How To Start A War

Anyone can start a war - it's easy. Just do any or all of the following:

1. Accuse the other guy of being a terrorist, while terrorizing him
2. Accuse the other guy of threatening total destruction, while threatening total destruction
3. Accuse the other guy of building Weapons of Mass Destruction, while building Weapons of Mass Destruction
   
4. Accuse the other guy of starting World War 3, while starting World War 3
5. Accuse the other guy of striking first, while striking first

White House Leak: Cheney's Plan for Iran Attack Starts With Israeli Missile Strike

By Gregor Peter Schmitz and Cordula Meyer, Der Spiegel

US Vice President Dick Cheney -- the power behind the throne, the eminence grise, the man with the (very) occasional grandfatherly smile -- is notorious for his propensity for secretiveness and behind-the-scenes manipulation. He's capable of anything, say friends as well as enemies. Given this reputation, it's no big surprise that Cheney has already asked for a backroom analysis of how a war with Iran might begin.

In the scenario concocted by Cheney's strategists, Washington's first step would be to convince Israel to fire missiles at Iran's uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. Tehran would retaliate with its own strike, providing the US with an excuse to attack military targets and nuclear facilities in Iran.

This information was leaked by an official close to the vice president. Cheney himself hasn't denied engaging in such war games. For years, in fact, he's been open about his opinion that an attack on Iran, a member of US President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil," is inevitable.

Given these not-too-secret designs, Democrats and Republicans alike have wondered what to make of the still mysterious Israeli bombing run in Syria on Sept. 6. Was it part of an existing war plan? A test run, perhaps? For days after the attack, one question dominated conversation at Washington receptions: How great is the risk of war, really?

Grandiose Plans, East and West

In the September strike, Israeli bombers were likely targeting a nuclear reactor under construction, parts of which are alleged to have come from North Korea. It is possible that key secretaries in the Bush cabinet even tried to stop Israel. To this day, the administration has neither confirmed nor commented on the attack.

Nevertheless, in Washington, Israel's strike against Syria has revived the specter of war with Iran. For the neoconservatives it could represent a glimmer of hope that the grandiose dream of a democratic Middle East has not yet been buried in the ashes of Iraq. But for realists in the corridors of the State Department and the Pentagon, military action against Iran is a nightmare they have sought to avert by asking a simple question: "What then?"

The Israeli strike, or something like it, could easily mark the beginning of the "World War III," which President Bush warned against last week. With his usual apocalyptic rhetoric, he said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could lead the region to a new world war if his nation builds a nuclear bomb.

Conditions do look ripe for disaster. Iran continues to acquire and develop the fundamental prerequisites for a nuclear weapon. The mullah regime receives support -- at least moral support, if not technology -- from a newly strengthened Russia, which these days reaches for every chance to provoke the United States. President Vladimir Putin's own (self-described) "grandiose plan" to restore Russia's armed forces includes a nuclear buildup. The war in Iraq continues to drag on without an end in sight or even an opportunity for US troops to withdraw in a way that doesn't smack of retreat. In Afghanistan, NATO troops are struggling to prevent a return of the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists. The Palestinian conflict could still reignite on any front.

In Washington, Bush has 15 months left in office. He may have few successes to show for himself, but he's already thinking of his legacy. Bush says he wants diplomacy to settle the nuclear dispute with Tehran, and hopes international pressure will finally convince Ahmadinejad to come to his senses. Nevertheless, the way pressure has been building in Washington, preparations for war could be underway.

In late September, the US Senate voted to declare the 125,000-man Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. High-ranking US generals have accused Iran of waging a "proxy war" against the United States through its support of Shiite militias in Iraq. And strategists at the Pentagon, apparently at Cheney's request, have developed detailed plans for an attack against Tehran.

Instead of the previous scenario of a large-scale bombardment of the country's many nuclear facilities, the current emphasis is, once again, on so-called surgical strikes, primarily against the quarters of the Revolutionary Guards. This sort of attack would be less massive than a major strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.

Conservative think tanks and pundits who sense this could be their last chance to implement their agenda in the Middle East have supported and disseminated such plans in the press. Despite America's many failures in Iraq, these hawks have urged the weakened president to act now, accusing him of having lost sight of his principal agenda and no longer daring to apply his own doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.

Sheer Lunacy?

