by Propaganda
weapons program and would soon have the capability to attack the United States;
and third, that he was engaged in production of chemical and biological weapons
that could also inflict great damage on the United States and its allies. That these
pretexts amounted to propaganda follows once we note that the Bush administration
had competent advice from within the intelligence community pointing to the lack
of a solid foundation for these claims, yet the administration presented them as if they
were established truth.114
Propaganda for war is prohibited in international law.115 The UN International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states in Article 20: “Any propaganda for war
shall be prohibited by law,” and the American Convention on Human Rights states
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in Article 13: “Any propaganda for war ... shall be considered as [an offence] punishable by law.” Just war theory requires that a belligerent, to be justified in going to war,
should have the right intention, a good expectation of victory, declaration of war by
proper authority, and an assessment that the harms produced by war are necessary
to avoid some greater evil, as well as the requirement that no alternative short of war
could accomplish the same objective. If another country has an aggressive intention,
launching of a pre-emptive war may be allowed if there is solid evidence that actions in
line with the aggressive intentions are imminent. It is not enough that there is a distant
likelihood of some possible attack.
Starting in August 2002, senior members of the Bush administration began build-
ing a case that there was a need for a pre-emptive attack, using words that suggested,
but did not contain, solid evidence that there was a threat from Iraq that needed an
urgent response. Canada’s National Post prominently pictured, under a banner page,
one headline on September 9, 2002 that said “U.S. Makes Urgent Case for War,” a
quartet of senior administrators in the Bush administration, with quotations from each.
National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice is quoted, above her picture, as saying, “We
don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Vice-President Dick Cheney
declared, “The United States may well become the target.” Secretary of State Colin
Powell intoned, “I don’t think we should just sit around and wait.” Finally Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “Our task is to connect the dots before the fact.”116
Interestingly, none of these statements, taken in isolation, is a demonstrable false-
hood. Who would quarrel with Rice’s desire to avoid a mushroom cloud? Cheney
merely makes a claim about a possibility rather than established fact, although he
would be engaging in deception if he knew that Iraq had little or no capability of
delivering an effective blow against the United States with a weapon of mass destruc-
tion. Powell’s comment is unexceptionable if we don’t construe “not waiting” as equiv-
alent to going to war. Rumsfeld’s claim is also inoffensive by itself, but it connotes
something more aggressive when tied to the headline and the other statements.
There are numerous proofs that the Bush administration’s decision to go to war
against Iraq was not made on the basis of evidence that it presented to the world. One
is the highly classified Downing Street memo leaked to the press in 2005. It reports
on a meeting on July 23, 2002 between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top
security advisers with the Bush administration in Washington. It states that the Bush
administration had decided to go to war and that “the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy.”117 Another is testimony by a Security and Counterterrorism
insider, Richard A. Clarke, in his book Against All Enemies.118 He describes how, to his amazement, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the administration
discussed targeting Iraq instead of dealing with al-Qaeda, with President Bush prod-
ding security personnel to find evidence implicating Iraq. When informed that several
investigations had already taken place with no real linkages found between the 9/11
perpetrators and Iraq, Bush’s testy response was “Look into Iraq, Saddam.”119
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It is not hard to see why the Bush administration would want to attack Iraq. It is a major source of easily extractible oil and would be a major asset to any power seeking more control over the oil market. A second reason is that Hussein was a threat to
Israel, among other things by helping relatives of suicide bombers with cash donations.
US military bases in Iraq would also strengthen US power in the region. None of these
reasons are sufficient to justify war.120 Moreover, the US population would not likely
support war on such a basis. Hence the need, as perceived by the Bush administration,
to have some simple, understandable, compelling reason for war, such as imminent
attack by Iraq using weapons of mass destruction.
The goal was achieved with the help of elaborate PR assistance from the Rendon
Group in Washington, DC. Working with the CIA, Rendon created an umbrella
group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) composed of Iraqi exiles who wanted to
depose Hussein and who could be expected to distort the truth if necessary to sup-
port US action against him.121 Large sums, in the millions, were available to assist their
efforts. Francis Brooke played a prominent role for Rendon and the CIA in eliciting
helpful stories from the exiles, such as Hussein’s support for terrorists and possession
of weapons of mass destruction.122 The exiles obliged with fabricated stories and evi-
dence that were later discredited when checked out following the invasion. With the
help of an insufficiently sceptical press, they supported the Bush administration in
successfully persuading the public to support the war.
