IB: So let's start by talking about Iraq. Governments have been lying and using propaganda to sell war since the beginning of time, and certainly in the U.S. since World War I and the Committee on Public Information. So what sets the Iraq war apart, or is it just another link in the chain?
SR: Well, in a lot of ways it is similar. It reflects similar assumptions about the nature of propaganda, about communications I should say in which the government or the propagandists set themselves up as communicators whose mission is to mold the thinking and behaviour of a target population which carries within itself a set of assumptions about the nature of propaganda that I think are quite different from what most of us think about when we think about communications within a democracy. We have a privileged class of communicators and an audience whose role is either to be passive or to accept the will of the privileged communicator that's different from the dialogue that you expect in a democracy. That hasn't changed; that's been part of war propaganda since war propaganda and wars began. One of the things that I think is somewhat different about the propaganda that sold the war in Iraq is the extent to which the communicators themselves used the jargon of advertising and commercial marketing, so for example you had Andrew Carr, the White House Chief of Staff who was asked why they had chosen September of 2002 to kick off their big publicity push, and his response was "Well, from a marketing point of view you don't launch new products in August". That's a rather striking turn of phrase in a way of thinking about things, it's a very straightforward statement that they're selling just as they would a bar of soap.
Another thing that goes hand in hand with this I think was the appointment of Charlotte Beers to head US public diplomacy efforts in the wake of September 11th. There's was a woman whose background was in Madison Avenue advertising and at the time that Collin Powell announced her appointment he said that one of the things that had impressed him about her was that she had succeeded in selling Uncle Ben's rice as a product. He said, "She got me to buy Uncle Ben's Rice and if she can sell Uncle Ben's rice to me, she can sell Uncle Ben's rice to Arabs and Muslims". I think that is a somewhat different attitude towards how a nation puts its message out to the rest of the world than you've seen in the past. During the Cold War for example, a large part of what the United States did to communicate its side of things vis a vis the Soviet Union was through traditional public diplomacy efforts that involved actual proclamation of ideas about democracy and subsidizing of books by writers or poetry, cultural exchanges, you know, everything from ballet to music as tools in putting a human and positive face before the world. I think that sort of thing has actually fallen by the wayside somewhat, because of this somewhat narrowly commercial model and the set of assumptions that seemed to have shaped the Bush administration's approach to marketing the war with Iraq.
IB: So it wasn't about ideas, it was product…
SR: It was about product, it was about short term sound bytes and I think it has also been reflected in some of the inflexibility of the Bush administration. Every day has been about the talking points of the day, the message consistency and I don't see a lot of evidence that there is a long term vision there, so either they expect the war to unfold or what sort of vision of the United States they are trying to put forward to the world. It's all about stay the course and we're winning.
IB: What about the privatization of the selling of the war. The CPI was an in-house agency. Tell me about the out-sourcing of PR to sell this war.
SR: Right. Well, the Committee on Public Information during the First World War was a group of people who were recruited by the Wilson administration to sell that war to promote it to the American people and they actually went to work for the government. They put aside their careers in the private sector in order to do that and the public relations industry as a private industry didn't really begin until after the end of the First World War when people thought well, we can use the techniques we learned promoting the US case during the First World War to promote commercial products as well and then they started to take on clients like the steel industry or the tobacco industry and so forth, so in an interesting way the public relations industry and commercial marketing got a lot of impetus from the First World War.
What's happening now is things are pushing back the other direction and the commercial sector is shaping the government's war messaging in interesting ways and instead of people going to work directly for the government, and becoming essentially people who see themselves as public servants or government employees, what you have instead is something similar to what you have happening in the war itself - outsourcing of the job to people who remain in the private sector and do it as a contract, so for example, the Lincoln Group that became very controversial, in late 2005 was a private company that was set up specifically to look for business opportunities in Iraq following the US invasion and they tried various activities including real estate and dabbling in other things like sales of materials, building materials and things like that and finally settle on, oh, we'll be a PR firm and we'll work for the Pentagon and so the military hired them, gave them tens of millions of dollars to plant stories in Iraqi newspapers that would be favourable to the US military, so what you had was the Generals saying here are the stories that we want to go out; they would hand them to this group, the Lincoln Group, but it was doing it as a private contractor.
