29 June 2007
Sliced Bread - How Ideas Spread
In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. And early adopters, not the mainstream's bell curve, are the new sweet spot of the market.
Safe is Risky - Risk is Safer
Advertising: Dan Wieden - "The Secret of My Success is Failure and Uncertainty"
His clients include Nike, Coca-Cola and Microsoft. His agency is a global force. And yet Dan Wieden, the man who coined the phrase "Just Do It", thrives on chaos.
By Ian Burrell
Step into the London offices of Wieden & Kennedy, one of the world's most cutting- edge advertising agencies, and the first thing you see is a mannequin in a pinstriped suit and buffed shoes, his head replaced with a kitchen blender and the words "Walk In Stupid Every Morning" inscribed in pink on his briefcase.
The building in Spitalfields looks like it has been furnished by fictional Shoreditch media upstart Nathan Barley (there is a table football game, drum kit etc), after a trip to the West Coast of America (the office is decorated with self-portraits of every member of staff). Other weirdness includes a padded cell for creative thinking on the top floor and a giant polystyrene statue called Nicola (made by the artist Wilfrid Wood).
"Blender Man" embodies the chaotic creative spirit of the agency that Dan Wieden founded with David Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, in 1982, but the motto is just one of many slogans found in this strangest of workplaces. "Fail harder" is another, "Welcome to Optimism" is another.
This is perhaps understandable when slogans are your business and you have previously come up with a line of such impact as Nike's "Just Do It", as Wieden did.
W&K has grown with Nike, building one of the greatest global brands and at the same time expanding its defiantly independent operation to New York, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Shanghai.
This has been W&K's extraordinary achievement, to maintain its reputation for risky, left-field advertising (it was the world's most-awarded agency in 2002) whilst maintaining a roster of clients that includes such giant all-American brands as Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Subaru and Miller beer.
On a recent visit to London, Wieden explains the DNA of his unique agency and what he makes of the advertising industry's future.
W&K, he says, still thrives on a culture "built around a friendly relationship with chaos", a concept represented by Blender Man. "I think it's important that if you're going to be innovative, that there's not a process for everything. Sometimes it seems that if you're never lost you're never going to wind up any place new. It's only if you're willing to be completely fucked-up that you're going to do anything important," says Wieden, who has a silver beard and a barking ringtone on his mobile ("I'm sorry, I keep a dog in my pocket...")
Yet W&K could not have maintained long-standing relationships with such global clients without a high degree of diligence with regard to the financial side of the business. "There are parts of the agency that operate with the precision of a German railroad," he says. "We try to be as old fashioned as humanly possible when it comes to our books. The tracking of projects, the planning and research is very traditional, very methodical."
The relationship with fellow Oregon company Nike has been fundamental. "We're here because of Nike. They were a small shoe company and we were four people trying to buy shoes for our kids. Because of our close relationship, I think that there's many of the same gene pool, almost literally the same gene pool, floating around both companies."
The familiarity and success of the two businesses does not have to mean the advertising work is predictable, Wieden claims. "Phil Knight (the Nike founder) loves, and has always loved, to take risks, and he took risks with us. That company continues to thrive on throwing out old ideas, embracing new things and waiting to see what happens."
When Wieden looks back at how that "Just Do It" end line came about, he admits it was proposed as nothing more than a "connecting device" to link a group of eight Nike television commercials. "I hated tag lines, we all did, I thought they were dumb. So I wrote, like, six things. 'Just Do It' was one of them. I showed it to some folks in the agency and they went 'Do you think we need that goddamn thing?' " says Wieden, who decided the line should remain. "We just typed it out on typewriters, then blew it up, and put it on a board. It was not a big deal, seriously. Then when it actually aired, it surprised everybody involved because it apparently spoke some truth that was larger than sport or advertising. There's no explaining that thing. Nobody understood that it was going to take off like that."
More recently, W&K has been better known in the UK for its work with Honda, with memorable campaigns such as "Cog", where the tiniest parts of a car interact to set in motion a Honda Accord, and "Choir", in which a group of singers voiced the sounds of driving a Honda Civic.
