How to sell a war
- Author: Kenneth
Charlie on wall Street in new York city sells bonds. (spring, 1918). During the war, Chaplin at the request of the US government was involved in the distribution of war bonds. Traveled to the United States, participated in a special rally in support of loans. (World War I Liberty Loan Tour).For the first time “perception Management” was introduced in the late 1980s during the Reagan administration, in order to avoid future wars public opposition, which occurred during the Vietnam war.
The Ministry of defense of the United States defines perception management as:
Actions on provision and/or prohibition and prevention to provide the foreign audience selected information and data in order to affect their emotional state, motivation and objective judgment, as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all, with the purpose to influence official estimates, ultimately, expressed in behaviors and official actions favorable to the objectives of the initiator. Different ways, perception management combines truth projection, combat operations, security measures, measures for concealment and disinformation, and psychological operations.”
At the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 journalists were embedded in the American troops as military cameramen. This was not done with the purpose to show what happens in war, but to present the American point of view on it. Perception management was used to promote the belief that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction to push through its military intervention, even if this hidden background of this war was regime change.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book War and Antijoin” referring to the tools of perception management:
- accusations of atrocities.
- hyperbole and exaggeration of events;
- the demonization and dehumanization;
- the split of public opinion;
- the requirement of imposing dissuasive sanctions;
- meta-propaganda.
In 2001, led by John randono random groups got a secret contract of $16 million, with the objective to transform Iraq into a target for propaganda. “Rendon group, which the CIA hired to help create the conditions for the removal of Saddam Hussein is the leader of the “perception management”. Two months later, in December 2001, the CIA and the Pentagon conducted a secret operation in the production of false testimony of alleged Iraqi civil engineer, given at the polygraph, in which he gave oral evidence that supported Saddam Hussein and his people to bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Of course, we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.
The study by Professor Phil Taylor reveals the following differences between the media of the US and global media in terms of covering this war:
- Pro-war coverage in the US did the US media “instigators” in the eyes of the cautious and more rigorous global media;
- article about the war more was discussed in the countries not affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011;
- not the American media was not able to see the connection between the “war on terror” and “axis of evil”; and,
- The US media became part of a campaign to conduct information operations, which weakened their credibility in the eyes of the world media.
President Bush himself admitted in a television interview with Katie Coric on the “evening News” CBS, “one of the most difficult aspects of my work – “linking Iraq to the war on terror.” Vice President dick Cheney said on meet the press:
“If we succeed in Iraq… we will have struck a heavy blow right in the heart of the main, with your permission, the geographic base of the terrorists who for many years has exposed us to the attacks, but most especially on 9/11”.
Until the beginning of 2002 the main provider of intelligence on Iraq was the CIA. In order to establish a link between Iraq and terrorists in 2002, the Pentagon established the Office of special planning”, which in fact was responsible for military planning against Iraq, and was characterized by Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld as the provider of intelligence for the Bush administration. Its head, assistant Secretary of defense Douglas Feith, sent a small command to view the available intelligence information on terrorist networks in order to identify the States that sponsor them, among other things. In 2002, the Deputy Secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, Feith, wrote a memo entitled “Connection of Iraq with al-Qaeda”* in which it was noted that “has been little progress in pushing intelligence to the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Peter Rodman, Advisor to the Minister of defense for international security, has established “the evaluation policy of combating terrorism” GOPT, which analysed the links between al Qaeda and Iraq with the recommendations, “how to use this connection”.
“In February 2003, when former Secretary of state Colin Powell addressed the UN, he described a “sinister connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda network,” saying that “Iraq today is home to a deadly network headed by Zarqawi’s forces, the ally and companion of Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi was preparing its operations, including exercises with biological weapons, with the approval of Saddam Hussein. It has later been questioned as a fake.
However, in October 2004, due to the fact that the Iraqi unrest has been in Vogue as a General for the jihadist circles of the case, Zarqawi officially announced his loyalty to al-Qaeda. It happened after his group in August 2003 blew up a powerful bomb near a Shiite mosque, killing one of the high clerics of the Shia and provoking the outbreak of hostility between the Shiite and Sunni communities. A turning point in fomenting full-scale civil war was the attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the responsibility for which was attributed to Hatimu Sabah al-Badri, a former soldier of the Republican guard of Saddam Hussein, who joined al-Qaeda after the American invasion. This has led to the emergence of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
General Wesley Clark, former Supreme allied commander of NATO and head of the joint chiefs has said in his book “How to win a modern war”:
“When in November 2001 I went back through the Pentagon, one of the senior military staff officers had time to spill the beans. Yes, we still followed the course of the war with Iraq, he said. But there was something else. This was discussed as part of a plan for a five-year campaign, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan”.
In 2004, John Negroponte, who from 1981 to 1985 served as Ambassador in Honduras, was appointed as Ambassador to Iraq with a specific mandate to conduct “Salvador option”, the terrorist model of mass killings carried out by death squads that are sponsored by the United States.
In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld directed Colonel James Steele to serve as a civilian adviser to the Iraqi paramilitary police special forces, known as the “Wolf brigade”. Steele was a specialist in the fight against the rebels, he was a member of the special group of US military advisers in the army of El Salvador, and in South America trained commando who committed egregious human rights violations. “The wolf brigade was created and established by the United States, it provided for the possibility of redistribution for the soldiers of the Republican guard. Later this brigade was accused by US authorities of torture, killings and the practice of death squads. Methods used by these anti-insurgent brigades that are described as “the war on terror by terror” have been used in other theatres of war, such as Vietnam and El Salvador.
The use of death squads started in 2004 and lasted until the end of hostilities in 2008. In addition to the death squads, during certain operations, regular military units were often given orders to “kill all military-age males”; use “test shots” or kill wounded soldiers; to call air strikes at areas with civilians, conduct all-round fire 360 degrees on busy streets. The use of these extreme measures were justified to troops in Iraq propaganda about the relationship of the population with terrorism.
Colonel Steele, with the help of Colonel James Hoffman, organized torture centers, sending Shiite militia torture of soldiers of Sunni in order to get details about the resistance. It was considered the main cause of the civil war that led to the formation of LIH.*
The operation of death squads as a counterinsurgency at that time it was also common knowledge.
In relation to private contractors is similar to the Touch, often acted norms and rules than the rules of the armed forces they served and, in some cases that they serviced. As of 2008, in a ground operation in Iraq in the service of the United States consisted of approximately 155 286 private contractors, compared with 152 of the 275 soldiers. Approximate annual costs of such contractors by 2010 it had ballooned to $5 billion.
In August 2006 four us soldiers from a military unit in Iraq had shown at the preliminary hearing in accordance with article 32 of the Military criminal code that was given orders by my commanding officer, Colonel Michael Steele, to “kill all military-age males”.
According to the journalist Glenn Greenwald, all the men of military age in the areas of attack in the last programme of strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles are considered rebels until then, until proven otherwise. Some argue that this resulted in an even greater number of victims among the civilian population than reported by the government.
Note:
* – A group banned in Russia.
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