Part of the reason they did that actually was for the sake of deniability. The Lincoln Group was presenting itself, attempting to present itself on the ground that in Iraq it's not being connected to the military, so in the jargon be termed the cut out, they create a certain distancing between the military and its own message, but it's also strikingly, to me strikingly ineffective that they've done this. First of all, every evidence is that the Iraqis saw right through them and as soon as they started paying to plant articles in the Iraqi newspapers, the Iraqi newspapers jacked their prices up right away, because they knew the money was coming from the military and there was lots of money to spread around and secondly, it got exposed publicly in the press and became more of an embarrassment than something that actually succeeded in getting the US message out. I think that's something that could probably also be said of other aspects of outsourcing military activities to private companies, for example Halliburton and some of the things that have happened with private contractors skimming money or being paid a lot of money to do things that actual soldiers were doing for a lot less money in the past as actual employees of the military rather than a private company.
One thing I should say though is that this role of the private sector media in being recruited to participate in war efforts is not entirely new. During the Second World War for example, there was actually quite a bit of interplay between Hollywood and the White House. For example, one of the best films ever made in my opinion, certainly one of the best propaganda films ever made is Casablanca, which was made with heavy input from the US government and every frame of that film right down to the part where at the end, the French inspector throws down a bottle of Vichy water in disgust is carefully phrased and framed to deliver a message about the war in those days.
IB: One of the organizations you write about is the Rendon Group. Tell me about John Rendon and the Rendon Group.
SR: The Rendon Group is a public relations firm that began working as basically a political campaign manager for political campaigns in the United States, mostly for Democratic Party candidates. They moved from that into doing work internationally, usually doing contracts for the US military in conjunction with military efforts in places ranging from Panama, during the invasion of Panama to Bosnia and have been heavily involved in the First War against Iraq, the Operation Desert Storm and also in connection with the war against Afghanistan and the current war in Iraq as well. They have been fairly closed mouth about their work but have on occasion given speeches, and in one speech for example that John Rendon gave to US Naval Cadets, he told the story - he said, "Do you remember how at the end of the first war in Iraq how you saw Kuwaitis lined up waving American flags on television as they were, you know, as they were greeting American soldiers in Kuwait". He said, "Did you ever wonder how those flags ended up in their hands? That was my job back then". That tells you that those iconic moments that you see on television, that people watch and they think this tells us something about the meaning of what is happening in this war - those don't happen by accident. There is someone carefully scripting and staging things and making sure that little flags end up in the hands of Kuwatis so that they are there to wave them.
IB: You talk about how one of the ways that propaganda works is creating and controlling images. It seems they weren't able to do that in Vietnam. They did it very successfully in Grenada, Panama and the Gulf, but they now seem to have lost control of the images in Iraq.
SR: I think though if you look back at Vietnam and other wars, wars usually start off with the planners, the war and control of the imagery and then over time, that control starts to break down, and that was certainly the case in Vietnam for the first six, seven years of the Vietnam War, the imagery you saw coming back from Vietnam did not involve carnage or chaos or any of the things that people now associate with that war. It was only after the public had soured on the war and morale was dark among American soldiers that that started to be reflected in the news coverage and the same thing has happened I think in somewhat more an accelerated fashion in the case of the war in Iraq, partly because we live in a much more media rich world in which a lot of the images that have come out of Iraq have not come through the big, traditional broadcast media. The first images of flag draped coffins coming home from Iraq were taken by a woman who had her digital camera with her whose job was to load the coffins onto planes and she sent them home to a friend of hers because she wanted her friend to see what care was taken in the handling of dead servicemen.
The first images of human rights abuse is from Abu Grave, in fact all of the images were taken by the people who committed the abuses. It's an odd case in which the journalists exposing the abuse were the abusers themselves and it's because they had digital cameras, soldiers blogging from Iraq who will go out and fight a battle and they'll go back to their home base and log into their account and write about how their day went. Those sorts of messages were coming back in past conflicts as well, but they were coming back in the form of letters that people would write and then they would go back to someone's home and maybe some of those letters would end up in a reporter's hands somewhere but these days, information is much more fluid and there are many more people whose voices are finding their way into public discourse.
IB: What about the role of Al Jazeera that can tell the story from the outher side?
