The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
Rolling StoneStrapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.
It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.
The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.
Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.
At the very end of the article Rendon says....."We lost control of the context. That has to be fixed for the next war." He's referring to individual news organizations taking control of a story and 'shaping' the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day's events.
This isnt news. This is the old truth of media-America. There many before this Rendon and there will be plenty afteroword.
I am sure every Administration has had a similar finance. I could also go as far as to say Kennedy was probably the first President to really prove this type of finance to be effective and therefore crucial in the game of politicing.
Ahhhhhh....America the beautiful, home of the slave...I mean brave.
I don't buy it. We didn't see John Kennedy marketing the Bay of Pigs fiasco, although given today's climate of conservative-interventionism, many Republicans would have likely supported the invasion idea.
Oh sure, Presidents have probably used PR firms to come up with catch jingles, and slogans for government campaigns for a long time, but the Bush junta has taken the marketing of administration ideaology to a whole new treshold.
The Marketing of War.
And then you have another slant on "selling a war". I found this column to
be very interesting. It touches on history and being around at the time of
WWII, I can remember some of the things the writer addresses.
The Not-So-Simple Truth about Statesmanship
By Jonah Goldberg
Nov 18, 2005
Stop me if you've heard this already. But there are people out there - honest, decent, sincere people and deranged moonbats, too - who think that George W. Bush lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. No, seriously, it's true. "Bush lied, people died" is one of their catchier slogans.
Now, I'm not one of these people, but let's assume they're right.
What if Bush did lie, big time? What, exactly, would that mean? If you listen to Bush's critics, serious and moonbat alike, the answer is obvious: He'd be a criminal warmonger, a failed president and - most certainly - impeachment fodder. Even Bush's defenders agree that if Bush lied, it would be a grave sin. For example, the Wall Street Journal recently accused Harry Reid & Co. of becoming "Clare Boothe Luce Democrats" for even suggesting that Bush would deceive the public. Luce, a Republican, had insisted that FDR "lied us into war." And this, the Journal editorialized, was a "slander" many paranoid Republicans took to their graves.
My friends at the Journal are right to suggest that some Bush critics are paranoids, but here's the thing: Luce wasn't slandering Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the evidence that FDR lied is far greater than the evidence that Bush did.
Charles Beard, arguably the most influential historian of the 20th century - and a very liberal progressive - dedicated the last years of his life to writing about FDR's lies and "Caesarism." Richard Hofstadter, another of the great liberal historians (and a sharp critic of Beard's), also conceded FDR's "undeniably devious leadership" in the months and years before the war. Hofstadter, like countless other historians, had to agree that FDR's diplomacy and politics were designed to push the United States through a "back door into war."
Roosevelt won his unprecedented third election on the vow that he wouldn't send American boys to war: "While I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." This was almost surely a lie.
"Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor," writes the historian Thomas A. Bailey. "He was faced with a terrible dilemma. If he let the people slumber in a fog of isolationism, they might fall prey to Hitler. If he came out unequivocally for intervention, he would be defeated" in the 1940 election. This view was seconded by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in a rave review of Bailey's book in 1949. Schlesinger now spends his time lending gravitas to the moonbattier "Bush lied" table-thumpers at Arianna Huffington's Web site.
Just three days before Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 4, 1941, the Chicago Tribune and Washington Star-Ledger broke the story that FDR had already drafted a plan for war with Germany, a plan that entailed a 10-million-man army invading Germany by the middle of 1943. Democrats and Republicans alike saw this as further proof that FDR had been lying all along. Some suggest that a U.S.-flagged schooner sent into Japanese waters that same day was intended to provoke a fight. Roosevelt got Pearl Harbor instead, which was a surprise but nonetheless "rescued" the president, in Hofstadter's words, from the "dilemma" of needing to start a war the American people opposed.
Does this make FDR a bad president? No. While I have my problems with FDR, most historians are right to be forgiving of deceit in a just cause. World War II needed to be fought, and FDR saw this sooner than others.