We have been speaking for most of this chapter about government controls over
an aberrant media. In this case, informal government controls over the media, largely
in the form of granting access and scoops to favoured media outlets, are the main part
of the problem, but they are compounded by attitudes in the media themselves, reluc-
tant as they have been to challenge official accounts. In some cases, this may have been
because co-operating media shared the administration’s unstated goals. In others, it may
be because publishing costs are less when toeing the administration’s line than when
paying the cost of investigative reporting necessary for successful y chal enging official
accounts. A news medium suffers less when it gets things wrong if its reporting matches
that of other media. In any case, the evidence of faulty journalism and the contributions
to the propaganda efforts from seemingly independent think tanks or endowed univer-
sity study centres is available. A few examples follow.
1. The case of Judith Miller, writing for the New York Times during the critical pre-
war months stands out partly because of the great influence of that newspaper, but
also because it later apologized for what it acknowledged was substandard journalism
> (though not before a lot of pressure had been placed upon it to do so, largely through
various Internet critics that refused to allow the issue to die). The case against Miller
is that she relied heavily on suspect sources without identifying them, so that readers
were not privy to reasons for doubting their veracity. Much of her information came
from Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled Iraqi opponent of Hussein, who served as the basis for
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many front page stories concerning weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration, working with the INC and Chalabi, was able to get across its ideas to the pub-
lic through her reports and then cited the newspaper in support of its own position.123
The New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent faulted his newspaper for being too
credulous, desiring scoops, and giving undue display to suspect material. The public’s
right to know should have outweighed the “coddling” of sources. He noted in passing
that the public was not informed that the newspaper had hired Chalabi’s niece for
work in its Kuwait bureau.124
2. While Judith Miller deserves special attention because of the prominence and influ-
ence of her stories, Douglas McCollam, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review,
told how Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman for the INC’s Washington office, showed him
a list of 108 stories generated by its Information Collection Program and published
in many major newspapers and magazines.125 For example, on December 20, 2001, the
New York Times carried the front page headline “Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites for Chemical and Nuclear Arms,” followed by a story reported by Judith Miller. Stephen
Engleberg, a former New York Times editor who worked on the story, later realized, as did Miller, that the story should have been treated sceptically, since it was based simply on an interview with Adnan Ihsan Saeed Al-Haideri, an Iraqi civil engineer who
claimed to have visited at least 20 secret weapons sites. However, at the time, Miller’s
story “ricocheted through America and the world,” in McCol am’s words.126
3. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council in New
York on February 5, 2003 was full of striking visual effects, charts, and taped conversa-
tions but very little hard evidence with which to persuade the world that Iraq posed an
imminent threat to US security. A widely published photograph showed him holding
a vial containing a white powdery substance while denouncing Hussein’s capability of
attacking the United States with anthrax. It was not made clear what the vial contained, but it was a graphic way of implicating Hussein, as if it had been found in his territory.
There were photographs of mobile units, supposedly for manufacture of chemical and
biological weaponry, but there was no proof that that was their purpose. Charts replete with arrows connected Hussein to al-Qaeda and were superficially persuasive, although
they contained no proof.
Most media outlets in the United States treated the presentation as convincing.
Not so the French-Canadian newspapers. Le Devoir reacted on February 6 with thor-
ough scepticism, even ridicule. A cartoon showed Powell with a picture of empty des-
ert sands and the caption: “Nothing! That’s proof that it’s well-hidden.” The English
language newspapers were more gul ible, although some writers were sceptical. On the
same day that the National Post headlined “Facts are ‘Irrefutable’: Powell,” followed by an opinion piece by Mark Steyn confidently predicting that “Saddam’s skeletons”
(presumably meaning his weapons of mass destruction) would “come tumbling out of
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US Secretary of State Colin Powell holding a vial while discussing the threat of
AnTHRAX at the key February 5, 2003 meeting of the Un Security Council.