SR: Absolutely. I think Al Jazeera, up until now has mostly been, and other Arab networks as well, their main role has been that they have made it harder for the United States to dominate the message space in Arab and Muslim countries. There aren't a lot of people who watch Al Jazeera in United States, so Al Jazeera's impact on public opinion in English speaking countries is still fairly minimal but in Arab countries I think it's huge.
IB: You wrote in The Best War Ever that the propaganda model that has developed over the course of 20th century has broken down. What did you mean by that?
SR: Well, two things. One is that the propaganda model is failing because it produces bad policy. What it does, the propaganda model is based on assumptions about the audience, that assume the audience is not very rationale and that the leaders are. It 's also based on the assumption that the technology of communication is broadcast technology, which means that the leaders can hope to dominate and control the messages that most people see. We're living in an age in which new communications technologies have emerged, in which it's much cheaper and easier via the internet and other means for a broader spectrum of voices to reach the public and so the assumptions of broadcast propaganda are no longer working as well. I think that's mostly to the good, it means that it's going to make it harder for leaders to act without carefully consulting and participating in a dialogue with the public and I think it will lead to better policy.
IB: What do you see as the future of war propaganda?
SR: The same people who are involved in advertising and public relations and government propaganda for that matter are right now spending a lot of time and effort studying how they can work with the new technologies, so there are public relations firms that are specializing now in reaching out to bloggers and figuring out how to reach bloggers the same way the used to figure out how to schmooze journalists and the US military have done a couple of things that are interesting in controlling blogging. One is it has offered actual news feeds and news releases to bloggers and then invited them to repost military supplied information on their blogs. The other thing it has done, it has attempted with varying degrees of success to punish soldiers who blog in ways that they find inappropriate. Sometimes the claim is that they are jeopardizing actual safety of other soldiers by revealing information that the enemy can use - sometimes though it's fairly transparently political. Interestingly to me, the people that they have come down on have not just been soldiers who are opposed to the war, but also soldiers who are overly enthusiastic in support of the war because some of them express attitudes that are well, patently racist or offensive. There's a blogger who, a military blogger who was reprimanded and told to stop blogging because he posted a blog post that said "I (heart) dead civilians" and he was not an opponent of the war, he was just being excessively enthusiastic for it and they found that problematic as well. I don't think that the efforts to crack down on soldiers and silence their voices have been very effective or likely to be very effective in the future, but I think what you will see is increasing sophistication to do a better job at reaching out in subtle ways to the network of people who support the cause, to pro-war bloggers and things like that, and I think you'll probably see those sorts of almost viral marketing efforts increase as part of the strategy.
IB: Now, one of their big innovations in the Iraq war was to embed reporters with the troops. What was the thinking behind that and what effect did it have?
SR: Embedded reporters, the idea was that they would actually plant soldiers, have them accompany troops as they advanced on Iraq and from a PR point of view it was tremendously successful, almost all of the soldiers, or almost all of the reporters bonded with the soldiers. They wrote stories that were really generally very sympathetic to the soldiers, which you would expect, I mean, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the reporters are literally dependent for their lives as well as for transportation and food and everything else, the soldiers with whom they're traveling, they're sharing the soldiers own experience of you know, being far from home, you know, eating food that maybe isn't very good and so they form a natural, emotional bond.
Just from a physical point of view, I mean, where you place yourself physically at a time of war determines to some degree the point of view that you're going to be able to present and the reporters who were standing with soldiers would see what they were doing is they perhaps you know, fired off a missile or something, but they were not standing at the location where that missile landed and in modern warfare especially, often times the soldier who fires a weapon doesn't actually see what happens at the other end of that event, so embedded very definitely had the effect of giving a point of view, very close to the point of view that the military planners wanted to convey to reporting. What happened though after the toppling of Saddam Hussein' s regime is that those same reporters who embedded with soldiers began to experience the next phase of the chaos and the difficult managing things on the ground and so you've seen some really excellent documentaries come out by journalists and filmmakers who are embedded with the troops and which the soldiers are grumbling. There's one item I saw recently for example, called Operation Dreamland which is based on the experiences of soldiers stationed near Falujah. There's another documentary that was made just recently - actually filmed by the soldiers themselves called The War Tapes. They gave cameras directly to the soldiers and mostly what they do is complain about the difficulties and the chaos and so forth, so during the initial euphoria phase of the war, embedding worked quite well, but the same pattern that has happened in past wars is happening here, which is that as you get bogged down in a quagmire and as morale starts to dip amongst the soldiers in a field, embedding doesn't work quite as well.