Despite some of the hand-wringing within the advertising industry over a dearth of good creative work, Wieden, sitting beneath a large "Welcome to Optimism" banner, remains upbeat. "The industry is probably in the throes of its most creative revolution in decades. The experimentation that's going on is so widespread and so profound that I can't imagine being bored."
He is especially thrilled by the "explosive, unpredictable" Chinese market, where W&K opened an office two years ago. "There's just an incredible vibrancy – it's just like unleashing a lot of fresh eyes on old problems," he says of the emerging Chinese advertising industry.
Wieden did not immediately appreciate the importance of the interactive world of new media and is now trying to make up for lost time. "To be honest, we were very late getting into the interactive thing, but we are headstrong about it now," he says. "I mean, we were playing around with interactive, but we were not obsessed with it. We are now obsessed with it."
Like so many others, he is not entirely clear "how we can keep doing what we are doing and make as much money" in the digital arena, yet the chaos and uncertainty appeals to him.
He says television work is being undermined in terms of finance and creative energy.
"I'm not sure television is where the most revolutionary work is taking place right now. Production budgets have shrunk, which should not be a break on creativity, but there's not as much psychic energy in television as there is in the interactive space," he says. "But it's still an incredibly magic medium that has the ability to engage you emotionally in ways that few other mediums do. It's great for storytelling."
The independence of W&K, rare in a world of advertising conglomerates, is an essential part of its DNA. "David Kennedy and I are creative guys. We set out to create a second-generation independent advertising agency that would exist long after we were gone. We may have sacrificed a lot of financial gain, but [independence] has allowed us to make decisions more freely. We have the ability, when we don't see eye to eye with a client, to say 'It's not working, what shall we do?' and not feel like we have stockholders in the room making that decision for us."
Dan Wieden is an influential man, named one of America's top 25 "most intriguing entrepreneurs". But his success, he says, has come from not compromising his creative instincts. "In this business, you follow one of two masters: you either follow the muse or you follow the dollar..."
28 June 2007
Location, Location, Location
Social Websites Expose Class Divide
Bobbie Johnson, Technology correspondent
Monday June 25, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Social networking websites are increasingly splitting along class lines, according to one prominent academic.
In recent years networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have seen remarkable growth and become some of the most popular destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California and internet sociologist, said populations of different networks were now divided on a rough class basis.
Her evidence, collected through a series of interviews with US teenagers using MySpace and Facebook over the past nine months, showed there was a clear gap between the populations of each site.
Article continues"MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students," she wrote in a paper available online. "The picture is now being blurred ... it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class."
Typical Facebook users, she said, "tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively." MySpace, on the other hand, "is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens" as well as "other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm".
MySpace, which was founded in 2003 and bought by Rupert Murdoch two years later for $580m (£290), has enjoyed huge success, particularly among young music fans, and recently became the most visited site on the web.
But in recent months Facebook, created by the college student Mark Zuckerberg, has started gaining ground on its major rival. Figures released last month suggested it had more than 3.5 million users in Britain alone.
A number of high-profile individuals, including Prince William, have joined the service, and established companies have approached Mr Zuckerberg about buying Facebook. The dotcom pioneer Yahoo! is reputed to have offered $1.6bn for the company last year.
The class difference between the two websites could lie in their origins. Mr Zuckerberg started his service while studying at Harvard and until late last year membership was limited to university students and individuals with an email address from an academic institution. This, said Ms Boyd, had given the site higher value among aspirational teens.
In the paper she also conjectured that a recent decision by the US military to ban service personnel from using sites including MySpace showed evidence of social fissures in the forces.
"A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there's a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook."
According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.
"The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can't help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage."
27 June 2007
Lobbying - or How to Mirror the Power Structure
"Although there are distinct limits to what they can achieve, lobbyists are the crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington." --Ken Silverstein
Ken Silverstein, HARPER'S Magazine's Washington Editor, has for years been reporting on the questionable lobbying practices of certain Washington firms that advocate in Congress on behalf of corrupt foreign regimes.
For his latest article, he decided to pose as the representative of a fictitious investment group with business interests in Turkmenistan, and approached several prominent Washington lobbying firms to see how they might bolster the image of Turkmenistan as a viable international economic and diplomatic partner.
