the inquisitive techie

I wrote a post a few months ago on the propaganda used to sell the Iraq war to the public. I had watched a great video called “War Made Easy”, and found the tools used to sell us the war fascinating. The film details how selling the war to the American public was accomplished by organized, professional people, similarly to an advertising or public relations campaign. Make no mistake about it, the selling of the war on Iraq was professional propaganda.

For whatever reason Google Video doesn’t embed well in Wordpress, so here’s a link to War Made Easy

Recently, former Bush administration White House press secretary Scott McClellan blasted his former employers in his new book. One of his biggest statements was regarding the propaganda the White House used to get us into Iraq. The intertubes are abuzz with this treachery by the former insider. Raw Story details some of the more sordid revelations and propaganda was one of the biggest tools of the administration, as shown in this post on the Huffington Post:

McClellan says Bush’s main reason for war always was “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom.” But Bush and his advisers made “a marketing choice” to downplay this rationale in favor of one focused on increasingly trumped-up portrayals of the threat posed by the weapons of mass destruction.

During the “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” Bush and his team tried to make the “WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were.” Something else was downplayed as well, McClellan says: any discussion of “the possible unpleasant consequences of war _ casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions.”

In Bush’s second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, McClellan says the president was “insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin.”

All of this was a “serious strategic blunder” that sent Bush’s presidency “terribly off course.”

“The Iraq war was not necessary,” McClellan concludes.

McClellan sounds like the first rat off of a rapidly sinking ship. I was particularly interested in the Orwellian doublespeak-like phrase “through the spread of freedom”. In his book “1984″, Orwell gave us the three bold statements of the government. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” But the question that we always talked about in English class was - for who? Whose peace? Whose slavery? Whose ignorance? And most importantly, whose strength? Spreading freedom sounds a lot like that same kind of doublespeak, and to whose strength was it really playing?

We were all fooled into thinking that the war in Iraq was necessary. In 2002 we were still hurting from the attacks of 9/11 and collectively we wanted to return that hurt, naturally. But now we know the truth, and how we, congress, and the world were sold a war nobody needed, except the people who stood to make money from it.

As we head into a critical election, with the Democrats doing their best not to implode, and the Republicans hoping to stay the course, we must be diligent in separating truth from fiction, propaganda from news, and good from evil. Listen for the drumbeats of war, the next Pearl Harbor, the next reason for attacking Iran. Pay attention to the truth, the reality behind the glossy campaigns, the Fox News headlines. Is the next war in the best interest of the United States, or just a few select people that stand to become richer?

In the things to notice department, note the book makes claims that that Bush outed Valerie Plame, repeats the old news that Bush knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq before invading, and a host of other startling revelations.  Here’s what McClellan says about Bush’s purported cocaine use in the 80’s:

“‘The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,’ I heard Bush say. ‘You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.’”

“I remember thinking to myself, How can that be?” McClellan wrote. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Bush, according to McClellan, “isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie.”

“So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true,” McClellan wrote. “And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious — political convenience.”

Maybe we’ll all be lucky and Bush and company will leave without getting to bomb Iran. But remember, John McCain has a plan to bomb Iran too, and he even likes to sing about it.