PR Campaign Gone Bad

Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. Stauber is founder and director of the Center for Media & Democracy while Rampton is his co-writer and editor of the quarterly PR Watch: Public Interest Reporting On The PR/Public Affairs Industry.

Their just-released paperback deconstructs the marketing campaign that sold Americans on the war - and the interesting thing is, much of it was written before the first bombs fell on Baghdad. The truth about Iraq will come out eventually, and sooner than any hard evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction or connections to Al Qaeda. Even for seasoned skeptics and critics of the Bush administration, the audacity of the repeated lies and deceptions outlined in the book are shocking. Of particular interest is the book’s focus on the critical role of public relations companies hired by the government to sell the war. Nukes and chemical and biological weapons may be capable of wreaking a lot of havoc, but when it comes to war today, they aren’t the real big guns. The real powers, it turns out, are the PR agencies. The book documents the specific PR agencies hired by the U.S. and American allies, like the Saudis, during the Iraq war and the buildup to it, and exposes the vast amounts of money involved in these PR contracts. For example, shortly after the Sept. 11th attacks, the Saudis launched a PR campaign to disassociate themselves from the attacks and convince Americans of their support for the war on terrorism, employing U.S. PR firms, including Qorvis Communications and Burston-Marsteller, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

Some of the book’s best research comes in the chapter ‘True Lies,’ which dispels many of the myths that resounded through the media’s echo-chamber in the months leading up to the war - such as the supposed connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 hijackers, a story that helped generate pro-war sentiment but originated in rumor, not fact. As the Bush Administration’s rationales for going to war with Iraq continue to unravel questions are finally being asked about how we got into the mess in the first place. How could an invasion of Iraq - based on administration-orchestrated misinformation, disinformation and outright lies - have been sold to the American people? Who did the selling? And what are its ramifications for democratic discourse and/or future American overseas adventures? These are just some of the issues tackled in this book. Unless there is a massive public outcry of people unwilling to buy the hype, the U.S. seems intent on continuing a foreign policy parallel to the most common corporate strategies for dealing with scandal and dissent - putting its resources into altering public perception rather than its own unpopular behavior.

“Rather than changing the way we actually relate to the people of the Middle East,” the book says, “they still dream of fixing their image through some new marketing campaign dreamed up in Hollywood or Madison Avenue.”

An in-depth interview with the authors appears at the Barnes and Noble website.