PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Iraq, the world and America’s propaganda war

Mohammed Haruna

The reader would pardon me if most of today’s article about the subject above are rather copious quotations from a number of American experts on the story of the American propaganda machine. I thought I could not deal with the subject better than allowing you to hear the story straight from the horses’ mouths, in a manner of speaking..

Our story tellers this morning are (1) Nancy Snow, an assistant professor in communication studies and one time cultural affairs specialist and Fulbright program desk officer at the United States Information Agency, USIA, the nerve centre of America’s propaganda machine, (2) Scott Ritter, co-author with William Pitt of War on Iraq. Ritter, a self-styled conservative Republican, was a marine intelligence officer who spent seven years on a U.N. inspection team in Iraq searching for the country’s fabled weapons of mass destruction.

The other story tellers today are (3) Gore Vidal, author of The Last Empire essayist, novelist and a distant cousin of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and (4) Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and an award-winning investigative journalist who specializes in financial matters and writes for the London Observer, mostly from his New York base.

We begin our story with Snow. This associate professor in communications who once worked in the USIA chronicles the agency’s story in her little book, Propaganda, Inc. She tells us in the opening chapter of the book that “The USIA receives annual support of about one billion dollars from the American tax payer but this U.S. government agency is no tourist attraction. In fact it is unlikely that most Americans would have heard of it. It is one of the best kept secrets in Washington.”

Snow then proceeds to tell us the origin of this nerve centre of America’s propaganda machine, and how it was once deployed to deadly effect in Korea. She also tells us how it has since been pressed into the service of Corporate America. The USIA, she said, started back in April 1917 as Committee on Public Information (CPI) a.k.a. Creel Commission, under George Creel, a well-known American journalist. The committee was set up by President Woodrow Wilson, who had been re-elected on a pacifist platform of keeping America out of World War I. The British, on whose empire the sun was already setting, didn’t like this American neutrality and set up a secret war propaganda bureau to drag in the Americans into the war. The bureau succeeded beyond its wildest imagination. Six months after his re-election, Wilson reversed himself and said neutrality was no longer tenable. A few days later he declared war on Germany, Britain’s arch-enemy. A further few days after joining the war on the side of the British, Wilson set up the CPI to handle the propaganda front of the war.

Like the British propaganda bureau before it, the CPI succeeded beyond its wildest imagination. Its propaganda war against the Germans was so successful that Americans, in Snow’s words, “learnt to hate German civilians as much if not more than the targeted enemy, the German government.” Creel himself could apparently not restrain himself in his effusive praise of his commission’s achievement in convincing Americans that a war some 6,400 kilometers away at a time when the steamboat was the fastest means of transport across the ocean, was a serious threat to America’s security. CPI, Creel said, was “a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”

Fast Forward to 1948 when the CPI metamorphosed into America’s peace-time propaganda agency under the Smith-Mundt Act. Its goal then became the promotion of “a better understanding of the United States in other countries and to increase mutual understanding”. This benign-sounding objective, however, hid a more sinister aim as we shall see presently from an account of the deadly use to which the USIA was put in the 1950 Korea war, which it fought under United Nation’s mandate.

Snow recounts an episode from a book titled American Propaganda Abroad by Fitzhugh Green on how the Americans lured Chinese infantrymen in the peninsular into an act of surrender using propaganda leaflets and then simply cold-bloodedly massacred them. She quotes Green as recounting his interview with an American officer who participated in the massacre. During the interview the officer reportedly told Green how the U.S. artillery fired the leaflets across the enemy line. Moments later the Chinese infantrymen picked them up and studied them. “Sure enough”, the officer told Green, “they started in the direction of the United Nations Command headquarters. The tracts had promised safe conduct and good treatment of prisoners of war. More and more of the Chinese headed to the Command until eventually there were two to three thousand of them”.

Green: What happened then?

Officer laughing uneasily: Oh we reloaded our guns with anti-personnel ammunition and wiped out the whole lot.

Fast Forward to 1979, towards the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. A genuine born-again Christian, Carter had worried about the one-way orientation of USIA propaganda since its establishment. He was worried that the spread of America’s “hedonistic ethic” which was defined more by one’s material worth, than by what one did could only bring chaos to the world. Carter believed that just like America had a lot to teach the world, it also had a lot to learn from the world. “It is also in our interest” – and in the interest of other nations – that Americans have the opportunity to understand the histories, cultures, problems of others, so that we can come to understand their hopes, perceptions and aspirations”, Snow quotes him as saying in a speech in which he signaled his intention to change USIA one-way orientation into a two-way street

Carter, as we all know, never got the opportunity to fully implement his reform agenda of the USIA, as he was defeated by the neo-conservative Ronald Reagan. Predictably Reagan quickly reversed what little progress Carter had made in his reform. Reagan brought Charles Wick, his close friend “and a colourful former Hollywood press agent and producer” to reinstate USIA’s one-way orientation.

Fast rewind to 1947. This, according to Gore Vidal, one of our story tellers this morning in his book, The Last Empire was the year hat President Harry Truman “replaced the old republic with a National Security State whose purpose was to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid.”

“The exact date of replacement?” asked Gore. “February 27, 1947. Place: White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Under Secretary Dean Acheson, a handful of Congressional leaders. Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only if he first ‘scared the hell out of American people that the Russians were coming’. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by and for the people is now faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by Congress’ and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media”.

Since this 1947 hijack of American democracy by corporate America, neither ordinary Americans nor the rest of the world has known peace. To use Vidal’s graphic words in describing what America has turned into since the Truman doctrine, “Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rouge state of all. We honour no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally whenever we chose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states”.

