[iwar] Brian Eno on IWAR

Lessons in how to lie about Iraq

The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind
of things we think about

Brian Eno
Sunday August 17, 2003
The Observer

When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician
whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor. One day we were
talking about life during 'the period of stagnation' - the Brezhnev
era. 'It must have been strange being so completely immersed in
propaganda,' I said.
'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,' replied
Sacha.

That is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious that most
Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the
government operated in its own interests and any message coming from
it was probably slanted - and they discounted it.

In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve
political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore
much more effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't
notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists. We watch the
democratic process taking place - heated debates in which we feel we
could have a voice - and think that, because we have 'free' media, it
would be hard for the Government to get away with anything very
devious without someone calling them on it.

It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us
look a bit more closely and ask: 'How did we get here?' How exactly
did it come about that, in a world of Aids, global warming, 30-plus
active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two
billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked
about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really that big
a problem? Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq
issue was important and had to be fixed right now - even though a few
months before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the
interim.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear
that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new book Weapons of Mass
Deception , it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would
justify an invasion of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was
fabricated and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a
coalition of the willing - far-Right officials, neo-con think-tanks,
insanely pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR
companies - worked together to pull off a sensational piece of
intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern propaganda.

What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American
approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and
pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just
propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda '. It's not so much the
control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.
When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it
by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing
everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion
with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language,
dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'.
(What else can the spat between the BBC and Alastair Campbell be but
a prime example of this?)

With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then 'use
the democratic process' to agree or disagree - for, after all, their
intention is to mobilise enough headlines and conversation to make
the whole thing seem real and urgent. The more emotional the debate,
the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

An example of this process is one highlighted by Rampton and Stauber
which, more than any other, consolidated public and congressional
approval for the 1991 Gulf war. We recall the horrifying stories,
incessantly repeated, of babies in Kuwaiti hospitals ripped out of
their incubators and left to die while the Iraqis shipped the
incubators back to Baghdad - 312 babies, we were told.

The story was brought to public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year-
old 'nurse' who, it turned out later, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti
ambassador to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.
Nayirah had been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton PR
agency (which in turn received $14 million from the American
government for their work in promoting the war). Her story was
entirely discredited within weeks but by then its purpose had been
served: it had created an outraged and emotional mindset within
America which overwhelmed rational discussion.

As we are seeing now, the most recent Gulf war entailed many similar
deceits: false linkages made between Saddam, al-Qaeda and 9/11,
stories of ready-to-launch weapons that didn't exist, of nuclear
programmes never embarked upon. As Rampton and Stauber show, many of
these allegations were discredited as they were being made, not least
by this newspaper, but nevertheless were retold.

Throughout all this, the hired-gun PR companies were busy,
preconditioning the emotional landscape. Their marketing talents were
particularly useful in the large-scale manipulation of language that
the campaign entailed. The Bushites realised, as all ideologues do,
that words create realities, and that the right words can over whelm
any chance of balanced discussion. Guided by the overtly imperial
vision of the Project for a New American Century (whose members now
form the core of the American administration), the PR companies
helped finesse the language to create an atmosphere of simmering
panic where American imperialism would come to seem not only
acceptable but right, obvious, inevitable and even somehow kind.

Aside from the incessant 'weapons of mass destruction', there
were 'regime change' (military invasion), 'pre-emptive defence'
(attacking a country that is not attacking you), 'critical regions'
(countries we want to control), the 'axis of evil' (countries we want
to attack), 'shock and awe' (massive obliteration) and 'the war on
terror' (a hold-all excuse for projecting American military force
anywhere).

Meanwhile, US federal employees and military personnel were told to
refer to the invasion as 'a war of liberation' and to the Iraqi
paramilitaries as 'death squads', while the reliably sycophantic
American TV networks spoke of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' - just as the
Pentagon asked them to - thus consolidating the supposition that
Iraqi freedom was the point of the war. Anybody questioning the
invasion was 'soft on terror' (liberal) or, in the case of the
UN, 'in danger of losing its relevance'.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie.
Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he
thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was
being lied to. I hope writers such as Rampton and Stauber and others
may have the same effect and help to emasculate the culture of spin
and dissembling that is overtaking our political establishments.

· © Brian Eno 2003
A longer version of this article will appear in the new literary
magazine, Zembla. Weapons of Mass Deception by Sheldon Rampton and
John Stauber is published by Robinson at £6.99

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Received on Sun Aug 17 18:56:08 2003