War and Propaganda
Post Iraq War Soundbites
Abstract
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, Friday, 2 October 2009
First-Strike or Aggression?
The United States has the greatest military power in the history of the world. It must use its power responsibly and with restraint. Paul Kurtz wrote in Free Inquiry 23:1 reminding people that the “no-first-strike principle” has been the moral case for US wars in the past. But Bush and his Judaeao-Christian neo-con administration redefined first strike as a “pre-emptive” first-strike—a first-strike forced by an enemy whom the Bush administration says will strike first if they do not! Kurtz asked:
What is the difference between a pre-emptive first strike and a war of aggression? The latter is defined in Webster´s as “a forceful action… intended to dominate… unprovoked violation by one country of the territorial integrity of another.
The strike against Iraq by the US and the UK was just such an unprovoked violation—a war of aggression—however it was presented. President Bush insisted that Iraq was “a threat to the peace” and “security of the United States”, for it had “weapons of mass destruction”, and that justified a pre-emptive strike. Iraq is a small impoverished country of 25 million people, with limited technological resources. There was no threat of an attack by Iraq, but the US undermined the international framework of world order laboriously developed since the second world war.
Other countries are known to have weapons of mass destruction, and on that criterion are more of a threat to the US. Toppling a regime is the familiar call of those who want to use aggression to achieve their own interests, but it is a violation of recognized international law. By acting unilaterally in the face of UN opposition, the US has created the precedent of ignoring international law, thereby undermining the idea of collective security introduced to stem wars of aggression after the last world war. Moreover, Bush has destroyed the moral authority, that America has enjoyed since Wilson, as a defender of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Kurtz concluded that, by invading Iraq as if the US had a “divine right” to do as it liked, when others in the world disagreed, defined the US as an aggressor nation in the eyes of the world. One might add, particularly the Islamic world.
The Meaning of Freedom
Americans like to tell us that they are guardians of freedom, but large numbers of them do not understand the concept. They think freedom is unquestioning belief in the insane actions of the fundamentalist Christian President and his neo-conservative administration. It follows that anyone who does not have that uncritical belief in the policies of a bunch of right wing concentration camp guards must finish up in the concentration camps, or at least ostracised from society. US liberals really must stand up against this or the US will finish up Nazi. In April, the President of the Baseball Hall of Fame, one Dale Petroskey, cancelled its fifteenth anniversary celebration of Bull Durham, a baseball film starring Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, whose principled stand against bombing innocent Arabs has been a beacon of sense in a fog of self-righteous hatred. People like Petroskey just do not get what freedom means, and he is one of a large many. Robbins, in speaking out against the war, has been accused of putting US troops “in danger”. George Bush and his neo-con adminsitration are the ones who have put US troops in danger. Robbins is objecting to it! At the Venice film festival, Robbins admitted that many US liberals had been intimidated into keeping quiet:
Too often people abdicate their freedom in their minds and choose not to speak, but once you abdicate that freedom, you might as well not have it.
That is what the right-wing do not care about as long as the administration behaves the way they like. What they do not get is that they have lost their freedom to do anything about it, if the administration welshes on its promises. Robbins and Sarandon have inspired some of the liberals in the US to lend their voice to the defence of liberty before it is too late, but more of them need to join in the protests. Robbins says about the atmosphere in the US:
We are being fed a lot of fear by people who would rather we were afraid than aware.
There could have been no better way than to generate it than by bombing people whose insane devotion to fundamentalism can exceed that of the President of the US.
Terrorism is using violent action to provoke a violent reaction through fear. 9/11 was terrorism all right and it succeeded in provoking the reaction. The reaction, bombing Iraq, was also terroristic, and that too has succeeded in provoking a reaction. Moslems now hate the US even when they did not before. That should make Americans, even right wing ones, fearful.
Since most of them are barmy Christian fundamentalists, they should consider the history of their own religion. It began with a leader hung up accused of terrorism, and was treated by the great power of the day, Rome, as terrorist for several centuries, but finished up taking over the great power.
One could prophesy now that Nero Bush has already surrendered the American empire. Only the American people can do anything about it. They can get an enlightened leadership next year while they still have the chance. It can begin by bringing in retrospective laws against falsifying election results, and against using state terrorism in the name of democracy!