See the Interview here
Ken Silverstein, HARPER'S Magazine's Washington Editor, has for years been reporting on the questionable lobbying practices of certain Washington firms that advocate in Congress on behalf of corrupt foreign regimes.
For his latest article, he decided to pose as the representative of a fictitious investment group with business interests in Turkmenistan, and approached several prominent Washington lobbying firms to see how they might bolster the image of Turkmenistan as a viable international economic and diplomatic partner.
See the Interview here
25 June 2007
The "Poverty-Fighting" World Bank
NOTE: It's official - The World Bank is now New and Improved. It has a new president - Robert Zoellick - and a new mission - Poverty Fighting.
Fighting the poor should be easy enough; the World Bank has been doing that for years.
Fighting the poor should be easy enough; the World Bank has been doing that for years.
Zoellick Confirmed as New World Bank President
25 Jun 2007 19:14:49 GMT
By Lesley Wroughton
WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) - The World Bank on Monday unanimously approved Robert Zoellick as its president after a controversial two-year term by Paul Wolfowitz, who agreed to resign over a promotion scandal involving his companion.
Zoellick, former deputy U.S. secretary of state and trade representative, was the only nominee for the job and will overlap for a week with Wolfowitz before he officially takes the reins of the poverty-fighting institution on July 1.
"Mr. Zoellick brings to the bank presidency strong leadership and managerial qualities as well as a proven track record in international affairs and the drive required to enhance the credibility and effectiveness of the bank," the World Bank's board of shareholders said.
Zoellick, 53, has said his first priority will be healing rifts between management and staff caused by the bruising battle over Wolfowitz, whose tenure at the bank was tainted from the start by his reputation as an architect of the Iraq war.
"It is a special honor and responsibility and I am ready to get to work," Zoellick said in a statement.
A tough negotiator with a reputation for being extremely demanding, Zoellick has said he will focus on the poorest countries in Africa but also wants to define a clearer role for the World Bank in emerging nations like China, India and Brazil, which despite rapid economic growth are still dogged by high poverty levels.
He will also have to position the World Bank to deal with new global challenges such as greater concerns about climate change and its impact on developing countries.
His five-year tenure begins in the middle of the bank's year-long negotiations with donors to raise funds for projects in its poorest borrowers, which will set the course of the bank's lending for the next three years starting in mid-2008.
"Once I start at the World Bank, I will be eager to meet the people who drive the agenda of overcoming poverty in all regions, with particular attention to Africa, advancing social and economic development, investing in growth and encouraging hope, opportunity and dignity," he said.
The White House welcomed the board's decision and said Zoellick was deeply committed to the mission of the World Bank in reducing global poverty.
In his first few months at the World Bank, attention will be on Zoellick's management style and how different it will be from Wolfowitz, who relied on a coterie of former White House and Pentagon officials as advisers.
While Wolfowitz made a controversial anti-corruption drive a signature issue, Zoellick has said little about whether he will stick with that strategy or change the way the bank tackles corruption in countries it lends to.
"My sense is that it is an important issue for the legitimacy of the institution but also for the effectiveness of its programs," he said about corruption on May 30.
Some of the stiffest opposition to Wolfowitz came from inside the bank. Zoellick said on Monday he intended to meet with the leadership of the bank's staff association.
Zoellick brings a broad portfolio of experience to the World Bank. He served as a top foreign policy adviser to Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign and has studied and commented on events in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
20 June 2007
Rick Berman - A.K.A. "Dr. Evil"
Berman and Co. - The 60 Minutes Take
Rick Berman takes a certain pride, even joy, in the nickname Dr. Evil. But the people who use it see nothing funny about it—they mean it.
Watch the video here - http://www.bermanco.com/60min.htm
His real name is Rick Berman, a Washington lobbyist and arch-enemy of other lobbyists and do-gooders who would have government control, and even ban, a myriad of products they claim are killing us. Products like caffeine, salt, fast food and the oil they fry it in. He's against Mothers Against Drunk Driving, animal rights activists, food watchdog groups and unions of every kind.
As correspondent Morley Safer reports, Berman believes we are fast becoming a nation of passive children rules by the iron thumb of self-appointed "nannies" and he gets paid good money to keep all those Mary Poppinses at bay. And they have reserved a special place in hell for him.