The notion of war with Iran has spilled over into other circles, too. Last Monday Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, made it clear that the president would first need Congressional approval to launch an attack. Meanwhile, Republican candidates for the White House have debated whether they would even allow such details to get in their way. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said he would consult his attorneys to determine whether the US Constitution does, in fact, require a president to ask for Congressional approval before going to war. Vietnam veteran John McCain said war with Iran was "maybe closer to reality than we are discussing tonight."

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has also adopted a hawkish stance, voting in favor of the Senate measure to classify the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Her rivals criticized Clinton for giving the administration a blank check to go to war.

The US military is building a base in Iraq less than 10 kilometers (about six miles) from Iran's border. The facility, known as Combat Outpost Shocker, is meant for American soldiers preventing Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. But it's also rumored that Bush authorized US intelligence agencies in April to run sabotage missions against the mullah regime on Iranian soil.

Gary Sick is an expert on Iran who served as a military adviser under three presidents. He believes that such preparations mark a significant shift in the government's strategy. "Since August," says Sick, "the emphasis is no longer on the Iranian nuclear threat," but on Iran's support for terrorism in Iraq. "This is a complete change and is potentially dangerous."

It would be relatively easy for Bush to prove that Tehran, by supporting insurgents in Iraq, is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers. It might be harder to prove that Iran's nuclear plans pose an immediate threat to the world. Besides, the nuclear argument is reminiscent of an embarrassing precedent, when the Bush administration used the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- which he didn't -- as a reason to invade Iraq. Even if the evidence against Tehran proves to be more damning, the American public will find it difficult to swallow this argument again.

The forces urging a diplomatic resolution also look stronger than they were before Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wants the next step to be a third round of even tighter sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. Rice has powerful allies at the Pentagon: Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral William Fallon, head of US Central Command, which is responsible for American forces throughout the region.

Rice and her cohorts all favor diplomacy, partly because they know the military is under strain. After four years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US lacks manpower for another major war, especially one against a relatively well-prepared adversary. "For many senior people at the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department, a war would be sheer lunacy," says security expert Sick.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and now a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, agrees. A war against Tehran would be "a disaster for the entire world," says Riedel, who worries about a "battlefield extending from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent." Nevertheless, he believes there is a "realistic risk of a military conflict," because both sides look willing to carry things to the brink.

On the one hand, says Riedel, Iran is playing with fire, challenging the West by sending weapons to Shiite insurgents in Iraq. On the other hand, hotheads in Washington are by no means powerless. Although many neoconservative hawks have left the Bush administration, Cheney remains their reliable partner. "The vice president is the closest adviser to the president, and a dominant figure," says Riedel. "One shouldn't underestimate how much power he still wields."

'Is it 1938 Again?'

Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last week also played into the hands of hardliners in Washington, who read it as proof that Putin isn't serious about joining the West's effort to convince Tehran to abandon its drive for a nuclear weapon. Moreover, the countries bordering the Caspian Sea, including Central Asian nations Washington has courted energetically in recent years, have said they would not allow a war against Tehran to be launched from their territory.

Cheney derives much of his support from hawks outside the administration who fear their days are as numbered as the President's. "The neocons see Iran as their last chance to prove something," says analyst Riedel. This aim is reflected in their tone. Conservative columnist Norman Podhoretz, for example -- a father figure to all neocons -- wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he "hopes and prays" that Bush will finally bomb Iran. Podhoretz sees the United States engaged in a global war against "Islamofascism," a conflict he defines as World War IV, and he likens Iran to Nazi Germany. "Is it 1938 again?" he asks in a speech he repeats regularly at conferences.

Podhoretz is by no means an eccentric outsider. He now serves as a senior foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani. President Bush has also met with Podhoretz at the White House to hear his opinions.

Nevertheless, most experts in Washington warn against attacking Tehran. They assume the Iranians would retaliate. "It would be foolish to believe surgical strikes will be enough," says Riedel, who believes that precision attacks would quickly escalate to war.

Former presidential adviser Sick thinks Iran would strike back with terrorist attacks. "The generals of the Revolutionary Guard have had several years to think about asymmetrical warfare," says Sick. "They probably have a few rather interesting ideas."

According to Sick, detonating well-placed bombs at oil terminals in the Persian Gulf would be enough to wreak havoc. "Insurance costs would skyrocket, causing oil prices to triple and triggering a global recession," Sick warns. "The economic consequences would be enormous, far greater than anything we have experienced with Iraq so far."

