Marketing the invasion of Iraq

New book documents Bush Administration's use of PR firms to sell war to the American people

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber's new book will not sell as many copies as Hillary Clinton's memoir, the latest Harry Potter book or Ann Coulter's most recent bestselling work of fiction, "Treason." There won't be a major motion picture deal and there's no made-for-tv flick in the works. Unlike Jessica Lynch, Stauber and Rampton haven't received a massive multimedia financial proposal from CBS -- or any other network. And thus far, they haven't been asked to co-host MTV's Doggy Fizzle Televizzle with Snoop Dogg.

They haven't even been invited to discuss their timely book on the Today Show, Good Morning America or any of the nightly cable news channel talk-fests. And most mainstream dailies haven't seen fit to review it.

In a mid-August email, Stauber talked about a recent trip to New York City "where our very competent and hardworking publicist at Penguin was unable to interest a single ABC/NBC/CBS/MSNBC/FOX/CNN/PBS program in having us on for a discussion." He noted that even "the war's number one cheerleaders at FOX" refused to avail themselves of the opportunity "to pound and smear us in their typical WWF style. Amazingly," adds Stauber, "the common response from these networks when they turned down our publicist was 'the book is not topical.'"

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15447

Interview with authors of the book --

Tell us about your new book, "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq."

It's the story of how the Bush Administration sold the War on Iraq to the American people and it's, like all our books, a case study in the use of propaganda.

Give us a short history of how propaganda and war in Iraq.

I think if you step back and you look at how the U.S. came to attack Iraq based on phony assertions of that country's involvement in 9/11, that country's connections with the terrorist group Al Qaeda, that country's possession of weapons of mass destruction, this whole deception really traces back to the first Gulf War, and it's very important to understand that Saddam Hussein did desire nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein did use chemical and biological weapons, as we hear so often, against Iranians and Kurdish Iraqis, and that those weapons came from western countries – especially U.S. and France – and that Saddam Hussein was a close ally of the U.S. right up to the moment that he invaded Kuwait to take over their oil fields, and that precipitated a complete sea change ...

Right, what is amazing is that those arms sales – this was a scandal in the late 80s that they called Iraq-gate that Ted Koppel himself said, quite possibly, could be worse than Watergate. But people forget that – that we were selling arms to Saddam. It never really carried over. The first Gulf War happened and there was a collective amnesia about it.

A part of that is just due to the abysmal reporting on foreign policy issues in the American media and the tendency of the American media to take its lead on foreign policy from the U.S. government. During that time, the editorial writing in The Washington Post, for instance, essentially made light of Iraq's use of chemical and biological weapons against Iranians – sort of saying, "What's the big deal here? Weapons of war are really nasty, and do some weapons deserve to be considered nastier than others?"

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16435