It is an interesting thing when one not only lives through a particularly historic moment, but is aware of it at the time.

I had first encountered the works of Noam Chomsky in 1998, and he gave me a much deeper worldview than I had before. Chomsky led to Pilger and other "radical" books discussing how foreign policy, particularly of the USA, had been conducted post-World War II. I had also been an interested adult during the 1991 UN-sanctioned invasion of Iraq, a war which was heralded as being the first with around-the-clock media reporting. All of this left me with an understanding of the history of Iraq, other 20th-Century American interventions, and likely outcomes, an understanding deeper than most of the people I knew. 

There had always been lingering questions after the 1991 Gulf War around whether Bush Sr.. should have pushed further.  Saddam Hussein brutally crushed internal resistance following the withdrawal of coalition troops, and what was a fairly brutal regime beforehand seemed only to become worse. The war didn't end with the liberation of Kuwait, and coalition troops enforced no-fly zones and maintained harsh ongoing sanctions for over a decade after the war. There have been arguments about how many lives the no-fly zones saved, given that those zones didn't include the Iraqi military helicopters used so devastatingly against Iraqi civilians, and how many lives the sanctions cost. After another historical event of the attacks by Al Qaeda on America on September 11th, many suspected that Bush Jr. (or "Bush the lesser" as Chomsky called him) would use the opportunity to redress what some saw as the major foreign policy failure of his father. 

Propaganda in a democratic society

It has been said "the first casualty of war is the truth". After the US decided to lead a coalition into a war against Iraq in 2003, most surveys showed that the average person was against the war. In Australia, as in Europe, most people were strongly against involvement unless it was agreed at the United Nations. Given that it was so clear that many in the Australian and UK ruling classes, including the Prime Ministers of both countries, seemed to strongly support war, I assumed we were about to experience a wave of propaganda goading people to war. Edward Bernays, the father of Public Relations, had after all got his start in drumming up support for America to get involved in World War 1.  The story is told of how a non-interventionist public was so so fiercely anti-German that orchestras could no longer play the works of German composers without public outcry. 

With the war clouds looming, I was watching with a historical interest as to how the levels of propaganda in society might change. I was not prepared for how obviously and strongly the propaganda machine of our media went into full swing. To understand the subtlety of the media of the time, a map of Iraq and the positions of the various military on a major American network showed the 9 countries in the "Coalition of the Willing" as a USA flag and the Iraqi forces were represented by machine guns. I could see the propaganda in the people around me. I remember political conservatives, ones who supported the ruling Liberal Party at the time, trying to argue the case for war. They knew virtually nothing about it, it was almost like they had decided to pick a football team. The pro-war cheerleading group, comprised of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Howard and Blair, would say something on television, and I could almost guarantee the people I was arguing with would repeat what the cheerleaders said, word for word, next time we talked.

You might agree with the war to depose Saddam Hussein, otherwise usually intelligent people like Christopher Hitchens did after all, but you should never be happy when people blindly follow elites in a march to war.  All I can say is that I did try. 

Here is a letter (with minor grammatical edits) I wrote trying to communicate what was happening to some friends on various sides of the issues shortly before the invasion:

I feel compelled to write as the voices of real dissent are being silenced in the media, and it seems that alternative opinion regarding the war on Iraq has been restricted to tactical considerations, rather than human rights and moral considerations.

Watching Channel 9 news can be educational.  If their promotional blurb of "more Australians get their news from Channel 9 than anywhere else" is to be believed, with an unpopular war in the making, the Hermann/Chomsky propaganda model would predict a high level of control.  

So it is, in a Channel 9 bulletin, I was entertained with an interesting way of reversing defending to really be attacking.  This line was one they were very pleased with, as it was said by the news presenter and then repeated verbatim by the field reporter, 'Iraq has threatened to attack Kuwait, if Kuwait is used as a base of operations for war'.  Attack is Defence.

Not content to rest on their Orwellian laurels, they then kept us all informed with 'Iraq has yet to provide evidence that it doesn't have Nuclear Weapons'.  That would be interesting evidence indeed.

As I said though, our corporate-owned media can be educational and even provoke thought despite itself, because in watching this, I naturally thought about Orwell and one of his quotes, 'War is Peace'.  I had always found it puzzling, but I think its meaning is clearer to me now.  In an aggressor power, the general population, like any other, rarely want war, they want peace.  In order for them to be goaded into war, they must be convinced somehow that 'War is Peace'.  

