Americans, it would seem, are the ideal
audience for propagandists, precisely because they
don't believe they are being propagandized. We have just seen the
U.S. government cry wolf, then admit there was no wolf, and still
maintain its credibility. How is that possible?
When a subject is selectively reported,
misrepresented, or contextualized with biased phrases, keywords, and
images, well, that's the definition of propaganda. The undisputed masters of
this tyranny of the mind are the media and the government. Working in tandem and
armed with a public trust, these forces derail the train of truthful thought in
society and oil the machinery of war and prejudice. Whether politically or
commercially motivated, fight provoking displaces thought provoking;
condemnation precludes diplomacy; and media distortion, like human subjectivity
itself, is constant.
The most effective means of
state propaganda is a mixture of fear and constant repetition. Once you've
established yourself as the good guys, you can sell almost any idea
and justify virtually any action. For years the U.S.
government has managed to manipulate Middle East
policy with misinformation and glaring omissions of fact. Take
"allegedly", a word conspicuously absent from discussion of the weapons
capability of Iraq or the nuclear complicity of Iran. It doesn't take a nuclear
physicist to figure out that the double standards toward Iran and Iraq
(rather than a known imminent threat like North Korea) exist because
they are old enemies sitting on a lot of oil.
For over a quarter century, Americans have been programmed
to fear and despise Iran, so when the day comes that the U.S. decides to
attack, there will be little resistance. That time may have
"..Fool me once, shame on-shame on you.
Fool me-you can't get fooled
- President George W. Bush, September 2002
In the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of
Iraq, President George W. Bush and senior White House officials
including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin
Powell made decisive statements about their absolute certainty that
Iraq not only harbored weapons of mass destruction, but intended to use them
against Americans. They did so in plain, unmistakable language on numerous
While Bush and Cheney made sweeping allegations about the
threat of Iraqi WMDs, former Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
conjured the frightening image of mushroom clouds looming over the homeland. In
early 2003, Colin Powell testified before the U.N. Security Council and
offered visual "proof" in the form of satellite photos of
alleged Iraqi chemical weapons facilities. "Indeed, the facts and Iraq's
behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to
produce more weapons of mass destruction", said Powell.
With mountains of post-9/11 political capital to
burn, the government succeeded beautifully in (mis)leading
Americans to a preemptive war based on false pretenses, but have failed
miserably in their efforts to find the weapons of mass destruction which were
the rationale for war to begin with. We can thank them for creating a war
that has caused the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, the beheadings of
innocent men and women, the violent deaths of over 1,500
Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of
people maimed and handicapped, and a record high federal budget deficit.
Having gotten away with it once, the Bush administration is clearly not above
giving a repeat performance.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that
Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no
doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our
allies, and against us."
- Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002
The United States invaded Iraq in March of
2003. Months went by and the body count grew higher, but no Iraqi WMDs
turned up. In June 2003, President Bush remarked, "I am absolutely
convinced with time we'll find out that they did have a weapons
program." Bush's phrasing is an inadvertent admission that the
existence of Iraq's weapons program was not certain - you
can't "find out" what you already know!
"I'm absolutely sure that there are
weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're
just getting it just
Colin Powell, May 4, 2003
After more than a year in Iraq, Colin Powell, who had so
emphatically and arrogantly lectured the entire world for not recognizing the
obvious Iraqi threat- finally admitted in April 2004 that his February 5, 2003
presentation before the United Nations
was based on dubious intelligence which he could no longer stand
In July 2004, with no WMD's found whatsoever, Bush
continued to defend the still unfounded claims about Saddam Hussein's supposed
weapons stockpile. "We won't be proven wrong," he said. "I believe
that we will find the truth. And the truth is he was developing a program for
weapons of mass destruction." Just three months later, Bush would
eat those words.
On October 7th, 2004, with thousands of American and Iraqi
lives lost and billions of dollars squandered on a preemptive attack on Iraq,
President George W. Bush finally conceded that Iraq did not possess the weapons
of mass destruction once "known" to exist. "Iraq did not have the weapons
that our intelligence believed were there", admitted Bush.
While Americans and Iraqis continue to die by the
day in Iraq, the Bush administration is now unashamedly focusing the
same accusations against Iran. In eerily similar rhetoric, the United States,
still the only nation to have ever actually launched a nuclear
attack on an enemy, insists that Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons. At
this point, there is no hard evidence to back this up, and Iran,
a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, maintains that its
nuclear program is peaceful and for energy purposes only. According to Iran's
Foreign Minister, "Iran has been always pushing for the elimination of nuclear
weapons. Basically this means that it is forbidden based on our ideology, based
on our Islamic thinking it is forbidden to produce and use nuclear weapons as
well as other weapons of mass destruction."