The Hutton Enquiry into the Death of Dr David Kelly
An eminent Porton Down scientist and UK expert in biological and chemical weapons, particularly Iraq’s, Dr David Kelly, killed himself in an Oxfordshire copse after he had been named as the source of a BBC item claiming that the Labour government of Tony Blair (now renamed Tony B Liar, King of Britain) had “sexed up” the September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, used as grounds for the subsequent illegal war on Iraq. Blair was forced to appoint Lord Hutton, an eminent Judge, to conduct an enquiry into the civil servant’s death, one that inevitably would reveal a great deal behind the scenes in the preparations for the war.
We have now heard several weeks of evidence including evidence from the British Head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a formerly faceless spy who now is revealed. John Scarlett turns out to have been a chum of Blair’s chief spin doctor, now thankfully fallen on his sword, the odious Alastair Campbell, and that should be sufficient to have him sacked from his position. In the UK, Thatcher, Major and Blair, the last three Prime Ministers, have taken to changing the traditions of the British constitution into an American styled one. The civil servants close to the leadership are no longer professional mandarins with a code of honourable service to whichever party is in power but are appointed by nepotistic PMs from their own coterie of hangers on. That is what people like Campbell and Jonothan Powell are. John Scarlett, the JIC chief and former head of MI6, sounds to be the same, or, if not, certainly to have cosied up far too closely to these people so that his evidence, which ought to have been reliable, sounds like a Campbell script.
Blair’s defence has emerged as that the September dossier was “owned” by Scarlett and the JIC, and so Number 10 could have had no influence on it. In short, they claim it was purely intelligence with no government spin except what is ambiguously described as “presentation”. The government spin doctors led by Campbell therefore had no role in “sexing up” the document, as Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter had initially said in an unscripted interview early one morning (at 6.07am!) while he was dozily putting his socks on. For subsequent programmes reporting the information that day, he had scripted the report and it was therefore more cautious. Blair regarded the report as an attack on his personal integrity that would have required his resignation, if true! Gilligan admitted that his words were not the best ones possible in the first report but stood by his story, and BBC bosses supported him against a savage and stupid tit-for-tat attack by Campbell and Blair’s government on the leading public service news organisation in Britain. It was this that seemed to lead to Dr Kelly’s death when he was exposed by the Ministry of Defence as Gilligan’s mole, and subjected to a public inquisition and humiliation by the Labour dominated and chaired Foreign Affairs Select Committee of Parliament.
Blair’s government disgustingly continued spinning long before the Hutton enquiry had had chance to collect any evidence, even spreading the idea that Kelly was a Walter Mitty, the famous James Thurber dreamer. No one else seemed to think so, but a blot had been placed on his character. Lawyers for Kelly’s own widow also claimed that information that Kelly was under investigation by the MOD was also leaked in an evident attaempt to blacken his character.
Meanwhile the central buttress of the Blair case, John Scarlett, Alastair Campbell’s “mate”, gave his evidence relieving Blair and his obsessive team of spinners of any responsibility for the dossier, thus making Kelly and Gilligan into liars. Well, we all know who the real liars are. Whoever was responsible for the September dossier, it was wrong. Kelly was an Iraq weapons inspector and knew it was wrong and briefed Gilligan and other reporters about it.
Kelly was therefore a mole? Again, the MOD has aimed at blackening Kelly as a mole giving away information that he was not supposed to give away. They mean the truth! Kelly, it turns out, was authorised to brief reporters as he wished on technical matters. The question then becomes: Are lies about weapons capabilities in Iraq technical or political matters? The MOD thinks he has stepped over the boundary in giving political briefings, but they were over a strictly technical matter.
Was it true that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction in only 45 minutes? Scarlett has it four times in the 16 September draft of the dossier he “owned”, twice saying the Iraqis “may” be able to deploy them in that time and twice saying they “could” do. In the final dossier, the claim appeared three times all saying the Iraqis “were” able to deploy them. It beggars belief that competent intelligence agents would feel it necessary to repeat a dubious bit of information from a single source so positively and so frequently. Once would be enough, if it had to be there at all. Scarlett admitted that the Defence Intelligence Staff queried the assurance of the 45 minutes claim and wanted it qualified, but it never was. Scarlett also accepted that Campbell made changes, but ones that Scarlett tells us were merely “presentational”.
