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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Paul Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War against Iraq (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004)
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| PAUL RUTHERFORD's new book examines how the recent war in Iraq was sold to various publics. Throughout, it also tells an eerie, if all too familiar, tale about the power of marketing in our culture. The language of marketing dominates other modes of communication in affluent societies, to the extent that spin is now like the Stars and Stripes at a John Ashcroft news conference; it's everywhere. Marketing generates publicity about new products and services but it also clutters our lives with ever more slogans and pitches. Spin spreads, taking over aspects of our culture previously thought to be part of that vaunted liberal democratic domain: the public sphere. In politics, public relations creates what Rutherford (drawing on the work of Daniel Robinson) calls a "marketing polity," one in which a new kind of democracy is practiced. Here politicians are retailers and voters are consumers in a political supermarket intent on turning even the most brutal events into easy-to-consume homilies. It is such a context that fashioned the second war in Iraq as a commodity throughout the winter and spring of 2003. Such a production is dangerous, Rutherford warns, because it is only made possible through the provisions of a propaganda state, a "regime where a constant flow of illusion enables an elite to rule over the citizenry." (192) |
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For the record, Rutherford did not support the war because it lacked UN sanction. But it is not "the justice ... of what happened in the spring of 2003" that interests him. (3) Rather, Rutherford is concerned with the experience of war, the spectacles and narratives produced by the mainstream media, and the ways in which these were received by audiences. "The intervention became a branded war," Rutherford argues, "a co-production of the Pentagon and of newsrooms, processed and cleansed so that it could appeal to the well-established tastes of people who were veteran consumers of popular culture." (4) This was war as a commodity, clean and compelling. And while most might find the notion of selling war like any other product repugnant, our pop culture of violence easily lends itself to the marketing of real war through spectacles of adventure, conquest, and victory. |
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Gulf War II was expected to be the first Internet war. In fact, Rutherford tells us, this was not the case. Again television remained the only medium that "could deliver the experience, the images and the sounds, that made of war a live spectacle." (80) Newspapers, radio, and the Internet would prove important, but TV stayed at the centre of our media landscape. As compared to the first Gulf War, what was new this time though were the satellite TV services of Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, etc., which offered alternative, if sometimes equally suspect, perspectives on the conflict. |
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A sense of belligerence across American public opinion following 11 September 2001 certainly created fertile ground in the media for Bush's war. However, with polls throughout 2003 indicating that most Americans wanted UN sanction before moving into Iraq, the Administration and the Pentagon worked tirelessly to ensure their message and the commodity they offered (i.e., victory) were front and centre. This meant dominating and controlling the media through what the Pentagon calls the discipline of "information operations." (61) Executed through both White House and Pentagon officials, information operations works through the constant production of narrative. The infamous "shock and awe" campaign was one such storyline meant to brand the invasion as a "good war" executed with technological sophistication via smart bombs, decapitation strikes, and stealth machinery, etc. These efforts were supported by three-a-day news briefings from White House spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, news reports by US commanders from Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and daily Administration faxes sent out to major networks and US embassies laying out the theme for the day. And when these efforts were still not enough to manage news headlines, information operations also included the production of dramatic storylines, including the so-called rescue of Private Jessica Lynch on 1 April 2003. We now know that this story was over-hyped and wrongly reported, but its fit with the intentions of the Pentagon's publicity machine made it impossible to resist. It also didn't hurt that the story came out just as polls were suggesting that the American populace was beginning to worry that Iraq would become a quagmire like Vietnam. |
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Besides heroic tales of rescue, Rutherford also notes how a new form of marketing came to influence media coverage of the war. Viral marketing propagates one message by infecting other more legitimate messages, much like viruses spread through an unsuspecting population. A version of this was implemented in Gulf War II; only audiences came to know these people by a different name: embedded journalists. In Canada, CBC refused to embed any of its journalists for fear they would become "instruments of the marketing apparatus," but more than 600 mostly British and American correspondents did take up this option. (70) And once in, as was to be expected, "[m]any of the reporters became family; they lost that sense of distance necessary to 'objective' journalism because they developed instead a sense of camaraderie, an admiration, for the people in the unit." (76) In this way, Rutherford argues, embedded journalists became servants of the war effort. More importantly, by providing a seemingly unending flow of images, they also helped usher in the experience of real-time war, which can be viewed as it is happening. "The conceit of the real-time war was its capacity to create an illusion of being there, right when something is happening." (85) The problem, however, is that this kind of coverage becomes a more sinister version of reality TV. By bombarding the viewer with wave upon wave of new, low-res, fragmented images, real-time war overwhelms our sense of history. It promises a kind of "thereness" that negates the past and absolves one from thinking about the future as a framework for making sense of what is happening now. How can Rutherford draw these conclusions? |
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Certainly, one of the most interesting methodological components of the book is the "citizen's panel" Rutherford turns to as a bounce-board to evaluate how audiences received the messages sent out by the Pentagon and TV networks. Not surprisingly, he was selective with regards to the members of the panel: these were "women and men who belonged to the articulate public, people inside and outside the university community, who paid a lot of attention to public affairs." (4) To Rutherford's credit, the panel offers divergent opinions and includes the voices of peace activists, those who supported the coalition, and some who were simply what Rutherford calls "alienated consumers." (5) Polls, letters to newspapers, and newspaper editorials were also consulted and, in general, what results from this is a book that helpfully tracks "how the weapons of mass persuasion were deployed, what their effect was, and why the experiment was significant." (7) |
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The major weakness in the text has to do with the way Rutherford treats those who opposed the war. Throughout the text, there are occasions where critics of the Bush war plan are dismissed all too easily. Protests lacked intellectual substance and in fact were "naïve, ideological and ... so very anti-American" (48), we are told. Rutherford's own disdain for left-of-centre social movements seems to inform this conclusion, rather than a clear analysis of how opposition to the war developed in the West. This is a shame in what is otherwise a fine contribution and assessment of the future of war in Western cultures. |
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Stuart Poyntz
University of British Columbia |
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