Because the catastrophic consequences of an attack on Iran are obvious, many in Washington have a fairly benign take on the current round of saber rattling. They believe the sheer dread of war is being used to bolster diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis and encourage hesitant members of the United Nations Security Council to take more decisive action. The Security Council, this argument goes, will be more likely to approve tighter sanctions if it believes that war is the only alternative.

War - What Is It Good For

War hasn't been used for actual "warring" since LBJ and the Domino Theory. War is now just another piece of a Successful Business Plan. ~ Spinboydotcom











War Is So Over

The world has changed. War can't do what it used to.

By Mitchell Anderson

Published: July 18, 2007

TheTyee.ca

War doesn't work anymore. From Iraq to Afghanistan to the Palestinian conflict, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the oldest method in human history for resolving disputes has become obsolete.

It's not that war is wrong (it usually is). It's not that war is ghastly (it always is). The simple fact is that war as a strategy to achieve a desired outcome no longer functions.

Look no further than the ongoing debacle in Iraq. The U.S., with the biggest military machine in human history, is mired in a losing struggle with determined insurgency equipped mainly with small arms and improvised roadside bombs.

After spending more than $480 billion and counting, the U.S. military still cannot pacify a country with no organized military opposition, even when the prize is the second biggest oil reserves in the world.

Perpetual Enemy Creating Machine

The grisly human toll mounts even as prospect of a military victory fades daily. The U.S. and their allies have so far lost over 3,500 soldiers. Over 26,000 have been wounded. Last year the Lancet estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had lost their lives to violence since the invasion in 2003.

Even while saddled with arguably the most docile and jingoistic media in the developed world, the American public is demanding an end to this fiasco. Two thirds of the U.S. public currently opposes the war. Over half believe that it is creating more terrorists than reducing the threat from terrorism.

This last point is key. The strategy of trying to pacify a population by killing those who don't agree with you may have worked for millennia but has now become plainly counterproductive. It is like trying to fight a fire with kerosene.

With every door kicked in, every person humiliated, every loved one killed, there are more bereaved and enraged people willing to join an insurgency. This ad-hoc volunteer force of combatants is becoming an unbeatable foe for the world's leading military powers.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a poignant example of this emerging reality. Pound for pound, Israel has one of the most effective militaries in the world. They also have employed a grimly well-honed policy of disproportionate retribution.

There is no doubt that the various groups opposed to Israel know very well that the Jewish state can and will exact a disproportionate cost for every action against them. This strategy, with its gruesome human toll on both sides, has been going on for generations, yet has utterly failed to end the conflict, or to protect Israeli citizens.

Everyone's Armed Now

So what has changed? Why has it become so much easier to mount a crippling insurgency? One factor is the global profusion of small arms. There are now about 600 million in circulation in the world, which cause some 500,000 deaths each year.

The cost of a new AK-47 in Iraq is about $200. In Afghanistan, a used one is a bargain at about $10. Bullets are 30 cents each. A rocket launcher in Baghdad can be had for about $100.

According to author Stephen Flynn, "weapons like the AK-47 are so plentiful that they can be had for the price of a chicken in Uganda, the price of a goat in Kenya, and the price of a bag of maize in Mozambique or Angola."

With so many weapons in circulation, the historic advantage of a well-armed military over an unarmed occupied civilian population is becoming lost.

Era of the Suicide Bomber

The other new factor is the deadly and recent phenomenon of suicide bombing. Developed as a tactic in the Lebanese civil war only in the 1980's, it has become a frighteningly effective tool that military powers are virtually powerless to prevent.

Between 1980 and 2003, suicide attacks accounted for only 3 per cent of terrorist attacks worldwide but 48 per cent of deaths due to terrorism. A conventional army trained to fight other soldiers is of little practical use against such extreme tactics.

Contrary to popular opinion, most suicide bombers are not motivated by religious fanaticism. According to Robert Pape's seminal book on the subject "Dying to Win", 95 per cent of suicide attacks have had one strategic goal: to remove an occupier.

Not surprisingly, places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, where suicide tactics are commonplace, are also examples where it has become virtually impossible to win a military solution.

Sunset Industry

In spite of the waning utility of war, like many sunset industries, it will be subsidized long after it makes sense to do so. Military spending around the world has increased 34 per cent since 1996 and currently eats up $1.2 trillion each year -- 46 per cent of which is accounted for by the U.S. alone.

