The terror alert level is red today, and I smell a PR blitz. Ned Lamont won a big one for the peace movement on Tuesday, and by Thursday cable TV watching Americans find themselves in dire fear of toothpaste tubes. Suspicious minds might discern a connection. Now before you start snarking about tin foil hats (not original anymore, by the way), hear me out. First, let's agree to a few things: (1) the Bush administration has been willing to exploit and politicize terrorism; (2) the White House uses words to elicit behavior rather than to mirror actual states of affairs in the world; and (3) they're better at public relations campaigns than governing. Now I have no doubt that the 20-odd suspects in custody in the UK intended to bomb airplanes and am even willing to stipulate that their conduct was more than merely preparatory. But I still want to raise one question:
why now?
OK. Thanks for sticking with me.
Here are the mechanics of the scam:
STEP I: Structuring the Debate
Years ago a city councilman told me, "He who controls the agenda runs the meeting." It's a simple idea, really: by controlling the universe of topics allowed into conversation, participants can be guided gently toward a predetermined outcome. For example, public opposition to a new road can be gently steered into a technical discussion of traffic flow patterns. By design, everyone gets lost in the details, but the road opponents walk away with the feeling that they've "been listened to" and the planners continue planning the road having "received public input." The outcome was planned, but no fingerprints are discernible. After all, everybody went away satisfied that they had had their say.
Controlling the agenda is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and it's been the bread and butter of the public relations industry for years. Sigmund Freud's PR man nephew, Eddie Bernays, was a master of the form. In the 1920s, the publishing industry came to Bernays with a problem. More people were listening to the radio and fewer were reading books. How would they get demand back up? Eddie, a master of what he called "big think," went at the problem obliquely by planting articles about built-in bookcases in the architectural journals of the time. As more craftsman bungalows with built-in bookcases went up, so did demand for materials to put on them. Bernays recognized that the real problem wasn't that fewer people were reading books but that fewer people were buying them. And, of course, it's unlikely that any of the new homeowners who found themselves in a bookstore ever realized that they had been guided there.
By the middle of the last century Bernays was thinking about how to apply his techniques to politics and in 1955 produced a book called The Engineering of Consent.
"Now the concept of consent came from the Declaration of Independence, `the consent of the governed,'" [Bernays] told an interviewer. "Nobody is led anywhere unless he wants to be led." He chose the word "engineering," he added, because in America "the only way to approach a problem of millions--200 millions today--is to look at it as an engineering problem. Some people thought the use of the word `engineering' was cynical to use in connection with consent, but I didn't mean it as that. I think I found the words in a book on politics." [See Larry Tye, The Father of Spin, p. 104]
So it's not beyond the pale to suggest that a red herring such as a newly discovered terrorist threat might be introduced into the media to suck up the oxygen that might otherwise be used to discuss the war.
STEP II: Pairing Conditioned and Unconditioned Stimuli
And then there's classical conditioning. In 1920 John B. Watson discovered that he could create phobias. Working in a lab at Johns Hopkins Watson presented a child ("Little Albert") with a white rat while at the same time startling the boy by banging loudly on a piece of metal. Although he initially showed no fear of white rats, by the time Watson was finished with Little Albert the kid cried at the sight of a wide range of white things including: rabbits, dogs, fur coats, Watson's white hair, and even Santa Claus.
Driven out of academia by scandal (sex, by the way, not research ethics), Watson found his way into the advertising/PR industry. Although he burned his papers, there is little doubt that that the many pairings of beautiful women and cold bottles of beer had their origins in the fecund mind of John B. Watson.
Watson's trick was to pair a neutral stimulus (we'll call this the conditioned stimulus or CS), e.g., a friendly white rat, with another stimulus (call it the unconditioned stimulus or UCS) that was followed by the desired response. Over repeated trials, the UCS-response attached itself to the CS and other stimuli associated with the CS. Thus, Little Albert came to fear Santa Claus and would cry even when Watson was not banging on the iron bar.
Memories of people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center are a far more potent stimulus than banging on an iron bar. Again, given who's in charge at the moment it's not beyond the pale to suggest that the UK arrests are being used to give us all a refresher course in fear.
STEP III: Pairing Peaceniks and Terrorism
Immediately after Lieberman's loss, the GOP began a coordinated strategy of linking the peace wing of the Democratic Party to terrorism. Notice that from the perspective of classical conditioning the point is to pair Democrats with terrorists in order to elicit exactly the same response.
Dick Cheney (NYT 8/10):
Vice President Dick Cheney, who went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might encourage "al Qaeda types." "It's an unfortunate development, I think, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy.''
Tony Snow (WH Trans. 8/9)
This is a defining moment in some ways for the Democratic Party. I know a lot of people have tried to make this a referendum on the President; I would flip it. I think instead it's a defining moment for the Democratic Party, whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they're going to come after you.
The flip is in, folks. The peaceniks in the Democratic Party (oh, hell, all the Democrats) are dangerous, extreme, and they are going to come after you. Again, notice that Cheney and Snow are not using language to reflect states of affairs in the world but to elicit conduct. It's old time classical conditioning. Peaceniks (CS) get paired with terrorists (UCS) with the fear-response used to gin up support for the war.
Now back to the question I raised above the fold: Why now?
Remaining quotes from the Guardian (8/11):
A decision was made to move suddenly following months of surveillance.
(1) So a bust was in the works for a while.
The plans could have been carried out in the next two days, a White House spokesman said today. He added that Tony Blair and George Bush had discussed the plot on Sunday and Wednesday.
(2) There was coordination between the UK and the White House regarding the bust just prior to the Lamont election and the pairing talk coming out of the White house. Notice also the use of the word "could" as opposed to "would."
There were no firm indications of plans for an attack to have been carried out today, but the US homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, said it was a "well advanced" scheme. He said the plot was based in Britain but was "international in scope".
(3) What, precisely, does "well advanced" mean?
"This wasn't supposed to happen today," a US official who asked not to be named, told the Washington Post. "It was supposed to happen several days from now. We hear the British lost track of one or two guys. They had to move."
(4) What, precisely, does "several days from now" mean? Given that the Iraq war was undertaken on the basis of bogus "British intelligence" is it possible that even if this new evidence was accurate it's also extremely convenient?
The mark of a really good PR campaign is that it's not obviously PR. Good PR rings true, and the targets of the campaign unwittingly cooperate in bringing it to its conclusion. Think of the road opponents who thought they were heard or the people buying well-bound books for their new bungalows. At the end of the day, the test is whether or not the PR campaign brought about the desired behavior.
Now put yourself in Karl Rove's office. The Iraq War is a house of cards. It was undertaken on the basis of misinformation, bungled in its execution, and it's grinding on with no end in sight. Ned Lamont beats an 18-year pro-war incumbent in Connecticut giving the peace movement new momentum and, more importantly, ordinary citizens permission to voice their growing doubts about the war. What would you do to silence that conversation? How would you go about controlling the agenda?