Lest anyone should be confused, all of this confirms what Gilligan reported. The dossier had been “sexed up”. The purpose in repeating the dubious claim three times could only have been presentational! It added a false sense of urgency. It was to dupe the reader into thinking the world suffered an immediate threat from Iraq. Gilligan was reporting that his source, Kelly, considered this to be untrue. And who do we now know, from Hutton evidence, corroborated him on this? None other than Jonathan Powell, the No 10 Chief of Staff, who wrote in an email during the drafting process that no evidence suggested an imminent threat, and the dossier should not show Saddam in this light, and, in another email, that Iraq did not “at the moment” (underlined) pose a threat to UK interests. Blair ignored these warnings and referred in his foreword to the dossier to a “current and serious threat”.
It turns out that it had been sexed up in another serious way. Scarlett noted in his evidence that Kelly seemed unfamiliar with any Iraqi weapons system that could be used in only 45 minutes. Kelly was, after all, an expert on Iraq’s WMDs, so this is a curious fact, if true. Moreover, Scarlett admitted that Kelly was senior enough in these matters to be involved in writing at least parts of the dossier, whereas others had tried to maintain that Kelly was a junior—a Walter Mitty! Scarlett’s explanation was that the 45 minutes intelligence report did not relate to WMD missiles as Kelly thought. He had got it all wrong:
It was not, it was relating to munitions, battle shields, mortar shells or similar weapons.John Scarlett, Head of the JIC, Hutton Enquiry evidence
So, it turns out that, even if these shells and mortar bombs were filled with biological or chemical agents, they were no threat to the UK. The 45 minutes at best referred to battlefield weapons and nothing that could be used to bomb other countries, even Cyprus which has specifically been mentioned as threatened in this context. The dossier itself nowhere makes it clear what Scarlett now has admitted, and the plain inference anyone could make from the claim appearing three times in a dossier on Iraqi WMDs preparing the way for war is that Iraq could be a threat to the outside world in only 45 minutes. The toadying Head of the JIC admits it could not, and since these weapons were never used in the Iraq war as battlefield weapons either, the whole claim looks to be, at best, grossly erroneous intelligence or, more probably, a politically expedient lie.
The rough words of Andrew Mackinley, MP, questioning Dr Kelly in the FASC were:
Have you ever felt like a fall guy? You have been set up, have you not?
Perhaps he ought to have directed them at John Scarlett, except that Scarlett was not allowed to appear before the Parliamentary Committee. Only a few days after Scarlett had given his evidence, and as if the Judge wanted to silently demonstrate its falseness, Hutton published the record of a meeting held on 18 September 2002 on a document called, Iraq Dossier: Public Handling and Briefing, which has a sub-heading Ownership of the Dossier. Here it says categorically that Downing Street owned the dossier, not Scarlett or the JIC as Premier B Liar had maintained! Scarlett is the real fall guy for Campbell and Blair. Our naïve spymasters easily get dizzy when spun!
All of this condemns the lying self-righteousness of the Blair government and vindicates the BBC report and Dr Kelly. The Blair government has tried the common trick, used by all inept governments, of seeking electoral popularity by going to war. In so doing it supremely proved its ineptitude. It cannot even get the war propaganda right. Blair has no integrity. He can do no wrong because he has the Christian’s delusion that God will guide him in doing right. In truth, he and his government are smug, base and dishonest. He should resign, and the US public should throw out Bush to match.
UK Polls
Polls showed a large shift in public attitudes to the war once troops were in action. Some 58% of respondents disapproved of the war before hostilities began, but once the fighting started this fell to 43%. Why did voters approve or disapprove of the war in the first place. Two basic factors were at work.
- The costs and benefits of the war. If the benefits of the war were seen as outweighing the costs, then they were likely to approve of it, and vice versa.
- The morality of the war. People who felt the war was morally just tended to approve of it, and those who felt it was immoral disapproved.
These concepts were measured by statements with which respondents were asked to agree or disagree. Perceptions of benefits were measured by:
The country will benefit in the long run from going to war with Iraq.
Perceptions of costs were measured by:
War will seriously damage the country’s interests around the world.
Perceptions of morality were measured by:
There is a strong moral case for Britain going to war with Iraq.
Before the war started only 34% agreed with the benefits statement, 60% agreed with the costs statement and 45% agreed with the morality statement. Once hostilities began, the costs and benefits measures shifted much less than the morality measure. After the fighting started, 59% continue to disagree that we would benefit from the war, and 51% continued to believe that our interests would be damaged. Only the morality indicator shifted to the same extent as the approval indicator, so that 59% ended up supporting the moral case for the war after hostilities began.