the post-liberation closet,” the Globe and Mail observed prominently that Powell had failed to convince his Security Council audience. Nevertheless, the newspaper carried
a particularly strong endorsement of Powell’s claims by an expert on security mat-
ters, Wesley Wark of the Munk Centre for International Affairs at the University of
Toronto. “The evidence is in and it’s damning,” his article was titled. Wark contrasted
the case of the photos that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis with the Powell
evidence in a way that favoured the latter: “What’s different this time around is the
breadth of evidence offered—not just U-2 spy plane photos but a little of everything
in the U.S. intelligence dossier, part of what one Bush administration official calls a
‘Mount Everest’ of information.” On the other hand, Clifford Lincoln, Liberal mem-
ber of the Quebec legislature, commented in La Presse, the dominant Quebec French language newspaper, that Powell’s evidence was “[n]othing like October 23, 1962”
(“rien à voir avec le 23 octobre 1962”) when Adlai Stevenson presented “irrefutable
truth” of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Miro Cernetig, writing in the Globe and Mail, also thought that Powell lacked a “gotcha” moment.127
4. When a journalist actively campaigns for a political leader, it would stand to reason
that a newspaper publishing an opinion piece by that journalist on a topic related
to the leader’s policies should inform readers about the connection. When the Bush
administration started campaigning in August 2002 to gain public support for war
against Iraq, there were early indications that Canada’s prime minister, Jean Chrétien,
was reluctant to give his support. A rather vicious opinion piece appeared in the
Wall Street Journal under the headline “Canada’s Chrétien: the ‘Schroeder’ of the
Americas,” suggesting that he was tolerant of anti-Semitism.128 German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder had recently been under fire for not taking action against his jus-
tice minister for remarks that some interpreted as anti-Semitic. When the article was
prominently republished in the Ottawa Citizen and elsewhere, it had a big impact on
the public perception of Chrétien.
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The journalist responsible for the article was Marie-Josée Kravis, wife of Henry Kravis, a New York billionaire actively involved with the Republican Party. Earlier,
on May 15, 2002, the Washington Times reported that she was co-chair of a gala fun-
draiser for the Republican National Committee that raised $30 million and at which
she toasted President Bush, party officials, and activists. Yet, at the end of the article,
she was identified only as a member of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing think tank,
and born and raised in Canada. So when she wrote that former Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau had been tough on terrorists during the FLQ crisis and that Chrétien should
be emulating him by supporting the war against Iraq, readers could credit her with
some knowledge. But in fact what she wrote was highly tendentious. Her article began
“Why is Jean Chrétien so intent on finding a justification for terrorism?” According to
Kravis, he had suggested on the first anniversary of 9/11 that Western arrogance may
have contributed to the attack and that t
he gap between rich and poor was fodder for
terrorism. Such observations most likely referred to the causes of terrorism, not an
ethical justification for it. In December 1967, when Trudeau was justice minister, he
had said that if the wealthy nations continued to exploit the poorer nations through
economic injustices, the poorer nations would revolt and they would be justified in
doing so (I was in the audience when he spoke about this in Ottawa’s Conference
Centre and his words made a deep impression). So the wedge Kravis was trying to
place between Chrétien and Trudeau is doubtful.
In Canada, the Asper-owned (at the time) Ottawa Citizen reprinted Kravis’s arti-
cle prominently, along with other related news stories and opinion pieces. The pressure
on Chrétien to support the war was enormous, but he cannily solved the problem by
appearing to cave in and then, after the negative publicity had subsided, introduc-
ing conditions that greatly diminished his level of commitment. Like the Wall Street
Journal, the Ottawa Citizen failed to mention Kravis’s Republican connection but included mention that she was “born and raised in Canada, [and] is a senior fellow at
the Hudson Institute.”129
If we grant that the push to war in 2002 was so deceptive as to qualify as propaganda,
and if we interpret the 2003 war as lacking the kind of defensive necessity that might
have been provided by a well-founded reason for thinking that attack from Iraq was
imminent, then we have reason to believe the propaganda was illegal in international
law. Perhaps more of a hue and cry should be raised the next time such propaganda for
war occurs. Even if the governing power is unlikely to allow prosecution of its actions,
such an appeal to international law can create a focal point for discussion and raising
public awareness of the moral issues.
At the time of writing in April 2012, there is agitation in the media for increased
sanctions or an attack on Iran, in part because the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) issued a report in November 2011 indicating that that country was
continuing to pursue its program of uranium enrichment, consistent with seeking
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