I'm not exactly surprised that the administration's military propaganda program has received so little attention. The establishment has never demonstrated any understanding of the war in Iraq, of why it's such an incoherent, doomed venture. The propaganda program revealed last Monday is not a sideshow. It's an essential component of the only remaining strategic rationale for the continuation of the war -- preventing damage to America's image.
In the last year of her life, Hannah Arendt offered a retrospective on Vietnam; Home to Roost is printed in the Responsibility and Judgment collection published back in 2003. Her prescient insight was that the entire "not very honorable and not very rational enterprise was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth.'" Eventually, the war was maintained solely "to avoid admitting defeat and to keep the image...intact."
The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning. Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful "Suck. On. This." Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our "strength."
This sort of nationalist marketing campaign is incompatible with American democracy. Effective marketing requires message discipline; in the context of a public relations war, there is a real sense in which dissent muddles the message. Manipulation of the media becomes a strategic necessity; as Arendt put it, "the administration was bound to clash head on with the press and find out that free and uncorrupt correspondents are a greater threat to image-making than foreign conspiracies or actual enemies of the United States." Administration propaganda becomes routine, she continued:
Image-making as global policy is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in history, but lying as such is neither new nor foolish in politics. Lies have always been regarded as justifiable in emergencies, lies that concerned specific secrets, especially in military matters, which had to be shielded against an enemy. This was not lying on principle, it was the jealously guarded prerogative of a small number of men reserved for extraordinary circumstances, whereas image-making, the seemingly harmless lying of Madison Avenue, was permitted to proliferate throughout all ranks of governmental services, military and civilian -- the phony body counts of the "search and destroy" missions, the doctored after-damage reports of the air force, the constant progress reports to Washington, in the case of Ambassador Martin continuing up to the moment when he boarded the helicopter to be evacuated. These lies hid no secrets from friend or enemy; nor were they intended to. They were meant to manipulate Congress and to persuade the people of the United States.
Rick Perlstein's new Nixonland discusses the specific parallel:
CBS earned a privileged place on the White House enemies list with a documentary, "The Selling of the Pentagon," which exposed a Pentagon "public affairs" budget that deployed generals for political sales jobs in plain violation of Army regulations, enlisting trusted anchors like Walter Cronkite as unwitting dupes. TV critic Jack Gould called it "a whale of a constructive blow for unfettered TV journalism free from Washington manipulation." President Ahab reacted predictably. Vice President Agnew called it "a subtle but vicious broadside against the nation's defense establishment," and accused its producers of ethical lapses in 1966 and 1968, one for a show that never aired, and one in a complaint the FCC dismissed. Then he charged the interviews had been edited out of order, one obtained for a separate program; "the matter of the network's own record in the field of documentary-making," he concluded, "can no longer be brushed under the rug of national media indifference."
Matt Yglesias has captured part of this argument with his "Green Lantern Theory," the idea that "willpower" is all it takes to "win." As Yglesias explains, this should be crazy; in a normal war, "will" has little effect on any concrete strategic end. But when the objective of a war is to communicate that we have will -- that we are "strong" -- demonstration of will is the end itself. This glides neatly into the stab-in-the-back narrative, as Arendt again discusses:
Under the assumption that "the greatest power on earth" lacked the inner strength to live with defeat, and under the pretext that the country was threatened by a new isolationism, of which there were no signs, the administration embarked upon a policy of recriminations against Congress, and we were offered, like so many countries before us, the stab-in-the-back legend, generally invented by generals who have lost a war and most cogently argued in our case by General William Westmoreland and General Maxwell Taylor.
Simply put, democracies shouldn't fight public relations wars. It perverts our democracy and it leads to disaster. The military is not a marketing firm; treating the troops like an armed Amway sales force puts them in an untenable position.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
The Republican conviction, well learned in political campaigns, that marketing and dirty tricks create reality, is also their philosophy of governance. Replacing public diplomacy with armed public relations makes sense to them.
In an earlier era, a guy like me might have offered a ten-point reform program to prevent future Iraq wars. But the GOP ignores the rules, and then accuses people working to force compliance of treason. In this environment, all we can do is inform the American people of what's happening, help them to recognize it, and persuade them to reject it.
