Packaging the Iraq invasion (Review of Paul Rutherford's book)

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Rutherford, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, essentially argues that the war was a commodity, a package co-produced by the Pentagon and newsrooms, and that this commodity was "processed and cleansed" so that it would have as much mass appeal as possible. What makes his argument particularly dispiriting is that the marketing was so predictable.

In March, 2003, a CBC colleague and I interviewed several foreign correspondents, and one of them, Maggie O'Kane of The Guardian, foresaw that the predominant images of the conflict would be high-tech graphics of military hardware, as well as embedded journalists pretending to be soldiers doing fluff interviews with real soldiers. The one thing we wouldn't see, she added, would be dead bodies. How right she was: We saw, courtesy of that ridiculous, multimillion-dollar press centre in Doha, smart bombs hitting their apparently bloodless targets. We saw, via U.S. network television, a stupefying array of weapons graphics, all encoded in the very male jargon of techno-speak and, of course, underscored by pounding music.
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However, not all media, not even all U.S. media, took the Pentagon's view lying down. For me, the turning point in the way the press went from compliant to defiant came when Michael Wolff, the media critic of New York Magazine, asked the magically dull Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks what the point of being in Doha was, since the officials never really answered any questions. The reporters' gallery erupted into applause. Rutherford doesn't mention this anecdote and I wish he had, because it's an emblematic riposte to his powerful thesis: that reality always has a way of escaping spin, and that journalists can on occasion get it right, even during the war.
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Lies, half-truths, infotainment and marketing will surely come our way the next time war drums start pounding again. Let us hope that when that moment arrives, we won't be overwhelmed.


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