The Iraq war was a military action that claimed half a million lives, racked up a $2 trillion price tag, and resulted in untold costs for a country that remains in disarray. Major media outlets, like the New York Times, were careful to include editorials that acknowledged the war’s grim adolescence. CNN featured a piece that urged Americans to “not to repeat the mistakes of the past” in light of the destruction that the war has brought. Absent from much of these discussions was how the American media itself carried water for the war effort, and how political pundits and respected journalists served to legitimize and market the war to the American people.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org
From the beginning, President Bush had viewed any proposal to invade Iraq as requiring a public relations campaign in order to persuade the American people that the war was necessary and just. In September of 2002, the Bush administration had planned to use the President’s 9/11 commemoration speech as an emotional lead-in to a speech he would deliver to the UN General Assembly the following day. The New York Times reported that administration officials hoped that Bush’s 9/11 remarks would “help move Americans toward support of action against Iraq,” which could come within six months. Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card noted that the public relations campaign would need to begin in September because, “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
On the whole, the US news media did not systematically challenge the Bush administration’s insistence that Iraq possessed WMDs, nor did it question reports that Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons. When Colin Powell delivered aspeech at the United Nations in February of 2003 falsely insisting that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMD facilities from UN inspectors, the US media reported Powell’s accounts as though they were true.
The Iraq War was hardly the first war to be subject to media spectacle, but it was one of the first to use the media as an integral part of the war effort. This process, known as “embedding,” involved “integrating journalists into military units for the duration of [the Iraq War.Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment.” There were anywhere between 570 and 750 embedded reporters in Iraq during the beginning of the war in March 2003.
Embedded journalists were indeed subject to a series of restrictive “ground rules” in which they agreed to have their articles reviewed by the American military prior to release, their movement restricted to their assigned military unit, and their embedded status liable to revocation at any point.
Embedding journalists had an effect on the kind of reporting that news outlets produced. While reporting was overwhelmingly factual, the work of embedded journalists was more likely too biased from the perspective of the American troops with which these journalists were assigned.
War reporting, of course, is also a media product. What makes discussions about the US media “selling” the Iraq War to the American people so important is that Americans were not only buying a justification for a war, they were also buying a particular image of what that war looked like – an image mediated by television cameras and journalistic accounts and informed by ideas and sentiments about American military power.
Image creation was not only done with visuals, but also with the language of the news media. News anchors, pundits and journalists were happy to recite George Bush’s doomsday claims of WMDs in Iraq but did not employ the same language to describe America’s armaments.
The US media’s complicity in selling the Iraq War to the American people is an important object of analysis when assessing how enormously consequential foreign policy decisions can be distorted and manipulated within democratic societies. It is a reminder that democratically elected governments can and do act in ways that appeal to base emotions and greatest fears in order to push otherwise unpopular wars and initiatives. The mistakes of the Iraq War have been made, and the war’s consequences remain tangible to this day. But no one is held accountable to-date. Just like in Vietnam, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan. None of these were “just” wars! We don’t need war to settle disputes. We need peaceful dialogues – please give peace a chance!
Reference
Selling the Iraq War, Luca Brown, The McGill International Review, 10 April 2018
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