And so how can people be convinced 'War is Peace'?  This is the job of the government and any other systems of ideological control available to the elites who will profit from war.  Manufacturing consent for war is a time-honoured strategy, as when Mexico 'attacked' the United States, or Poland 'attacked' Germany.

Orwell might even have something to say about the use of the word 'War'.  Doesn't a war imply opposing sides with some chance of victory, however slight, on both sides? I would class this as a mugging. Actually I would class the last Gulf War as a mugging. after a decade involving constant bombing, murderous sanctions and UN weapons inspections, this isn't even going to be that.  Of course, unless you build up a credible threat in the people's mind, the whole 'War is Peace' thing can't work, because violence has to be the only answer.  That's what you have to lead the people to believe, that only through war will they have peace.

Even if we are to use their term 'war', it is not about to begin again because it has never really ended.  The constant bombing campaigns and crippling sanctions have been a murderous factor of the life of Iraqis since the last war over a decade ago.  UNICEF estimated the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq from easily preventable diseases since the imposition of sanctions, which Australian warships help maintain.  Despite Australia's continuous military involvement in this tormenting of the Iraqi people, the silence of the Australian media has been deafening.  As the propaganda model would predict.

In a recent national poll, only 6% of voters in this country supported a pre-emptive strike on Iraq, which wasn't done through the auspices of the United Nations.  I guess we will get to see soon who our political system represents.  By the time they attack Iraq I imagine the propaganda system will be in full swing, and that 6% will have risen dramatically.  Then we shall have seen what interests our corporate-owned media represent.

We should be trying to encourage democracy in the world, not the rule of force.  Attacks and sanctions should only be entertained to depose a tyrant if the people of the country have some chance of being better off, like the sanctions on the Apartheid South African regime which were supported by the oppressed South African people.  

It means nothing to the Howard government that the vast majority of citizens in this country oppose this war on the people of Iraq; that is why, in good conscience, our only option is to actively resist it.

"Naturally the common people don't want war....That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Nazi, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering

Australians may have voted for a right-wing government last election, but was it this far right that they wanted it?

No to Saddam, no to this oil war.

So that's the letter. 

The reason I sent it to people is that I wanted to put in writing the prediction that they were about to witness a change in public opinion driven by propaganda for war. I don't know what opinion poll I was quoting above, but there was a strong plurality of the Australian public very against the war if the United Nations didn't approve of it, and even if the UN did approve, still most people were against it.  Opinion polls at the time showed up to two-thirds of people opposed to Australia's involvement in what was seen as a war America was choosing. This was seen as very different to the Afghanistan conflict that Australians and many people around the world saw as more directly related to Al Qaeda and their attack on September 11th.

What I was seeing in both the corporate and government media was selective reporting in support of the war. Not all of this was perhaps evilly intended. Some people have pointed out that a reporter will find it much easier to interview a government minister or a retired general than a peace activist. It is more exciting to talk about war than peace, war is good for ratings. Whatever the reasons, the voices against the war were given only a fraction of the time that those supporting the war were given. I actually had sympathy at the time for people who believed Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons programme and had massive stockpiles of chemical weapons, because it was almost impossible to rationally think anything else.  The media was replaying endlessly every American accusation, probably because it is good ratings to scare people with a phrase like "Weapons of Mass Destruction". There simply wasn't enough critical evaluation of these claims by the media. For people who weren't aware that they were being submitted to propaganda, it was easy to be led by this barrage of fear and war.

It wasn't just a lack of presenting both sides of the discussion, but much of the coverage was actively pro-war. Channel 9, at the time the most viewed network in Australia, was a particularly pro-war as I set out in this letter (btw I assume none of these links work anymore). The context of the below email, was a marketing blitz for a 60 Minutes news show featuring victims of the Bali Bombings, in which a number of Australians had been killed, shortly followed by a discussion of the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda. The ads for this segment were a work of skilled manipulation of the facts in the story. Media people know that for every person who reads the full article in the newspaper, or watches a complete single show, many more will read the headline or see the advertisements for the show. Channel 9 played this sort of card shamelessly:

Another example of overt propaganda from Channel 9.  I haven't seen a sustained propaganda effort like this since the last election.