IB: You have a chapter called The Victory of Spin. What did you mean by that?
SR: The point we make in The Victory of Spin, and throughout the entire book is that the main success of all this propaganda has been at reinforcing the beliefs that the war planners themselves and to a lesser extent at helping the American people to fool themselves about the likely consequences of going to war with Iraq, you can basically draw a series of - you can basically draw a series of concentric circles emanating from Washington, DC and you can see how heavily people have embedded the propaganda. The people who believe in it most intensely are the war planners themselves in government and in think tanks, clustered around Washington, but to a lesser degree the American people bought that message although there were questions in a sizable percentage of the population that was skeptical all along, but you step across the boarder from the United States into countries like Canada and Mexico, our immediate neighbours and you find populations that were largely skeptical all along. You step one further circle out and you're in Europe and then one further out and you're in countries like the Arab world where less than ten percent of the public ever believed in the messages that all that propaganda intended to convey. So the people who believed in it most are the people who are creating the messages, not the people who were, the people that you might think they were trying to persuade.
IB: It's interesting you would say that because some people have argued that they knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, but what you're saying is that they actually believed the propaganda.
SR: I think they managed to persuade themselves to believe it. The ongoing discussions in anti-war circles has been the idea that Bush and Chaney and those people lied. I think that propaganda is a little different than lying. Propaganda is about coming up with messages that will motivate your intended audience to feel, think and behave in ways that you want and the propagandist is not necessarily trying to lie when they do that. Sometimes in fact, the messages are true but the propagandist generally is indifferent to the question as to whether the message is true or not. They're more concerned in whether the messages produces the desired effect in the audience and I think that way of thinking about communications there's a certain blurring of the distinction between truth and lies in the minds of the propagandists themselves and it makes it easier for them to fool themselves. They may not see themselves as lying when they do that. They in fact become very passionate about their messages but nevertheless, the messages are false.
IB: So at some point, kind of a switch happens and they start to believe their own propaganda.
SR: I think so and you can see very specific examples of that in the case of buildup to war with Iraq. For example, we now know that a lot of the information that the White House relied upon in making its claims about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction came from comments provided by a group called The Iraqi National Congress. As we've explained in our books and as is well documented, The Iraqi National Congress is actually a group that was set up at the instigation of the first President Bush, following Operation Desert Storm and who did he hire to create this group? Who came up with the name Iraqi National Congress? It was a public relations group, the Randen Group and the task for The Iraqi National Congress for which it was created was to create conditions that would lead to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Obviously they accomplished their goal. You could find interviews with people working with The Iraqi National Congress where they explained, following September 11th, they were trying to find the message that would most help them accomplish their goal and they said, find us people who can come up with Iraqi links to terrorists. Find us people who can come up with evidence of weapons of mass destruction and we now know that the stories that their informants told were not true. It's quite clear that they were outright lies. The Bush administration seemed to have believed them. So in an odd way you have a front group that was created by a public relations firm, going out and finding informants who would lie to the very people who originally created and paid to have this group created, this group that was funded by the United States ended up telling lies that were then relied upon by the United States but I don't think at the level of people like Colin Powell or George W. Bush or Dick Chaney, they necessarily were inventing the lies themselves; they were relying on information that people had been paid to tell them.
IB: So they kind of forgot it was propaganda and began to think it might be real?
SR: Right. It went from a sort of Potemkin village type of reality to something that seemed like actual reality in their eyes. It's to me, one of the most fascinating stories of how we got into war. They did that and it reminds me of, there was an Austrian journalist at the end of the First World War who was asked how are nations ruled and led into war. How did World War One happen? His response was, "Politicians lie to journalists and then they believe those lies when they see them in print". What we've seen happen as in the course of the build up to war with Iraq has been something quite similar with the additional wrinkle that it's been done in part through public relations firms and groups like The Iraqi National Congress.