"Let me just take you through some of the things your critics have said about you. Sleazy, greedy, outrageous, deceptive, ineffective except when it comes to making money for yourself, corporate lackey who is one of the scariest people in America," Safer remarks.
"You know, I grew up in the Bronx. Name-calling is not the worst thing that I've been subjected to," Berman replies.
Rick Berman is lawyer and a lobbyist—which some might say is bad enough, but he would say lawyer and lobbyist for personal freedom.
"If the government is truly interested in my health and welfare, I'm appreciative of it. But, I think I can take care of myself," Berman tells Safer.
Berman claims that we are quickly becoming a "nanny state," an overregulated society with ever-declining freedom of choice from how much we earn, to when we may drive, to what we eat.
He has particular contempt for so-called "food cops" who claim to know what’s best for us.
"They create this Chicken Little mentality that the sky is falling over everything," Berman says. "You know, the latest study says this, the latest study says that. And they drive the government to satisfy that artificial public need."
Berman blames activist, safety and watchdog groups—“do-gooders run amok” he calls them—for trying to scare America into submission. He points to those endless reports, often contradictory, which offer us a dizzying array of fearful news about everyday food and drink that might just kill you: like tuna fish, chicken, diet soda, salt, and that demon, trans-fats.
"You can't make up your mind until you have information from both sides and I don't think that the other side should be allowed to talk and the response be intimidated into submission or silence. And so I'm the other side," Berman says.
The other side as in big business, mainly the food, beverage and restaurant business, which have a vested interest in encouraging people to continue to eat, drink and be merry to their heart’s delight.
Berman’s the booze and food industry’s 6'4", 64-year-old weapon of mass destruction. They hire him to front for them in the "food wars."
"The businesses themselves don't find it convenient to take on causes that might seem politically incorrect, and I'm not afraid to do that," Berman says.
Asked if has become a major tool for corporate America, Berman says, "My mission is not to defend corporate America."
"You're a hired gun," Safer remarks.
"Well, I go out to people and I say, 'Look, if you believe in what I believe, will you help fund it?' Now, I don't know if that's a hired gun or not. But, the point is, yes, I do get paid for educating people. If that's my biggest crime, I stand accused," Berman says.
And it's not just the "food police" Berman goes after: it's anyone who seeks to limit or regulate our way of life, like animal rights activists, trial lawyers, and his current favorite, union leaders.
And Berman uses ads to drive home the message.
"You know what I love? Paying union dues, just so I can keep my job," one TV ad says. "I really like how the union discriminates against minorities!" "Nothing makes me feel better than knowing that I'm supporting their fat-cat lifestyles. Find out the facts about union officials at unionfacts.com" "Thanks, union bosses!"
"There's no sense in putting out a 17 page scientific report that nobody will read. So, I put out a 30 second commercial that makes the point," Berman explains.But the "point" is not made by Berman and Company. He has come up with a clever system of non-profit educational entities. Companies can make charitable donations to these groups, which have names like Center for Consumer Freedom and Center for Union Facts. They are neutral sounding but "educating," with a particular point of view, all perfectly legal.
Berman and his staff of young crusaders attack the nanny culture by combing through watchdog and government reports, seeking inconsistencies, overstatements, seizing on the one fact here or there that might discredit the research. And Berman says he's rarely disappointed.
He blasts MADD for no longer being run by mothers, and PETA, who he accused of killing animals in its care. And he questions the danger of mercury in tuna; he says it’s massively over-hyped.
Web sites devoted to nanny bashing and ads showing children being exploited by union bosses are all in a day's work for Rick Berman.
In the end, Berman says it's all about "shooting the messenger."
"Shooting the messenger means getting people to understand that this messenger is not as credible as their name would suggest," Berman says.
While those tactics have made him rich and powerful, they have also made him mightily unpopular. Even in a mudslinging city like Washington, it’s difficult to find someone who provokes as much venom as Rick Berman.
"He’s a one-man goon squad for any company that’s willing to hire him," says Dr. Michael Jacobson, who heads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a healthy food advocacy group. Jacobson has been the point man in the "food wars" for decades.
Jacobson's declaration of war on obesity has often brought him face to face with "Dr. Evil."