Instead of throwing good money after bad, we should admit that most military interventions are no longer effective and reallocate those resources towards preventing conditions that lead to conflict. Rather than lamenting the end of war, we should embrace the possibilities it creates.

The U.S. government spends 32 times more on the military than foreign aid. Globally, aid is less than 7 per cent of military spending. Based on those numbers, the potential to make the world a more civil, just and peaceful place is enormous.

The so-called "war on terror" will not be won on a battlefield; it will be resolved through economic development, fair trade practices, strategic assistance and respectful negotiation.

Like slavery, subjugation of women and eugenics, the age of war has come and gone. It will not be missed.

Today's Sarcasms Are Tomorrow's Realities

Fiction is now the playbook for real life. Entertainment trumps issues. Reality is just another perspective we may or may not use.











Larry Beinhart Explains the Narratives of War

Larry Beinhart is a regular BuzzFlash columnist and one of our favorite analysts on the role of packaging fictional narratives into reality. We hardly ever watch a movie more than once, but we've watched "Wag the Dog" several times, including viewing it with those commentary tracks by the director, Barry Levinson, and the "producer" of a non-existent war with Albania, Dustin Hoffman. "Wag the Dog" is based on Beinhart's book, American Hero.

American Hero. however, was set in Gulf War I, while "Wag the Dog" parallels the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

What distinguishes Beinhart's writing is how perspicaciously he understands the role of turning fiction into reality in a television age. He also understands the fine art of manipulating the masses.

The Busheviks, of course, are masters at these techniques. They create artificial "narratives" that plow right through reality.

BuzzFlash enjoyed having another conversation with Beinhart, as his thoughts are as relevant as ever.

* * *

BuzzFlash: Your novel, American Hero, was the basis for the film, "Wag the Dog." Your fiction is so interwoven with the reality of politics that, in many ways, it is reality, except that certain specifics are changed. Another of your books, Fog Facts, examined the deception that is used in political narratives to mislead the public.

Let's look at two real stories that the government itself chose to play up -- those of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. What was the Pentagon trying to do with those stories? Jessica Lynch was portrayed as a heroine. The Pentagon basically created something out of her that didn't exist. She was far too modest to take claim for what they attributed to her. And then we've learned that Pat Tillman didn't die heroically. The Pentagon covered up the circumstances of his death, which was death by friendly fire, and made a heroic narrative out of his death that was simply a lie. Jessica Lynch wasn't a victim of friendly fire, but she was unconscious during virtually all of her ordeal, and they attributed heroic acts to her that didn't happen.

Larry Beinhart: They were trying to create a fictional narrative that everybody would get behind and cheer. It's something that armies have always done. For instance, the British Army would go off to the Sudan, and everybody but one guy would get slaughtered, and he would be marched back through London as a hero. It's one of the things you do in war. You bring back the heroes, and you give them a parade. And you beat the drums, and you get people to join up.

I love Pat Tillman, because Pat Tillman should be the genuine poster boy for the Bush wars. Here's a guy who signs up out of genuine heroism and wants to do something. He goes off and gets killed by friendly fire. That he gets killed by accident, or by the incompetence of his own people, is the perfect metaphor for any Bush effort about anything, be it their failure to rescue New Orleans or the failed war in Afghanistan, or the failed war in Iraq. Whatever these guys touch turns into "Death to Smoochy." And then they produce a fictional narrative about it, and lie about it, because they want to keep their story going. When somebody tries to expose it, they say you're not Christian enough. If you were Christian enough, you wouldn't be upset that your son is dead. So Pat Tillman should be the poster boy for this war -- no question about it.

BuzzFlash: If we go back to before the first Gulf War, one of the "gotcha" points in terms of the narrative that led to that war was that the Iraqis had taken over a hospital and thrown babies out of their incubators.

Larry Beinhart: Yes.

BuzzFlash: A young woman testified to Congress and said that she witnessed all this, and how horrifying it was that Iraqis were just barbarians. They made these babies die. Later it was revealed that this young woman was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and she wasn't even in Kuwait -- had no knowledge of such an event.

Larry Beinhart: Her story wasn't true, right.

BuzzFlash: And she had been coached by a public relations firm and given a script to read to Congress. Clearly, this was not done without the knowledge of the Bush I Administration. That revealed how far our government -- in this case, the Bush I Administration -- would go. They actually fabricated an incident, with the help of a PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, and put a young woman who was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador before Congress. As a fiction writer, how can you outdo that?

