breathless press announcement about the ad makes clear.
Freedom’s Watch, you'll recall, is headed by two former Bush administration officials -- Bradley Blakeman, the organization's president, was a senior assistant to Bush; and Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary. We all remember Ari selling the Iraq War from the press room podium. What better guy to go to when you need help selling your new war, but you have to outsource the job because, well, you don’t have enough credibility left to do it yourself?
Freedom’s Watch seemed to have popped onto the radar just in time for Magical September in order to push the "Surge is Working" meme. But what if that was just a warm-up act for a bigger objective, marketing a war with Iran? With this ad, are we seeing Freedom’s Watch morph from Iraq War boosters to Iran War salesmen? It reminds me of how, back in 2002, the administration’s line slowly morphed from "fighting Al-Qaeda" to "Saddam/WMD/Iraq".
And now of course, we have yesterday’s Senate passage of the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment, a non-binding "sense of the Senate" resolution that Senator Webb called "Cheney’s fondest pipe dream."
Non-binding—so what’s the point?
Was this a trial balloon? A test run to see if we would notice, or care, or react? Something with which to gauge the level of resistance in order to appropriately calibrate the next phase of the marketing plan?
Here’s how the Senate voted on Lieberman-Kyl. You know what to do, in case you haven’t done it already.