Even the most cursory reading of any presidential biography will tell you that statesmanship requires occasional duplicity. If great foreign policy could be conducted Boy Scout-style - "I will never tell a lie" - foreign policy would be easy (and Jimmy Carter would be hailed as the American Bismarck). This isn't to say that the public's trust should be breached lightly, but there are other competing goods involved in any complex situation.
Now, you might say that Iraq was no WWII, Saddam was no Hitler, and 9/11 was no Pearl Harbor. Those are all fair arguments with varying degrees of merit. But WWII wasn't "the good war" in our hearts until after Pearl Harbor and even until after the Holocaust, and a lot of Hollywood burnishing.
The Bush Doctrine is not chiefly about WMD and never was. Like FDR's vision, it balances democracy, security and morality. Still, the media and anti-Bush partisans have been bizarrely unmoved by the revelations of Hussein's killing fields, his torture chambers for tots, and democracy's tangible progress in the Middle East.
If Bush succeeds - still a big if - the painful irony for Bush's critics is that he will go down in history as a great president, even if he lied, while they will take their paranoia to their graves.
^^^^^bump^^^^^
How come all the knowledgeable people never want to talk about something with some substance. Come on bountons and nbadan. No comments on a great
Democrat? Yeah, I spelled it right this time!
I stand corrected about my presumption that Kennedy was the first to "blossom" this position....seems it was much earlier.
"marketing of administration ideaology"
And remember the GAO faulting the Repugs for using govt $$$ to produce phony "news" releases which were nothing but partisan propanda paid for with tax $$$?
This particular set of Repugs is truly repugnant. They profoundly dispect and abuse fed govt, with the idealogical goal of making all Americans hate the intentionally dysfuntional fed govt as much as the Repugs.
There is not a single govt agency or program that has been improved or even run well since the Repugs took power. That is not by accident.
Exactly.
In a democracy isn't it inevitible and even necessary?
Were it not so NOTHING would ever get done.
It is the ultimate failing of democracy - and the more "democratic" our democracy has become, the less able our country has been to achieve its goals.
Could we have ever won WWII in this climate. Tons of bombs, fire-bombs dropped on civilians? Hundreds and Hundreds of thousands of non-combatants killed? Atomic bombs on cities for Christ's sake!
It is a true enigma of our offensive military now. It is the most capable force in the history of the world - descimating opponents in ratios heretofore unheard of. Casualty rates of 1000:1! Yet, with all this advantage, we can't put anyone away. We can't win! We jump out to a big lead, then go into a prevent defense, running clock, waiting for what?
Well, what were waiting for is to quit. It's what we do. We don't force an enemy into surrender - we don't inflict the type of devastation and demoralization on them necessary to bring them to the inescapable conclusion that they simply cannot win. Instead, from their perspective, we keep giving them hope to stay the course. We beam worldwide our own national hand-wringing about every casualty. This coverage then lowers our stomach for the fight, so we let the universe know that polls now show that the country, the democracy, no longer supports the war. This, in turn, emboldens our opponent, and they, without even the hint of any type of military success against us, stand to win - and if they simply blow up a roadside bomb every now and then, or find an zealot willing to strap on a few sticks of TNT - they will, in fact win. All they have to do in not quit - because we will.
Ultimately wars are won not by who destroys the most, or kills the most. They are won by one side quitting first. As far as I am concerned, this country does not have the will to win ANY war. We will not do what is necessary to finish the job:
We have NO collective killer instinct.
We won't ration ourselves.
We won't raise taxes for the war effort.
We won't support a draft.
We won't allow profiling of people who look like our enemy (much less wholesale isolation & containment of sectors of our society).
We are squeemish about killing any innocents.
We are consumed about interrogation methods against enemy combatants.
We are very concerned about what the rest of the world thinks.
Our politicians won't tell us that we are nation-building to promote peace, because they are afraid of the political backlash.
Our politicians make up a reason to begin a nation-building war, only to have that reason get thrown back in their faces as political backlash.
Our society won't realize that nation-building is as good a reason as any to go to war.
