Peace Researcher 29 – June
2004
David Miller (editor), Pluto Press, London, 2004. $47.95.
During the 1980-88 Reagan presidency, you might remember, the US had to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada because it was building an airport for Russian bombers. Nicaragua, on the Central American isthmus to the west, had been taken over by evil thugs. American TV viewers were reminded that Nicaragua was only “two days” marching time from Texas. It was a toss-up whether the Nicaraguans would beat the South American killer bees in the race to destroy America. Or would bees and Nicaraguans find Texas already bombed into submission? Cubans, in league with the Russians and Grenadians, were held responsible for much of the trouble. Further afield, Libyan hitmen and Hispanic narco-terrorists plotted.
In the last contribution to “Tell Me Lies”, an analysis of the propaganda devised to sell the 2003 war on Iraq, Noam Chomsky recalls the 1980s in order to make the point that the comic strip propaganda of Reaganite America might now seem absurd, but at the time it worked well enough. There was no mass rejection of Reagan’s claims by those in “Middle America” whose allegiance matters to Washington. Chomsky thinks Americans have learned. Major wars, like that waged against Vietnam, begun two decades earlier, could not now occur without provoking domestic opposition too strong for an American government to ignore.
Let’s hope so. If so, it will be at least partly the result of the efforts of Chomsky himself. He has documented American foreign policy for decades. One of his recurring themes has been that it’s never been pretty and its purpose - to secure the maximum possible global influence - is assumed by all American administrations. But if they were presented to the scrutiny of citizens, its violent methods would not be acceptable. So the need for secrecy and deception is permanent.
In NZ, during the 1960s and 70s, we were told that navies of Vietnamese might land on the beach at any time to enslave us. A government couldn’t sell that now. Could it? We didn’t believe it then either, so then we were told that the Chinese were making them do it. Now we are told that Osama bin Laden was behind Saddam’s nastiness. Or whatever it was that was being said. None of these things can stand scrutiny after the event.
We’re about to find out how far the US will go in defiance of world opinion. President Dubya Bush doesn’t seem to mind what the rest of the world thinks. The British PM, Tony Blair, and the Little Aussie Battler, John Howard, have been Dubya’s only real mates. Both look shaky at home as a result. The tension between a more open American disdain for world opinion and an apparently sharpened international impatience with its behaviour in Iraq is giving Bush less room than he might have supposed he would have - though it’s likely he hasn’t noticed.
In this context, “Tell Me Lies” is reassuring. Even Dubya would prefer some foreign backing. He probably thinks he still needs the UK. So for the sake of the rest of us it’s good to see that critics are thick on the ground in Britain. The book analyses the way in which the Blair government prepared the country for its decision to tag along with the dumping of Saddam. The war was always unpopular, at home as well as abroad. As we now know (and the case for the prosecution has become stronger since Miller put out this book) it was too big an ask. If you lie, you have to be able to hide the truth. The bulk of “Tell Me Lies” is a detailed investigation of how British propaganda evolved.
It used to be that the UK Ministry of Defence carried out “psychological operations”, or “psyops”. The Blair government calls it “information support”. “Information support” is what happens when you have a “traditional objective of influencing the perceptions of selected target audiences ... to mobilise and sustain support for a particular policy and interpretation of events”. When MPs talk like this you get nostalgic for 007 (the fictional British spy, James Bond. Ed.), and some good old-fashioned villainy.
As was said apparently at the time of the disastrous 1990s Big Power response to Yugoslavian chaos, you have to fix “one and a half eyes on media perceptions”. The persons entrusted with running their country’s foreign relations think their responsibility has to do with “massaging public opinion into accepting controversial foreign policy decisions”.
Notice how the emphasis is on manipulating domestic opinion elites, the politicians, journalists and academics who mediate between governments and the rest of us. For the policymaking classes, the public, as we were once called, doesn’t exist. We are assumed to be fit only to be passive consumers of the lies governments invent, and now refer to as their “products”.
It’s hard to talk about this stuff without littering the page with endless quotation marks. Britain’s New Labour has devised a new language. One reason is that it’s supposed to make its users seem deep thinkers. The more important reason is that the phrases of New Labourspeak have no meaning, so you can’t reject them. They’re there to baffle, to set the limits of acceptable discourse. As long as people put up with Big Brother “massaging” their minds, they won’t challenge with real words.
The Blairites had to sell their “product” of an unwinnable and nasty war they must have known that few would like. British voters might call the result a pack of lies. The PM’s publicists call it “the Future Strategic Context”. Why Blair hitched his wagon to Dubya’s is still a subject of some bemusement. Past history and present economics suggest that oil has something to do with it, an observation that the PM likes to tag a “conspiracy theory”. In this well-worn conceit a rational analysis of the effects of history, geography and politics on a nation’s policies is ridiculed as loony tunes. Instead Blair invites us to admire the sobriety of his take on why he had to fight Iraq. It has something to do with the agnostic Hussein’s penchant for launching missiles at Britain (which would have landed in 45 minutes flat) to further the cause of some foreign religious fanatics. Or something.
Stephen Dorril, a researcher with a track record, contributes a critique of how the State is skilled at “‘flattering and deceiving” journalists. While the journalists are often naive and lazy, the “Intelligence agencies are not very good. The only mystery is why journalists have not treated them with the same derision and contempt they generally reserve for politicians”.
This raises interesting points about Intelligence agencies and about politicians. We tend to think that the spies are idiotic hypocrites but it’s probably more accurate to say that they are idiots. In all the great crises of the 20th Century the conventional wisdom, as formed in Westminster and Washington, was wrong, and not just in hindsight. The policy experts did not listen to what informed lay opinion could have told them about Germany in the 1930s or about Vietnam in the 1960s.
In the 30s the expertise was the random impressions of your mates from the old school. By the 60s, possibly in reaction to the amateur ethos, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sought an illusionary technological precision. But no matter how many computers print out how many spreadsheets, if it’s garbage in, it’s still garbage out.
The spies have been good at fostering a mystique of their own brilliance, but the record is of permanent failure to understand what’s going on in the world. At first it seems incredible that Dubya’s billion-dollar “intelligence” gurus thought that the US Army could install a puppet regime in Iraq, call it a democracy, assume its longevity, and proclaim success. However, the record reminds us that it’s par for the course. The CIA has never thought it needed to temper the often crude prejudices of its bosses with dispassionate understanding of foreign places. It’s easy to be an imperial bully when you don’t want to know and you don’t care. Bullies enjoy the way their ignorance has the power to anger opponents.
We accept that the “embedded” journalists in Iraq, dependent on the US and UK governments, could not be trusted to probe for themselves in print. We might also consider the dangers of embedding ourselves with the sorts of politicians who accept New Labour-style Orwellian language. Whenever words are used for the sole purpose of hiding the truth, we’re in trouble. The Blair project, with its “Future Strategic Contexts”, is ultimately aimed at its own citizens. Its “information support” has other “products” to sell. And if we let our governments treat our public business, any of it, as a public relations ad campaign, we too are victims of a propaganda war.
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