As a gesture of goodwill, Iran has temporarily suspended
its uranium enrichment capability and recently opened a major nuclear
facility to the international media. The International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) has conducted inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities, but
their findings did not satisfy the Bush regime; which tapped the phone of respected
IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei (who had questioned U.S. suspicions of Iraq
and Iran) in an attempt to oust him from office.
The issue of the rights of Iran, a
country surrounded by U.S. military presence and a hostile nuclear armed
Israel, to nuclear technology is not even entertained for a moment in the U.S.
media. The United States and Israel's tantrums over Iran's nuclear
program can be dumbed down to the following: We Can Have a Bomb, But You Can't.
However, whether they are building nuclear weapons or not is still
speculation, not fact. The judicial system operates on fact. Science depends on
fact. Why not the government?
"Today, Iran remains the world's primary state sponsor
of terror - pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom
they seek and deserve."
- George Bush: State of the Union, February 2,
The discussion of Iranian nuclear capability in the media
is a textbook example of how preemptive conclusions can lead to preemptive wars.
As with Iraq, the U.S. media lazily regurgitated White
House allegations against Iran without offering context or
counterpoint. Reporting the unsubstantiated as fact, Patrick McGrath of
WTTG FOX News DC stated in a February 14 TV broadcast, "The U.S. is worried
about Iran's recent efforts to build a nuclear weapon." Wow! Are you
During a February 6th FOX News channel's report on Iran,
the screen headline asked, "IS A BATTLE WITH IRAN INEVITABLE?" A
February 13th Chicago Sun-Times headline blares "North Korea Says It Has
Nukes -- Can World Stop Iran?"
"You have a country there [Iran] that seems bent on
having a nuclear weapon."
intelligence has been wrong before on things like that."
Donald Rumsfeld, CBS News' Face the Nation, February 6,
Mass media in the 21st century is
a witch's brew of corporate and state propaganda, commercialism,
lawyertalk, and tabloid-style celebrity journalism. This gradual
mind-numbing softens Americans' resistance with the tenacity of a
telemarketering sales pitch. As advertisers know, branding and marketing can
make consumers choose one identical product over the other. It's called the
'power of suggestion'.
Witness the findings of a December 2004 Gallup Poll: "A
recent Gallup survey asking respondents to assess the threat posed each by Iran
and North Korea found significantly different results depending on which country
was mentioned first." Asked in February 2005 to name the world's greatest
enemy of the United States, Gallup respondents named the following top three:
Iraq, North Korea and Iran. President Bush's "Axis of Exil" maxim has worked
"Iran and Iraq have a history.. and it's
not a very good
- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, February
Propagandists are masters of linking their enemy with a
negative in order to bring about its demise. In 1953, the West justified its
violent coup against Iran by labelling its democratic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh as a communist and a dictator. In the 1960's, the FBI led by J. Edgar
Hoover attempted to brand civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. as a
communist. In our era, terrorism is the new communism, the proverbial scarlet
letter which brands the accused as a pariah. With this in mind, Bush
and his cabinet made sure to speak of September 11th and Iraq in the
same breath at every opportunity. The technique
appears to have worked. A September 2003 poll by The Washington Post found that
nearly 70% of Americans believed that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
"Every one of us [politicians] does a lot of propaganda on lots of things every
- Senator John Irvine - Republican,
between church, state and media in America gets blurrier all the time. In a
move worthy of the Soviet era, the White House was recently exposed for
having bribed political columnists such as Armstrong Williams to promote
administration policies -- an action so indefensible that even Williams
himself openly conceded that it was professionally and ethically wrong. More
recently, another scandal erupted when it was discovered that a pseudonymous
Internet writer with dubious credentials was given White House press corps
access and repeatedly called on to ask comfortable questions. And that's just
the condensed version of the story. From using taxpayer money to produce
pre-packaged faux "news" segments to suppressing information
about American war casualties, the Bush administration is increasingly
resembling the fundamentalist, repressive governments it
In response, Congress is now proposing the Federal Propaganda Prohibition Act of 2005 to prevent what they have termed "covert propaganda campaigns."