"Berman is against every single measure, no matter how sensible. He’d have no restrictions on tobacco advertising, junk foods galore in schools. No minimum wage," Jacobson tells Safer. "He wants to leave corporate America unfettered of any regulations that protect the public's health."
Jacobson says corporate America simply hires Berman to say the nasty things they wouldn’t dare say themselves.
"He's a hit man. He's dishonest, deceptive, he makes things up," Jacobson says. "He does things that the companies can't do or say themselves, badmouthing just about anybody who says anything critical of industry."
Who are the companies that support Berman?
"The food industry, the beverage industry, alcoholic beverage industry, the restaurant industry's a major supporter. He doesn't disclose the names of his funders," Jacobson says.
But a partial list of Berman’s clients was leaked to the media some years back. Names included Coca-Cola, Tyson Chicken, Outback Steakhouse and Wendy’s.
Berman will not confirm or deny. "You're not going to get a lot of companies who want to say that I'm funding Rick Berman to go after you. They're just not going to do it," he says.
Asked if these companies are embarrassed about being associated with him, Berman says, "I think it all comes down to not wanting to be targeted. I mean, I get attacked. But, I don't get attacked for my information. I get attacked personally."
And though his business rakes in millions, Berman says it’s not about the cash. It’s a calling.
"I didn't need to be doing this. I'm doing this because it's a passion of mind. I believe in what I'm doing," Berman tells Safer.
"But, you're also doing it for the money. C'mon, admit it," Safer says.
"I was making a lot of money before I ever started this firm. I do it because I believe in it. I do it because it’s the right thing to do," Berman replies.
Berman says his methods are fair, and that he is only responding to his opponents, who consistently use scare tactics.He has spoken out against trans-fat, that controversial frying oil under attack by city councils around the country. Berman says it’s hardly the poison its enemies claim it is.
"People should not be led around by the nose with bad information," Berman says. "You can make up your own mind as to whether or not margarine is really rat poison as some people have said."
"Oh come on…," Safer remarks.
"But, that's what they've said," Berman replies.
"You just love it when they do that, though, don't you?" Safer asks.
"Well, they're so stupid when they do that because they leave themselves open for criticism," Berman says. "And that's the tension between these communication battles. Somebody exaggerating the hell out of a story and someone like myself coming in and saying, 'What in the world were you thinking.'"
And on the very genuine issue of increasing obesity in this country, Berman's blood boils when people describe it as an "epidemic" or "disease."
"There are people, the morbidly obese who truly do have a problem in this country. I mean, these are the people who when you see them walk down the street, you get the feeling that their butt is another zip code. OK, I understand that. Okay? That's a problem. Those people are at a health risk. But this whole issue that it's a disease, that it's not your fault that you're fat. I mean, if this is a disease, this is going to be the only disease in the country that you could solve by taking long walks and keeping your mouth shut. This is a personal responsibility issue in most cases," Berman says.
"I understand that and a lot of social activists and the government to some extent is trying to get these people to change these bad habits," Safer remarks.
"I have no problem with education. But, education turns into regulation, you know?" Berman says. "As the government gets deeper and deeper into people's lives, they start to dictate more and more. If a bartender can cut you off for visibly being intoxicated, why won't we get to the point where a restaurant operator is not allowed to let you order dessert? I mean, you could get there."
"Oh, it sounds ridiculous, right? 'Well, I can't imagine that.' But, imagine ten steps to get there and all of the sudden it doesn't appear so crazy," Berman adds.
And that is how Dr. Evil frames almost any issue he fights—resist or big nanny will crush you.
He says MADD won't be happy until there is a breathalyzer in every car. Caffeine and salt will disappear, America will be regulated to a police state, one without French fries or foie gras.
"We all need to take a deep breath. We all need to look at the real science, at the real statistics and I am not opposed to stopping any of the stuff that's really bad. But, I am opposed to making the problem seem worse than it is. And these groups will make it seem so bad so it justifies their Draconian solutions," Berman says.
But Michael Jacobson says Berman, in his malevolence, is distorting deathly serious issues that will have long term effects on Americans.
"An occasional hot dog is not gonna kill anybody. But, when you're having fettuccini Alfredo one night and the next day you have a double whopper with cheese at Burger King and the next day you go over to Denny's and you have one of their enormous breakfasts, that's what's killing us. Half a million people die every year of heart disease," Jacobson says.
