New PR Offensive For War: The Big Guns Of August

Five summers ago, White House chief of staff Andrew Card — explaining the need to defer an all-out PR onslaught for invading Iraq until early fall — famously asserted that "you don't introduce new products in August." But this year, August isn't a bad month to launch a media blitz for the Iraq war, an old product that must be constantly reinvented to counteract the increasing buyers' remorse of the American public.

Looking for the glass half full, many people — not the least of them journalists — like to believe that the news media have gotten wise to the manipulators in high places who are determined to rev up the country's war machinery. But recent evidence is not encouraging.

Media ripple effects have been appreciable since a high-profile July 30 op-ed piece, by Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, appeared in The New York Times under the headline "A War We Just Might Win." Touting themselves as "two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq," they claimed — on the basis of a recent eight-day officially guided tour of Iraq — that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms."

But O'Hanlon and Pollack were always fervent supporters of the Iraq war. O'Hanlon has been a prolific foreign-policy theorist at the Brookings Institution, and Pollack's past credits include working at the CIA and authoring the 2002 bestseller "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." Their critiques of the war in Iraq have been merely tactical.

What has happened in the last week is akin to a pattern that worked well for the most fervent hawks of the Bush administration during agenda-setting for the invasion. Vice President Cheney and his underlings leaked disinformation — about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda — onto the front pages of The New York Times and other media outlets that breathlessly reported the falsehoods as virtual facts. Then Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and other top officials would go in front of TV cameras and microphones to cite the same "reporting" in the Times and elsewhere that they had rigged in the first place.

After the O'Hanlon-Pollack piece appeared in the Times last Monday, the duo made the rounds of TV studios and other media outlets.

Shamelessly, they flogged the goal of perpetuating a war based on deception that they'd helped to deceive the country into in the first place.

On cue, Tuesday night Cheney went on CNN's "Larry King Live" and declared that U.S. military strategists "made significant progress now into the course of the summer. ... Don't take it from me. Look at the piece that appeared yesterday in The New York Times, not exactly a friendly publication — but a piece by Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack on the situation in Iraq. They're just back from visiting over there. They both have been strong critics of the war."

On Wednesday, the U.S. News & World Report website reported: "The news that the U.S. death toll in Iraq for July, at 73, is the lowest in eight months spurred several news organizations to present a somewhat optimistic view of the situation in Iraq. The consensus in the coverage appears to be that things are improving militarily, even as the political side of the equation remains troubling."

What's most troubling is a U.S. media environment that perpetuates the same kinds of scams — and prolongs a long-discredited war — time after time, year after year.

The underlying problem, which no amount of media machinations or optimistic spin can obviate, could be described as militarism. In Washington, among the most influential journalists and the most powerful politicians, some have it bad and some have it worse. When the chips are down, one way or another, we're told that U.S. military might can provide the needed fix. But a more reflective assessment of history — recent and current — would tell us otherwise.

The new documentary film "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" is based on Norman Solomon's book of the same title. For more information about the full-length movie, narrated by Sean Penn and produced by the Media Education Foundation, go to: www.warmadeeasythemovie.org. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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