Many changed their minds out of loyalty to troops fighting in Iraq rather than a sense that the government was pursuing sensible policies. The government won the morality argument—with the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and troops loyalty—but it failed to win the cost-benefit argument. This matters, because, besides the grave doubts that WMDs were an important issue at all, analysis shows the cost-benefit attitudes influence electoral support more than morality attitudes or general approval of war. People may have been persuaded to approve of the war, but they were still not convinced that it would bring any benefits. The judgment of the leadership is called into question.
Democracy?
Will the war have any long term electoral effects? It may do among the people who dislike war. In the long run a government that starts a war when enough of its citizens cannot see a good reason for doing so is asking for trouble. Except, of course, in the US where the Republican witch hunt forces everyone to conform whther they like it ot not. This is democracy? Not according to Richard Perle…
Shortly after the end of the Iraq war, Mr Richard Perle came on to UK TV in the current affairs programme, Newsnight, to tell us “democracies do not start war”. Do Americans realise that one of their top government mandarins admits that the US is not a democracy?
An Annual War?
Did the people who voted Labour back into office in 1997 after eighteen years of Tory rule realise that their preferred government would be having an annual war, usually to remove the government of another country? The UN, after two monstrous wars among mainly Christian countries was set up in the hope of reducing the possibilities of such things. Mr Blair, the Labour leader and UK Prime Minister has chosen to join with the US ultra right wing Republicans in destroying the UN. Is this what Labour voters wanted, and have they forgiven the slef-righteous Mr Blair?
Rumsfeld’s Previous Happy Days
In 1984, Iraq was at war with Iran, and the UPI wire service reported on 24 March that year the Iraqis were using “gas laced with a nerve agent” in cross border raids. Tariq Aziz’s special guest on the day this report went out was Ronaid Reagan’s Middle East adviser at the time, a certain Donald Rumsfeld, who said he was there to “build bridges”. What did he mean, bridges? The US went on to sell Saddam millions of dollars worth of helicopter gunships, to be used in chemical warfare assaults. Rumsfeld declined to make any direct reference to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, but on leaving he did declare that he was reassured by Iraq’s attitude, adding that it “struck me as useful to have this relatlonship”. Happy days! What a touching re-union the two Christian hypocrites can look forward to.
You can Fool Enough People, Enough of the Time
President Bush swooped on to the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. No one will remember a word that the President said, but they will remember the scene, the smile, the cheering soldiers and the bomber jacket, and believe that George W Bush had defeated the Iraqis single handed. Of course, it is possible that there are some stunts so blatantly manipulative that they are actually intolerable—but we can probably rule that one out.Matthew Engel, The Guardian
Ted Rogers, an adviser who helped Richard Nixon fool the US public with a bogus television speech, died aged 82. Rogers invented for Nixon an entire broadcast to the nation that became known by its most memorable feature, a spaniel named Checkers. In 1952, Rogers was a Los Angeles advertising executive specialising in radio and the new medium of television, yet to be fully exploited by politicians.
Nixon, a US Senator from California, was campaigning as vice-presidential candidate in Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s White House bid. Democrats accused Nixon of accepting gifts from Californian businessmen, and Eisenhower’s advisers urged Eisenhower, well respected as the former second world war Supreme Commander, to drop his running mate immediately. Rogers, as Nixon’s broadcasting adviser, told his boss that if he left the controversy to political managers he would be out. He had to appeal to the people. Nixon agreed, and within 48 hours Rogers had arranged the nationwide telecast.
Rogers knew that as much as the press disliked Nixon, the public would find the dog irresistible. Nixon appeared in an emotional mood and accused his critics of smearing him. He frankly discussed his family’s modest finances and pointed out that his wife, Pat, wore a plain “Republican cloth coat” not furs. Then he admitted he had received a single gift—a black-and-white cocker spaniel that had arrived in a crate from Texas and was named Checkers by his daughter Tricia. “The kids love that dog”, Nixon continued, his voice breaking. “And… regardless of what ‘they’ say about it, we’re going to keep it”.
The press rightly described its sentimentality as a carefully rehearsed soap opera and accused Rogers of writing and producing it. He denied only that there had been a rehearsal.
As expected, the Great US Public were gulled and Nixon was retained as Vice President, and went on to greater fame as a ruthless and crooked President. Rogers wrote a novel, Face To Face (1962), showing how television could be manipulated on behalf of politicians.
When will people learn?