Enter Gene Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Palast’s book illustrates the very well documented story of how Corporate America hijacked American democracy and how it’s leaders have since become past-masters at abusing democracy in the most cynical and hypocritical manner. “Its easy” says Palast with apparent sarcasm, “to knock America, but the world should think of the $3 billion spent in the 2000 U.S. election campaign in positive terms. Think of it as the privatization of democracy – though an outright auction for the presidency would have been more efficient”.

“George Bush”, continues Palast, “may have lost at the ballot box but he won where it counts, at the piggy bank. The son of Bush rode right into the White House on a snorting poker stuffed with nearly half-a-billion dollars ($447 million): my calculation, of the suffocating plurality of cash from Corporate America (‘soft-money’, ‘parallel’ spending ‘marketing fund’), a good 25 per cent more than Al Gore’s take”.

As Bush, with Britain’s Tony Blair dutifully tagging along wage a bloody and an unnecessary war on poor Iraqis in the name of democracy and liberty, it should be obvious to any one with half-an-eye on the political-economy of the world, that all this is mere propaganda and that their true objective is to satisfy the insatiable greed of Corporate America in which Bush is a key player.

Bush and The Gang say they are forced to invade Iraq because that is the only way to end Hussein’s tyranny and dispossess him of his so-called weapons of mass destruction which he will invariably pass on to terrorists. Yet, as Palast reveals in his book, exactly on September 11, 1996, the FBI was told to back off its investigations on Bin Laden family members and their alleged links to alleged terrorist organizations. “FBI agents”, says Palast, “were livid that these investigations were shut down for five years – until September 11, when they were, for sad and obvious reasons, reactivated.

“Was the FBI case closed because there were no grounds to watch these groups and the Bin Ladens?, asked Palast. “When we asked, the answer came from several sources: ‘Arbusto’ and ‘Carlyle’ A young George W. Bush made his first million as principal of Arbusto Oil, Texas. The nearly worthless venture ended up a gold mine for the little Bush (Arbusto means ‘Shrub’ in Spanish), with financing and contracts from Saudi-linked businessmen and Gulf Arabs.

“Carlyle”, on the other hand, says Palast, “is a holding and investment bank which, through its ownership of United Technologies and other arms makers, became one of the America’s top defence contractors. It also has the distinction of having had both Bush pere and fils as paid retainers. In 1999 the elder Bush travelled to Saudi as a Carlyle representative.

“James Baker, Bush the first’s pro-Saudi Secretary of State”, adds Palast, “works for Carlyle; its Chairman is Frank Calucci, Bush Snr’s former defence secretary. The Bin Laden family held a stake in the secretive private company until just after the September 11 attack”.

It is, of course, by now common knowledge that Bush’s Vice, Dick Cheney, was head of Halliburton, a leading global player in the oil servicing business. It is also common knowledge that Condolesa Rice, his National Security Adviser, is also in the oil business, big time. With all their links to the Saudi and other global players in the oil and armament business, all their grand-standing about making the world safe for democracy is obviously nothing but duplicity at its worst.

What is worse, these war-mongering old men who head Corporate America are the least willing to send their own children into harms way just like in their own youth, they too were protected from being sent into harms way by their own parents. Take Bush Jnr, himself for example. Back during the Vietnam war, he was a fighter pilot, not, as Palast points out “in the United States Airforce where one could get seriously hurt, but in the Texas air force, known as the Air Guard. Texas’s toy army, an artifact of civil war days, is a favourite club for war mongers a bit squeamish about actual combat. Membership excused these weekend warriors from military draft and the real shoot ‘m up in ‘Nam. Young George W. Bush tested 25 out of 100, one point above too-dumb-to-fly status, yet leaped ahead of hundreds of applicants to get the Guard slot.

“In 1998”, continued Palast, “an aid to the Lone Star State’s lieutenant governor, Ben Barres, quietly suggested to Brig-General James Rose that he find a safe spot in the Air Guard for Congressman George H. Bush’s son. Neither of our Presidents Bush member asking for this favour. But how Barnes knew he should make the fix without a request from the powerful Bush family remains a mystery, one of those combinations of telepathy and coincidence common to Texas politics.”

The consolation about the greed and duplicity which seems to be the hallmark of Corporate America’s leadership is that in the long run, at times even in the not-so-long run, the chicken come home to roost. This is clearly the case with the Anglo-American war on Iraq where Bush and The Gang appear to have fallen victim of their own propaganda about how the Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein so much, his troops will quickly surrender in droves and ordinary Iraqi citizens will welcome the Anglo-Americans as liberators. So sure was Bush of quick victory in th war, corporate America managed to persuade so-called independent global network like CNN, FOX and MTV to refuse adverts by anti-war groups in the U.S., this according to the BBC in an article on its internet service on March 29.

Nearly two weeks into the war, it is now obvious that Hussein has given the Anglo-Americans worse than a bloody nose. The development, however, is merely small consolation. In the end it is hard to imagine the Anglo-Americans losing the war with all their superior technology and number. If anything, the danger is that Hussein’s relative success may tempt the old warmongers in Washington – and London – into unleashing their own weapons of mass destruction unto the hapless Iraqis.

As Scott Ritter said in the book War on Iraq, “This war with Iraq is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. Iraq wont roll over. I don’t believe the Iraqi people will rise against Saddam, or if they do, they will be brutally repressed. If the whole situation collapses and we have 70,000 Americans cut off in Iraq facing the prospect of annihilation, we’ll nuke. There is no doubt about it. We’ll nuke. This is a war that has everything bad about it. There is no good end for this war”.

This, unfortunately, is the tragedy of the war on Iraq, a war which, like so many others unleashed by America in the name of democracy and freedom, is the bitter fruit of the manipulations of old, greedy and power-hungry old men and not-so-old-men who hide behind the legacy of the founding fathers of God’s own country to satisfy their lust for wealth and power.