During the week, many of you may have seen the ads for the story on the Australian survivors of the Bali bombing.  It was pretty clear what the ad was getting at, it started out with a voice over "Don't make up your mind about the war with Iraq until you have seen this story", it then cut to a survivor with injuries saying "Justice will be done", etc.  The implication Channel 9 is making is clear, sure all you people are against the war, but if you'd been burnt like these people, you would have a different point of view.

I therefore forced myself to watch Sixty Minutes, to see if people who had been through such a terrible experience would really be wishing it upon anyone else.

Now, to set the scene, Sixty Minutes broke from its usual three-story format, and preceded the Bali Bombing Survivors segment with 'The Iraq Connection'.  

Nothing subtle about the intro here. Behind the "reporter" who introduced the story was a big graphic with Osama bin Laden on one side, Saddam Hussein on the other, and 'The Iraq Connection' in big letters above them.  The connection appears to be that a militant group with Al-Qaeda ties in the north of Iraq bought maps from someone in the Iraqi military.  For those interested in this well-researched and compelling story of map buying justifying war, you can read the inanity here : http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2003_02_09/story_756.asp

No break, from 'The Iraq Connection', straight into the Bali Bombing victims, tying in Iraq, Al-Qaeda and the Bali Bombing nicely, the fact that the Bali Bombings were more motivated by our involvement in East Timor is, of course mere detail.

The "Justice will be done" comment turns out to have nothing to do with going into Iraq and is made in a completely different context, the survivor was actually talking about his faith in the justice system to apprehend those responsible for the bombing.

When the conversation did turn to Iraq, of the three who spoke, two were strongly against the war, only one supported it, you can read the transcript of this here http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2003_02_09/story_754.asp

Of course, people who watched Sixty Minutes, and actually watched the story, rather than just taking in the inference Sixty Minutes was trying to make in their ads, would know that the survivors didn't en masse support the war.  But the ads are potentially a more potent tool of propaganda.  They know a certain section of the population watches Sixty Minutes, a fairly small section, the ads, on the other hand, are everywhere, during all the prime time shows, and they reach a much larger section of the population.

And after all, they don't need to manufacture consent for the war, they just have to be an effective opponent to dissent.  People with doubts in their minds probably aren't going to march in protest.

The narrative they were constructing was clear: Think of those poor victims of Bali, support the war in Iraq.  Yet again, War is peace.

As I have said previously, it is not enough not to support the war, John Howard has shown that he doesn't care what we think and is intent on the needless deaths of more Iraqi civilians. Therefore, the only way you can participate in saving lives is to actively resist. I encourage you to march against this war.  In Brisbane, there will be a march in the city beginning at 10-11 am on Sunday. for more details or a march in your city, see.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/feb16rally.htm 

Alas, I don't think anyone I sent this to came to the rally, but it was perhaps the biggest rally Brisbane had ever witnessed, with 80,000 to 100,000 people turning out. As someone who usually takes public transport to a rally, there is a sort of ebullient feeling you get when you are on a train and you see multiple people with t-shirts and banners going as well. My partner at the time coordinated painting a large banner featuring a dove which said "Justice without violence". 

The protests failed. The words of people wiser and more eloquent than I failed. The war happened. I remember asking someone I was arguing with at the time, as we watched Iraq descend deeper into chaos after the war, how long we would have to wait until the democratic, peaceful Iraq would emerge.  How long would be long enough to say the war failed in its aims? He said 20 years. Now, over 20 years later, I see that earlier this year Iraq lowered the age of consent to 9, a figure probably drawn from the life of Muhammad, who consummated his marriage to his youngest wife when she was 9 years old. Afghanistan, the other Neo-conservative war post 9/11, recently banned women from going to high school.

When we think of war, we think of politicians trying to look powerful and armies of men in helmets and tanks fighting each other.  The ones shouting orders and carrying guns, however, are only a fraction of the people involved in war. War is a mother's body on the ground, an infant child crying next to her and a slightly older sibling staring into the distance having no idea what to do, where to go or how to be safe. War is a girl with most of the skin on her body burned off, running along a road, not knowing where to, just away. War is an elderly person with their home and everything else taken from them, shaking in fear at the bombs and violence all around them. War is a mother covering her children's eyes because she does not know how they can witness such horror and grow up to be normal people. Young boys play war with little plastic figurines of army men, but this is only a cartoon vision of war; it is the sort of vision that warmongers want us to have, lest the full horror of what they propose enter our awareness.

Violence begets violence, and can rarely be contained. War is not peace, war is hell.