We won't behave openly imperial, although history suggests we have every right to - and that imperialism can be a great peacekeeper.
Our politics are so ed up that the party out of power is rooting for the country to actually lose the war so they can claim "na na na na naaaa na". (don't deny it, you know it's true)
We don't accept the notion, as a whole, that our society and way of life is superior than all others and that it is worth defending it and spreading it (military success is dependent on this).
The term "Traitor" is not used seriously enough.
In short, we are a bunch of pussies. We are powerfull and rich enough, however, to have the luxury of being pussies. All things come full circle, however. When we are finally beaten militarily, we'll come to our senses.
It is the definition of "necessary" which is so sticky.
Was WWI necessary for U.S.?
What about Europe in WWII?
Korea?
All wars are about philisophical or economic reasons (no so much land anymore - but, think about it, if Iraq was the 51st state, we wouldn't have any more "foreign oil" issues, would we?).
No war is doomed to failure, as long as we're willing to win it.
Let me be completely clear on this...
I absolutely, positively agree with you. On every single point made.
BUT!
I cant support the President even if what you say is true. If the US President got on TV and said...
That would scare the out of the world. But the President would have to mean it. I would support our President if he just came right out and said these things. But he would have to achieve these things. This peace-keeping bull over in Iraq is embarassing. Shoot first, its the only thing these degenerates understand.My fellow Americans, it is obvious that the religious extremists from the MiddleEast pose not only a threat to us, but to the entire democratic world. Something must be done about this and after careful consideration by this Administration, we feel we have a plan to begin the necessary changes in the region. As we all know, Sadaam Hussein is a ruthless dictator who has repeatedly cir vented the UN in many facets under the Terms of Surrender from Desert Storm. America has had ample, legal reason to re-establish a military presence in Iraq under those terms at any time since. We have tried to negotiate, we have threatened, we have sanctioned, with no response. It is time to act.
Sadaam Hussein will be removed from power immediately. He has been notified to surrender to International Authorities or face the American military and its full weight. When we prevail, we will ins ute a new Democratic government as to empower the local Iraqi's into a new way of thinking. A democratic way of thinking.
This Administration believes that knowledge is power. Freedom is absolute and that the enduring human spirit cries for an opportunity to prove it. When our forefather's wrote the Cons ution, it was not written with vague language or subtlety. It was written as not only a declaration to Americans, but as a declaration to the world. A majority of the world has listened. It is time the minority start as well.
With a successful democratic presence in the Middle East, this Administration believes that the ideals will spread like a wild fire in the Middle East. These unfortunate individuals have never had what we have had. Never shared ideas and opinions like we have. They have censured and oppressed by their governments in some shape or form since the begginnings of their origin. Can they function outside of an absolute ruler? I think I speak for every American when I say "Yes, no question."
Also, with a successful democratic government in place, it will give America a foothold in the region as to thwart the inevitable, immediate backlash. There are forces over there that hate America beyond imagination. They think women must dress a certain way, that Christianity or any other religion for that matter is against God, that women have no more worth than a piece of inanimate property, and even sometimes, the property is worth more than life.
Our goal is to change all of that. It starts with Sadaam Hussein. It will never end until there sits a TRULY elected official at every seat of the UN. This starts immediately. I believe this mission will ultimately be successful. We have no choice but to be successsful.
Some will criticize, of course. This is America, they are en led to their opinion. But we have no clear means of eliminating the terrorist threats that exist. They dont carry a flag, or rally a traditional army. They are cowards and cultists. They must be deakt with.
This is a warning to any who harbor such individuals...
Regardless of creed or country, in spite of trade status or economic dependance, do not think America will stand idly by watching the wolves plot. The day of your victory has passed and the might of America is coming. If you are aware that these elements lie within your borders, I would compell you to remove them by any means necessary, or suffer the consequences. This begins today. This will end when it ends.
Start on the West Bank of the Mediteranean and continue eastward until you hit the Great Wall of China.
, if that was the actual goal, I would sign up for the military today! No mercy, no remorse. You people couldnt (or wouldnt) control the situation, now we shall do it for you.
