War Pimps

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 key phrases, such as "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and "Rogue State," were used like precision weapons on the target audience: us.

To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but reformed spin doctors or, in this case, two of the most seasoned investigators into the dark arts of political propaganda, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.

Stauber and Rampton run PR Watch, the Madison, Wisconsin-based group that keeps tabs on the nefarious schemes of the global PR industry to sugarcoat useless, costly, and dangerous products. They have also written three of the most important non-fiction books of the last decade: Toxic Sludge is Good For You, Mad Cow USA, and Trust Us, We're Experts.

Now comes their exquisitely timed Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. Here Stauber and Rampton give us an immediate history, a real-time deconstruction of the mechanics of the Bush war machine. This extravagantly documented book is a chilling catalogue of lies and deceptions, which shows the press contretemps over the Niger yellowcake forgeries to be but a minor distraction, given the outlandish frauds pullulating daily from the White House and the Pentagon. Stauber and Rampton cut through the accumulated media fog to reveal how the war was conceived and the media battle plan developed and deployed.

To peddle the war, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spin-meisters 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 either shaded, retooled, or junked.

Take Charlotte Beers who Powell tapped as Undersecretary of State in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was the 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 had rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses, Ogilvey 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 US foreign policy." Beers extracted more than $500 million from Congress for the Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming US propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.

Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Prior to becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's DC office.

Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig Clarke began having 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 bi-partisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld group and included PR executive Sheila Tate 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 Arkansas.

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. Bogg's influence peddling may help to explain why the damning references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were redacted 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 had nothing 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 message 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.

At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the DC 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 both Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. When 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 run the organization.

Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the US bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the preemptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of its work there.

But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by US troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the 3rd Infantry rolled by them. He pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration.

The Rendon Group may also have played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the 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 psy-ops, 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, pray tell, is "perception management?" Well, 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 US government. In a rare display of frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department of 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 mainstream into a frenzy of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media is 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 UN 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 group of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the US 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 a con job, hit 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 percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 percent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.

Of course, Saddam wasn't even close to having a nuke. Iraq didn't have any weaponized chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even have any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.