Larry Beinhart: That's essentially why I wrote American Hero, which came out in 1994. The essential thrust of the book is that the administration created a fictional narrative to justify the real war that they wanted to have. I wanted to produce a fictional narrative that you could read, and know it was fiction, and yet when you had done so, the story explains the facts better than the the government's story.

But they sold the war. They have produced wars based on fictional narratives. I was astonished when "wag the dog" became a part of the international lexicon -- it became a metaphor for fictionalized war.

That's great, but the cynicism did not produce restraint. It produced even more outrageously cynical behavior. It's really quite terrifying. As I wrote in my new introduction for Wag the Dog: The Novel, which is the title of the reissue of the book, it was if they had taken this as an instruction manual.

As part of Wag the Dog, I have a scene in which the guy who's making up Gulf War I considers making up a war called the "war on terror." And he's going to have an incident. They're going to create the war on terror. And in the war on terror, it'll be like the Crusades -- the Christian, rational West against the backward, primitive Islamic East. And it'll be the new Crusades. And clearly you had a fictional incident.

And lo and behold, we had a real incident with 9/11. Then they went ahead and created the war on Iraq, and the war on terror -- which was kind of like the Crusades -- you know, the rational, Christian West against the mad, Islamo-fascist East.

It was astonishingly fictional, but it was a narrative. It was the only narrative seriously available. Because of that, our media universally joined up with it.

The only counter-narrative was that the guys in charge of the United States are madmen, and they have their own private, as-yet-unrevealed reasons for going to war with Iraq, and for having wars. And so they decided to do it. And they decided to do it in a way that would guarantee its failure, which is not a very appealing narrative. It leaves too much unanswered, and it doesn't satisfy either the reader or the TV watcher. It's not much of a counter-narrative, but it is, in fact, closer to the reality.

BuzzFlash: Why would they decide to do it in a way that would guarantee failure?

Larry Beinhart: That's an interesting question, and it is not yet answered, or it is answered in ways that are not narratively appealing. They decided to do it -- and this is my narrative, it's not a universally accepted narrative, I haven't read it anywhere else, so nobody else is buying it yet -- but they did it in a way that was guaranteed to fail because they are locked into a theological narrative. That is, they so believe in the power of their own theological beliefs that they think the theology alone will sweep everything before it. Once they removed the great barrier, which was the evil dictator, Saddam Hussein, and said, okay guys, now you can have democracy and free-market capitalism -- a mini-United States -- a kind of post-war, but more grateful, France would instantly emerge. They honestly believed in all their hearts that that's what would happen.

That theological belief guaranteed that chaos would ensue. They did not believe that you need real government institutions like, peace keepers on the street -- policemen. They didn't consider that, if you disband the army and suddenly release a couple of hundred thousand military-trained guys with guns into the country, with no place to go, that they're not going to become law abiding shopkeepers and construction workers. They're going to say: Hey, I got this gun. I'm going to go out and steal something. Or join a gang. It never occurred to them that that's what would happen. It never occurred to them that it takes years, even for free-market private economies, to come up with industries that employ people and have people making money. They were so trapped in their own theological narratives that they had no contact with realities at all.

BuzzFlash: Your book, The Librarian, was another fictionalized account that perhaps wasn't too far from being reality. When the fictional narrative in politics becomes more prevalent than the empirical reality, or the fictional narrative overpowers empirical reality, how do you write fiction? Aren't you then writing fiction about fictions?

Larry Beinhart: One way is you make it an apocryphal story. You take what is an institutional crime, kind of a soft-core vast conspiracy of the state crime, and you reduce it to an individual, and you make it an individual crime, with an individual paying the price for it, and an individual suffering injustice. That kind of clarifies what's wrong, as opposed to The Fog, in which a Dick Cheney or a George Bush claims he was acting on bad information -- that's what the CIA said, or that's what British intelligence said -- something that they can hide behind.

The other thing is that in fiction you can create the narrative with no restrictions. And yet the fictional narrative may better explain what really happened than the official stuff. That tells you, there's got to be something wrong with the official stuff. Maybe this fictional version I'm giving you doesn't quite cover it, but there really is something wrong, so we better think about this.

