A Rotten Deal
Marketing & the War in Iraq
By Lolly DePaulo

War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Slavery is Freedom…George Orwell
Whether the sales pitch is for a new and improved laundry detergent, an icy bottle of low calorie beer, or a brand new war, the techniques are the same. Associate your product with basic drives such as love, sex, hunger, fear, insecurity and the “need to belong,” then repeat the message endlessly until it sinks in. Pretty soon your target audience will be convinced that the new laundry detergent is better than the old laundry detergent, tasteless beer is manly and “cool” and waging a war on a country that has not attacked us is essential for our survival. As Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister, wrote, "A lie repeated many times becomes the Truth"

The selling of the war against Iraq was unleashed in a PR blitz in September of 2002. As Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff told the New York Times, “From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.” The Bush administration launched its public relations offensive to sell a war they had decided to wage more than ten years earlier. In 1997, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush and others founded the neo-conservative think tank innocuously titled, Project for the New American Century or PNAC. One of the original strategies outlined in the PNAC, aside from what Colin Powell called becoming “the biggest bully on the block” was regime change in Iraq. However, then President Clinton wasn’t buying. In fact, there were no takers for their radical plan to dominate the world. September 11, 2001 changed all of that. A policy statement drafted by the PNAC long before 9/11, warned the impatient neo-imperialists of PNAC that it would take a Pearl Harbor type of attack to rally the American public behind “regime change” in Iraq. “The process of transformation (world dominance)…..is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” The assault on the Twin Towers gave the neo-cons the justification they needed to launch their “war on terror.” Within hours of the tragedy news shows revealed the names of the 19 hijackers. There wasn’t an Iraqi among them. In fact, fifteen of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. Many may question the legality of any armed response to 9/11, but, given that such a response was inevitable, why didn’t the U.S. attack Saudi Arabia? No one seemed to ask that question. At the time a shocked and disbelieving nation accepted the necessity of attacking the lair of the “evildoer” Osama bin Laden, hence the first “battle” in the “war on terror” was waged against Afghanistan. Within days of defeating the Taliban, Bush & Co. were repeating the name Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein in every public utterance. The former demon spawn, Osama, disappeared from the radar of Fox, NBC and CNN and was replaced by the vicious sounding Saddam Hussein, almost always pronounced like Sodom as in sodomy. Soon the three words, weapons of mass destruction, which were repeated thousands of times a day on television and radio, followed the name, Saddam Hussein, leading viewers and listeners to assume he was responsible for 9/11. What was the connection between Saddam Hussein and the attack on the World Trace Center? There was none. The CIA couldn’t provide any credible evidence of a link between “Evildoer” number two and 9/11, so Wolfowitz was asked to head a newly created independent agency called The Office of Special Plans. Its task was to provide proof that Saddam Hussein had connections to al Qaeda even though there was no proof of such a connection. Nor was there any proof that Hussein was hiding, manufacturing or trying to obtain “weapons of mass destruction.” However, no amount of evidence was enough to halt the repetition of lies. The administration said that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence had met in Prague five months earlier. The administration said that Iraq had purchased enriched uranium from Niger and intended to use it to build weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations and presented ten-year old documents “proving” that Iraq possessed enormous stockpiles of banned weapons. Americans were told that Iraqi dissidents, who had formed the Iraqi National Congress, had first hand knowledge that Hussein’s WMD were an “imminent threat” ready for activation on 45-minutes notice which Bush repeated in his State of the Union address. The public became so terrified that within months of this hard-sell campaign almost 69% of the population said “they thought it at least likely that Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon,” according to a Washington Post poll. Even today, nine months since the official end of the second Gulf War, almost half of the American public believe in those weapons of mass destruction. Yet even administration officials admit it was a lie. Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.”

Only now, after the death at least 1500 Iraqi civilians and 400 U.S. soldiers (7000 soldiers have been wounded), is Congress or the media asking questions about the administration’s “intelligence failures.” Despite evidence to the contrary, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, continue to claim all is well in Iraq and that those pesky weapons are really, truly going to be discovered, while asserting that if there are any “failures” they are not the fault of the administration who, Bush says, “took action based upon good, solid intelligence." The L.A. Times (Oct 29, 2003) reported that “newly retired head of the State Department's intelligence arm” Carl W. Ford Jr., said the intelligence community “has to bear the major responsibility for WMD information in Iraq and other intelligence failures." This contradicts earlier CIA reports and appears to be politically motivated, a clumsy attempt to bolster administration claims they are innocent of manufacturing evidence.

Despite all of the media and congressional breast beating about having been deceived, the truth was available for anyone to discover. The Project for a New American Century has a public website. Scott Ritter, U.N. Weapons Inspector from 1991-1998, has spent years writing and speaking about the elimination of Hussein’s arsenal, which he claims was destroyed in 1998. Furthermore, twelve years of sanctions, extensive satellite monitoring of every inch of Iraq and an extensive web of other methods of surveillance, much of which is available to reporters, made the Bush claims against Hussein highly unlikely. Yet, no mainstream media organization questioned the propaganda. Indeed, many “news” organizations were part of the slick sales effort which eventually morphed into “freeing the Iraqis” from the tyrant’s iron grip. According to Rampton and Stauber in their new best seller, Weapons of Mass Deception, Bush insiders hired top ad agencies to push “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” – “a product no decent, patriotic citizen could possibly object to.”

We’ve all heard the saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln about deceit. “You can fool all of the people some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” His wise observation could not have anticipated the rise of modern methods of mass manipulation. Hence, we the people, who have been used and abused, are left with a bad taste in our mouths; a flavor redolent of stooges, suckers and fools. The boys from PNAC got their war. We got a 400 billion dollar defense budget, thousands of civilians dead, more tax cuts for the rich, an economy going down the drain and a 500 billion dollar deficit. What a rotten deal!