Asked if Berman believes in what he does, Jacobson says, "He's a PR guy. How you can believe anything he says? I think he's in favor of making a lot of money."
"Is he a man without conscience, you think?" Safer asks.
"I haven't seen a conscience. You know, I don't know. You know, he's willing to defend any of these companies, the purveyors of cigarettes and booze and unhealthy foods," Jacobson says.
"But I think he does hit a nerve in this country when he goes after the nanny state that everything you do is being controlled by Big Mother," Safer remarks.
"Yeah. Isn't it terrible? We have health departments that are trying to clean up restaurants, environmental agencies that are trying to clean the air and the water. It's just terrible," Jacobson says. "I think it's great that government sometimes protects the public's welfare. And he's there protecting industry."
Berman concedes government has a role, but says for the most part the marketplace will self-regulate.
"If the other side thinks that I'm all of these bad things, the one thing that they must think is I'm effective, or else they wouldn't be bitching about it so much," Berman says
"The fact is you enjoy being the contrarian. You like to be out there," Safer says.
"Well, I don't want to be in a business where it's a me-too thing, where everybody's saying the same thing, and I'm saying, 'Oh by the way, I agree,'" Berman replies. "I'm not afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes."
Berman says he rates his success by one simple measure: is he making people think twice?
As for his critics, Berman says, "I say to them, 'Look, once you get past the name-calling, tell me what's wrong with our statistics. Tell me what's wrong with our science.' Have I said anything that's wrong, or am I just objectionable? And if I'm objectionable, I say, 'Take a deep breath and get over it. I'm not going away.'"
19 June 2007
Murderous Japanese Cult Produces Cheery Anime About Their Leader
Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult founded by Shoko Asahara, is the group responsible for the deadly Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subways, which killed 12 commuters and left over 1000 people injured.
Although he's currently awaiting execution, Aum Shinriyko's latest incarnation as Aleph have taken it upon themselves to finance this remarkably cheery anime film about their leader.
13 June 2007
U.S. National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication
The New Plan states that-
The National Security Strategy of the United States establishes eight national security objectives:
The National Security Strategy of the United States establishes eight national security objectives:
- To champion human dignity
- To strengthen alliances against terrorism
- To defuse regional conflicts
- To prevent threats from weapons of mass destruction
- To encourage global economic growth
- To expand the circle of development
- To cooperate with other centers of global power, and
- To transform America’s national security institutions
How to Sell a War
Marketing an Invasion
How to Sell a War
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
~ This essay is excerpted from Cockburn and St. Clair's new book on the death of the mainstream media: End Times.
The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.
To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.
Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?
Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.
Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.
The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the state department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.
"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers. "All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.
The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."
Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.
Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's D.C. office.
Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.
The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.
According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.
Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .
At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.
As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.
But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."
The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.
So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."
What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning." In other words, lying about the intentions of the U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.
Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."
At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the war.
Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction.Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.
This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception."
During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted.
What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors." The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us."
When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.
The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.
"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from Baghdad.
Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.
Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war."
The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States." This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"
The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an article for the New Republic titled "Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast," arguing that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."
In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed pages.
Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed on message. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way," said Benador. "If not, people get scared." Scared of intentions of their own government.
It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.
Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."
The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.
It's war that sells.
There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn.
He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net
How to Sell a War
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
~ This essay is excerpted from Cockburn and St. Clair's new book on the death of the mainstream media: End Times.
The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.
To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.
Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?
Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.
Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.
The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the state department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.
"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers. "All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.
The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."
Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.
Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's D.C. office.
Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.
The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.
According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.
Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .
At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.
As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.
But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."
The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.
So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."
What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning." In other words, lying about the intentions of the U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.
Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."
At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the war.
Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction.Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.
This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception."
During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted.
What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors." The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us."
When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.
The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.
"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from Baghdad.
Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.
Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war."
The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States." This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"
The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an article for the New Republic titled "Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast," arguing that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."
In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed pages.
Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed on message. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way," said Benador. "If not, people get scared." Scared of intentions of their own government.
It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.
Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."
The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.
It's war that sells.
There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn.
He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net
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