In The Librarian, I was writing about the 2004 election before it took place, all right? From my point of view, it was a different kind of test, where I'm predicting what's going to happen. I could come off looking like a total idiot, if I got it radically wrong. If the Democrats had swept the election and swept out George Bush, it would have looked like a pretty stupid book. But what I said was, it was going to come down to the wire, with red states red, and the blue states blue. And then the election would get stolen. And it would come down to a matter of the will of both the Democratic opponent himself and of the American people and how much they were going to tolerate having an election stolen.

And that's how the book ends. It literally ends with the hero saying, "Now it's up to you. What you are going to do about this?" And in 2004 what happened is the American people and John Kerry shrugged and said, "Okay, you stole the election." He was so caught up in the narrative that "these are all honorable men," that I don't think he ever actually understood that the election was being stolen from him. I don't think that he was capable of believing that narrative.

BuzzFlash: Let's talk about another example of how a narrative element overpowers evidence to the contrary -- I mean, the case of the Iraq war. We recall that last year the Washington Post had a poll indicating that more than 60% of Iraqis supported attacks on American troops.

Larry Beinhart: Correct.

BuzzFlash: Let's say that another 10% of people, maybe, weren't being completely honest, so you may have had 70% supporting attacks on American troops. And another ten to twenty percent said they just want U.S. troops out. So polling shows not only do they want us out, but the majority of them, by at least 10% if not more, support attacks on American troops.

Yet, we still have the narrative that we're trying to bring democracy to the Iraqis, and save them from extremists. Bush is still going ahead with the narrative that we are fighting extremists who are undermining Iraqi democracy, even though the Iraqis are saying we are the problem, according to at least one poll. What's your thought on that?

Larry Beinhart: Narratives don't happen by themselves. Somebody's got to get out there and push them. Now there are several real narratives. One is that, in Islamic countries, if you let people vote, they tend to vote for Islamic republics. Islamic republics tend to be anti-democratic and anti-Western. And every time in recent years where we have opened up, or an accident has opened up, an Islamic country to an election, that's the way they voted. In Turkey, it's happening right now. They've been trying to determine whether to permit a vote to go forward that the Islamists would win, although the Turkish constitution is secular. It's up to the military to prevent these Islamists from coming back and re-establishing the caliphate. So that's one narrative that we do not permit. Of course, there's nobody in the United States with a stake in having that narrative.

BuzzFlash: In Iran, the duly elected democratic, secular government was overthrown in 1953 with US and British support.

Larry Beinhart: Yes. In other words, we have two conflicting narratives. One is that we support democracy, and democracy leads to goodness. We also have another narrative, which is to say Islamic-run countries, Islamic theocracies, are our enemy. So those are two narratives. In reality what happens is if you have free elections in an Islamic country, you are very likely to have them vote in an Islamic theocracy. So these two narratives don't compute.

But you don't have anybody willing to say, do not let democracy take place. That would be like making overtly racist statements. You can't say it, so only one narrative is permissible. The only permissible narrative is democracy is good; we support democracy. The truth is that we don't want real democracy. And if we get it, we'll suppress it and fight it tooth and nail.

BuzzFlash: This was true, and is still true, in Central and South America.

Larry Beinhart: It's true in a lot of places.

BuzzFlash: We support democracy -- as long as we can veto the winner if we don't like the winner.

Larry Beinhart: Right. So that's one counter-narrative. The next counter-narrative is that this war is already lost, and George Bush lost it, because he was in charge. He overruled his own generals in the field. And he micromanaged what the generals did, and he led us into losing the war. And he put in one of the world's leading incompetents, Paul Bremer III. And every decision this guy made was wrong. And it's true, okay? I don't know why the Democrats don't embrace that narrative. I do not understand. I do not understand why they're afraid of saying that George Bush has lost this war.

BuzzFlash: Harry Reid said that in April.

Larry Beinhart: He should have kept repeating it. You know, a year ago, when people were first saying the word "impeachment," it sounded, oh, so outrageous. We can't do impeachment. No, no -- not impeachment. But now impeachment's becoming part of the daily lexicon, and we're all going to get used to it. And by the time it happens next year, we'll all be comfortable with it.

The Democrats should say "George Bush lost this war. And if he wants to continue it, he's got to come up with some really clear path or statements how he's going to win it." Once you establish that, then you can get to the next part of the narrative which goes back to the old narrative of we're going to stand down when they stand up, and for them to stand up, they need time to train their army and their police.