The legislation is intended to prohibit "(1) covert propaganda that does not
identify the government as the source, (2) information intended for
"self-aggrandizement" or "puffery," and (3) materials that serve a solely
partisan purpose." Yet even if passed, the bill could not even begin
to erase the decades of anti-Iranian and anti-Islamic sentiment engrained in the
American culture. In a society imbued with such deeply held
attitudes about the Middle East, most people wouldn't even recognize
bias if they saw
"KILL ALL IRANIANS. Kill them."
Howard Stern, 1992
To illustrate this point, let's analyze the media coverage
of a recent news item. The subject of Iran's nuclear program came up during the
the January 28th, 2005 World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where U.S.
Senator Joseph Biden and Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi met to
discuss relations. The Associated Press article headlined the meeting "Sen.
Biden, Iran Minister Clash Over Nukes". Although the exchange centered on
differences in policy, judging from the quotes cited, the dialogue could be
described as civil, reasonable, lucid.. but not combative. However, the headline
clearly frames the talks as a contentious exchange between two bitter enemies,
USA and Iran.
This might reflect the bias (if not the carelessness) of
the writer; fanning the flames of already escalated tensions between two nations
who could very well be teetering on the brink of an armed conflict. In that 7
word headline, the writer has tainted the entire article with a misleading
premise. And it's that headline, and not necesarily the body of the article,
which sticks in the brain and skews perspectives.
Feeling clever, Reuters scribe Paul Taylor came up with
the headline, "Meal From Hell Whets Appetite For US-Iran Clash". The
headline seizes yet another opportunity to conjure images of hell, damnation,
Satan and overall evil in association with Iran. The Reuters piece
reinforces the West's anti-Iranian agenda by cementing these hackneyed
associations in the reader's mind, setting the stage for conflict with a
headline that literally suggests the probability of the U.S. bombing Iran. Other
than citing the same quotes, the article barely resembles the AP piece, instead
focusing on the series of "diplomatic and gastronomic blunders" that took place
that evening. In Reuter's report, the awkward faux paus of the night were as
much "the story" as the frank dialogue between Biden and
When FOX News republished the AP piece, they changed the
headline (is that kosher?) to "Biden Hints At War In Warning To Iran".
The closest thing to a "warning" from Senator Biden is his tactful comment "We
are on the course of unintended consequences" - hardly a threat of military
action. Yet FOX instigates anyway.
From the Iranian media: "Senior US senator Joseph Biden
meets Iranian FM Kamal Kharrazi in Davos". The article is based on reports
from the IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency), the Iranian Foreign Ministry's
official press bureau. The opening paragraph states: "Senior US Senator Joseph
Biden criticized the American government's policies on Iran during a meeting
with Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi...". If this were the case, no such
statements from Biden were cited. Most likely, they were referring to Biden's
comments quoted in the U.S. press about the need for both America and Iran to
"grow up" and "be smarter about this." If so, the selective description of the
comments is obvious. The article does at least give context to the meeting,
indicating that it was held in an adjacent lounge in full view of reporters- not
at a dinner or on a panel, as the other reports imply.
The only other objective, uninflammatory headline I could
find was penned by a female Iranian-born journalist for Radio Free Europe titled
"Washington, Tehran Hold Rare Talks on Sidelines Of Davos". The
differences are obvious. In the last couple examples, the two statesmen merely
'met' and 'talked'. In the rest, they "clashed". There is not even a mention of
the meeting in the World Economic Forum's archives.
"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack
Iran is simply ridiculous."
said that, all options are on the table."
-George W. Bush, February 22,
In March 2005, a presidential investigatory
committee (The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United
States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction) reported that the intelligence
community was "dead wrong" about Iraq and called for "dramatic change" in the
intelligence gathering process. "We still know disturbingly little about
the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our
most dangerous adversaries", says the report. Although Bush concurred
with the scathing criticism, he and his cabinet still claim to "know" the
capabilities and intentions of the sovereign nation of Iran... just like they
"knew" there were WMDs in Iraq. Are you buying it?
The way to counter propaganda is to objectively
analyze and verify information. It's not always as involved as it
sounds, though. Sometimes the truth is plain as day. The lies of the Bush
administration with regard to Iraq are so blatant that even the White
House itself cannot stand by its own proclamations. Remember
when they had "no doubt" and were "absolutely sure" of Iraqi WMDs?
Remember "Mission Accomplished"? The world can't afford such blunders. The
stakes are too high and the consequences too grave to treat international
relations with such flippancy. Human casualties are nothing to take casually,
and "Bad Intelligence", if swallowed, can be fatal.
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