Omg...I think I am getting to excited. I wish...only in my wildest dreams, I suppose.
The best thing about that speach is that it might cause California to secede.
Not necessary in Iraq per se; but didn't 9/11 show us that SOMETHING dramatic has to be done w/radical islamasists? What is that? The seeds of their attack on the U.S. were planted during the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration. What the did we do to them? What do they want? How do we appease them so they don't do it anymore?
The answer is we can't. They are mad because we ARE. Maybe if we flattened Israel for them it would buy us a few years; but ultimately they'd be back. These are ignorant, racist, simple minded religious zealots we're talking about. Think David Duke w/o the pretty hair and teeth.
Capitilist democracies don't support terrorism. It is not profitable to do so. We had to start creating such systems in the Mideast; because of Hussein, Iraq was the easiest place to start (also has the second greatest oil reserves).
So, Iraq wasn't necessary to go to war with, unless we agree we had to go to war with someone to begin fixing the problem. The fantasy speech written by our friend above sums it up pretty well.
If we'd have waited a year, Britain would have been eating Streusal at Christmas...and I have some S. Korean friends who would argue with you about the Korean war - or do you think Kim Jung Il should control MORE territory?
^But.... But.... preemptive strikes... Come on now. They're preemptive. We can't do preemptive strikes. That's extremist. Thats neocon. Preemptive is bad. Wait till enemy gets stronger and expectations of casualties get higher. But c'mon man. Preemptive strikes. That's so 2000 and 1.<sarcasm>
Well, according to your methods, bush is just too ineffective and is not willing to spend his political capital to do the right thing. Hopefully this doesn't translate to you voting democrat seeing as that would be way too counterproductive.
There's a reason your method would fail worse than Bush's. The whole ME silently agrees and supports alqueda's philosophy. If all you did was kill the protaganist in the situaion, you'd achieve nothing. Alqueda is a philosophy and not just a body. You don't change philosophy or peoples minds for that matter with force. Its like a jewish captive said about being imprisoned under stalin," I may have been captive, but my mind will always be free.". You change minds with introducing new ideas and a better life for those people. With the palestinians it's different. That's a whole different subject that i'll talk about later.
Democracy and freedom are that better life. I think that's the point. What is yours?
I think Freedom will always crush oppression. There's no such thing as forcing someone to be free of oppression. Did lincoln force the slaves to be free?
Btw i was talking about Dark reigns post not yours. Did you think i was talking about you?
*sigh*
Gtown...Gtown...
I dont have to prove anything to the likes of you. I state my opinion, peeps agree or disagree.
Ultimately, that faux-speech is (imo) exactly whats going on. Iraq is a springboard and a lookout post. Its just not going so well (which is a shame).
All my problems with Bush do NOT stem from Iraq. Its a culmination of issues. His Administration is constantly under fire for (simplistic term here) corruption and colusion.
This isnt a President getting a BJ, this is endangering lives. IMO, there is a big difference.
Regardless, IF President Bush came right and said what I wrote, I would support him. But instead he had to lie, cheat and smile the whooooole entire time using political power to persuade every talking head in Washington to repeat his mantra of war.
Imperialism....eh...who cares. If all was well, and every day was sunny, I would preach the Democrats rhetoric about "Peace, love and understanding"...but I cant with a straight face.
To quote Perry Ferrel;
Some people should die. Thats just unconscious knowledge!
Instead we kide behind behind false pretenses of "exanding freedom" or "empowering a people"....its all bull . I cant respect a politician who cant just come out with it (which equates to zero politicians, therefore I respect none....maybe a few).
Thats all.
Jonah Goldberg gets his talking points straight from Karl Rove, none-the-less, moon-bats as we may be, but at least we will not have to live with the knowledge that we sent 2100 American kids to their death based on our own cooked-up intelligence. Goldberg should think about that for for awhile.If Bush succeeds - still a big if - the painful irony for Bush's critics is that he will go down in history as a great president, even if he lied, while they will take their paranoia to their graves.
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