The guy who was in charge of training their army and police was General Petraeus. The reason they couldn't stand up is because he wasn't able to train their army. So, here's the guy who was in charge of the failure. The reason we still have to be there, is now put in charge of the whole shebang. And nobody said, wait a minute. You're the guy who presided over the failure that we now supposedly need the "surge" to make up for. And you will again be in charge. What are you going to do different? Nobody asked this, because the narrative of failure has not been accepted, has not even been articulated.

It's there. You can read it in Fiasco. You can read it in my work. You could read it before it happened in Scott Ritter. Scott Ritter provided the narrative. He said this was what was going to happen. To me, you have to admire his guts. It's a very gutsy thing to predict something like that. He said this is what is going to happen.

The degree to which people believe in the narrative over the facts or even the theory is astonishing. The official narrative is that we went to war in Iraq for some well-intentioned reason, whatever it may have been, and that American military efforts, planning and our troops on the ground are the best in the world. And yet the thing fell apart. The real narrative is that we went to war for unknown motives which are probably very bad ones. Then the American generals did not even adhere to their own theoretical principles -- they just went ahead and did what the idiots asked them to do.

BuzzFlash: Let's go to your last book, Fog Facts. You address so much in that book about what the American people see and believe, particularly because television is still such a primary influence on the way Americans think. What is a fog fact?

Larry Beinhart: A fog fact is a fact that's been published, or that's easily available, and that you could go out and check in five minutes on the Internet. Yet it has been lost in the fog of the vast amount of news that we have, because nobody has entered it into a narrative and so made it visible. We've gone over a bunch of them in this conversation, and another of them is the number of troops that you need to occupy Iraq.

BuzzFlash: We have seen, with the Bush Administration over the last seven years, but also in the corporate advertising world, that narratives can overpower reality. Reality sometimes has no place in a powerful narrative.

Larry Beinhart: Narrative is one of the basic ways that we organize life. You go to the grocery store, you organize it as a narrative. You don't organize it logically. You don't organize it emotionally. You don't organize it videographically. You go to war, you organize it narratively. It's one of the basic ways that we think and put life together.

What we should worry about is false narratives that overcome what could be better narratives. Some narratives are so driven by a particular interest or a form of salesmanship that they exclude or ride over things we should have been aware of, that in a more complete or better or more thoughtful narrative would have been included.

BuzzFlash: Meaning fog facts, for instance.

Larry Beinhart: Yes. Meaning, if you're going to occupy Iraq, you need 600,000 troops to do it. One narrative says you're going to draw out Saddam Hussein for whatever reasons, and you're going to occupy the country. Then you've got a choice of two narratives. One narrative is that it's going to be like the liberation of France in 1945, which is very clearly what they had in mind for Iraq. And the other narrative is, it's going to be like the British trying to occupy the American colonies back in the 1700s, or like the United States trying to control Vietnam.

So once you've got the situation, then you pick your narrative -- what it's going to be like. And they picked the wrong one. They picked France, 1945. It's not that the narrative itself is bad, but whether you've picked a good one or not. You watch TV, and the Coca-Cola people want you to pick the narrative that Coke will add life. Your doctor wants you to pick the one that says Coke adds fat.

BuzzFlash: We just had the fourth anniversary of "Mission Accomplished." Bush is at 26% in the polls, yet he continues in office along with Cheney and Gonzales. Rumsfeld is gone, but policy is basically unchanged. We were told we were going to have a short "surge" Now we're told we won't even know the results until September. Do you see any erosion of the Bush-Cheney war narrative?

Larry Beinhart: The Bush-Cheney situation right now is like this: They've gone to Vegas. Their stake was $200,000. They're down $300,000. If they get up and they leave the table, everyone knows they went to Vegas, lost their shirt, plus some more. If they stay there and keep betting, one of two things is going to happen. Either a miracle is going to occur, and somehow they'll suddenly win the war, or there will be a new election and they will be magically whisked away from their seats. Somebody else will be sitting there and become responsible for the losses. So their game plan has to be that they cannot lose more than they have already lost by staying in the war. They only lose more than they have already lost by acknowledging that they have lost. And that makes the narrative official -- that these guys started the war, ran the war and lost the war.

If they can keep the war going until somebody else comes into office, they will change the narrative to the war could have been won if we only had sufficient persistence. And the war was then lost by Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or whatever Democrat's in office. So from their point of view, there's absolutely no reason to end the war.

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