"War On Terror" Is Propaganda

New York, New York


On August 27, 2004 I flew from San Francisco to New York City to lend my presence to a protest against the policies of the Bush Administration. On August 29, 2004, for 5 hours over 400,000 people marched past the Republican National Convention in a loud, diverse and non-violent display of disgust and outrage at a disastrous foreign policy based on lies and hypocrisy, dangerous curtailments of constitutional rights, the reversal of decades of hard-won environmental protections, and an economy tilted toward corporate favoritism.

But it’s the war on Iraq that preoccupies most of us, and to those of us who marched that day, and to at least half the adults in the USA, and to most people around the world, the rationale behind support for the neo-conservative agenda remains frustratingly elusive. Perhaps it’s because, for other than special-interest groups such as the military/industrial complex and the Southern Baptist Coalition, there is no rationale for support based on what everybody now knows about the run-up to war. These are the facts:
1.We went to war based on a false pretext of imminent danger to the continental US from two non-existent sources: W.M.D. and Iraqi state-sponsored terrorism.
2.The UN inspections team’s efforts were so effective that well before the invasion Saddam Hussein had destroyed all his biological and chemical W.M.D. and had made no attempt to initiate nuclear capability.
3.Saddam Hussein’s secular Baath Party, a minority, controlled the larger, devout Shiite population, and had discouraged infiltration by Iranian operatives with a brutal repression of Islamic fundamentalism.
4.The Bush Administration, by abandoning the fight against Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan, and instead invading Iraq in a self-described “crusade,” has created a tidal wave of recruitment into terror groups across the Moslem world.

For ordinary grassroots conservatives who, in light of these revelations maintain their support for this administration, there seems to be a disconnect between the by now inescapable truth and their perception of our leaders’ role in the world. Ordinary rational people, not neo-conservative ideologues, not religious zealots, not corrupt corporate mercenaries, but just-plain folk who despite all evidence to the contrary and against all logic and reason, continue to believe that the war on Iraq is a “war against terror” that has “increased our security.” How can this be?

When somebody acts against reason, they are invariably being ruled by an impulse deeper than what they know to be right. The psychology of fear; fear of the unknown, fear of strangers, fear of pain, fear of death, is a powerful motivator, and it has been exploited relentlessly by the neo-cons. They’ve exploited terrorism here at home and fomented it abroad with an absolute conveyor belt of propaganda and their use of textbook techniques is depressing in its simplicity. These are the techniques:
1.Simplification – In the run-up to war the false dichotomy of “invade Iraq or do nothing” was especially effective on an American public deprived of information by the near-total collapse of serious analysis by the mainstream press. Now that we’re here, the ridiculous color-coded threat levels serve no purpose other than to keep us off balance and unreasonably fearful.
2.Repitition – Constant, ubiquitous references to a “War On Terror” to describe not only the war on Iraq but any other self-serving activity. No longer mentioned are Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda because they are real, hard targets, the truly important struggle against whom has gone nowhere. Questions about real results are deflected by repetitive references to a nebulous “War On Terror,” which means less than nothing in that war is terror.
3.Misrepresentation – The restating or reclassification of reality, often as it’s exact opposite. Examples are “The Patriot Act” and “Free Speech Zones” which have been used to carry out unprecedented attacks on our constitutional liberties like our rights to privacy, freedom to assemble and freedom of speech. More recently, we’ve seen an amazing recasting of the draft-dodging George Bush as a steadfast “war president” and the decorated war hero John Kerry as a vacillating wimp.

Since September 11, 2001, many of us have watched in horror at the unfolding of a plan begun decades ago by neo-conservatives with a secret agenda. We hurt then and we still hurt now, but when we needed reassurance from our leaders we got manipulation, when we needed inspiration we got moralistic hypocrisy, and when we needed truth, when we needed most of all the truth, we got a dark masterpiece of Orwellian propaganda from a cabal of ideologues as dangerous as any this nation now faces.