Uncovering the Weapons of Mass Deception

By Anthony Lappé, Guerrilla News Network. Posted July 17, 2003.

The toppling of Saddam's statue at Fardus Square is just one scene in a campaign of lies, distortions and made-for-TV spectacles highlighted by authors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new, highly-informative book, "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq." The authors, founders of the Wisconsin-based PR Watch, document how the Bush Administration played the U.S. media like a fiddle from the git-go: from planning the war months prior to "selling it," to manipulating the evidence to fit their agenda, to using the "big lie" tactic of repeating the same distortion over and over so that it becomes reality in the public's mind.

Tell us about your new book, "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq."

It's the story of how the Bush Administration sold the War on Iraq to the American people and it's, like all our books, a case study in the use of propaganda.

Give us a short history of how propaganda and war in Iraq.

I think if you step back and you look at how the U.S. came to attack Iraq based on phony assertions of that country's involvement in 9/11, that country's connections with the terrorist group Al Qaeda, that country's possession of weapons of mass destruction, this whole deception really traces back to the first Gulf War, and it's very important to understand that Saddam Hussein did desire nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein did use chemical and biological weapons, as we hear so often, against Iranians and Kurdish Iraqis, and that those weapons came from western countries -- especially U.S. and France -- and that Saddam Hussein was a close ally of the U.S. right up to the moment that he invaded Kuwait to take over their oil fields, and that precipitated a complete sea change ...

Right, what is amazing is that those arms sales -- this was a scandal in the late 80s that they called Iraq-gate that Ted Koppel himself said, quite possibly, could be worse than Watergate. But people forget that -- that we were selling arms to Saddam. It never really carried over. The first Gulf War happened and there was a collective amnesia about it.

A part of that is just due to the abysmal reporting on foreign policy issues in the American media and the tendency of the American media to take its lead on foreign policy from the U.S. government. During that time, the editorial writing in The Washington Post, for instance, essentially made light of Iraq's use of chemical and biological weapons against Iranians -- sort of saying, "What's the big deal here? Weapons of war are really nasty, and do some weapons deserve to be considered nastier than others?"

When April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador, was meeting with Saddam shortly before he invaded Kuwait and took over their oil fields back in 1990, they were reportedly discussing how they could improve the dictator's image in the United States, because the press was beginning to report more and more on his atrocities and this was a political problem for the U.S. Well, that problem suddenly disappeared when Saddam invaded Kuwait, and many analysts think that Glaspie apparently unwittingly gave Saddam indications that the U.S. wouldn't be too concerned if Saddam happened to take over those oil fields. But once that happened, of course, everything changed, and then Saddam had to be turned into the great evil -- a Satanic or Hitler-like character.

I think one of the interesting things we discovered doing our research is that the scandal that surrounded the Hill & Knowlton campaign that sold the first Gulf War to the people of the U.S. involving phony testimony before a phony Congressional hearing by a 15 year-old girl who claimed that Iraqi soldiers were murdering babies in hospitals in occupied Kuwait by throwing them out of incubators, now we see in a new light. That was a bizarre story that came to light a year after the U.S. drove Iraq out of Kuwait.

One of the mysteries has always been: Why do these PR people always have to invent these atrocities and foist them upon the American people? I mean Saddam committed plenty of atrocities.

The answer I think now, as we discovered in writing this book, is that because Saddam was so much an ally of the U.S. and because the U.S. basically looked the other way when he was using poisonous gas against Iranians and against Iraqi Kurds -- drudging up those true atrocities where thousands and thousands of people were killed by Saddam -- innocent civilians, women and children -- would have really reflected badly on the U.S. since the weapons components came from us and he was our ally.

This whole campaign was built around these false perceptions of how an invasion was going to affect the Middle East, how the Iraqis would react to American troops coming in. It's almost like there was this huge facade of lies that they were telling themselves.

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