'' "From a marketing point of view,' said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff who is coordinating the effort, "you don't introduce new products in August.' ''
It was as if the "product" -- the
unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state -- was a consumer good, like a
car or a TV show. The sales pitch was the manufactured "imminent
threat" of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
In other words, the business of WHIG was incitement to aggressive war primarily through the propaganda of fear.
Along those lines WHIG's most prominent member, National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, invoked the specter of an Iraqi-generated
nuclear holocaust in a Sept. 8, 2002, CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer:
"We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for
instance -- into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are
only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tools that are only really
suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs. ... The
problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how
quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking
gun to be a mushroom cloud."
The smoking gun/mushroom cloud images were among the most memorable of all the White House war propaganda. They were generated just a few days earlier in a WHIG meeting by speechwriter Michael Gerson.
The existence of Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction was central to the Bush administration's campaign for war.
Other important elements were Saddam Hussein's ties with Al Qaeda and
the strongly implied association of Iraq with the tragedies of 9/11.
All were false. In propaganda, though, selling the product trumps truth.
Unquestioning Submission
The role played by American mainstream media during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was marked by widespread unquestioning submission to the Bush administration and abandonment of the most fundamental journalistic responsibility to the public.
This responsibility is embodied not only
in Resolution 59 but in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of
Ethics as well, which states: "Journalists should test the accuracy of
information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent
error."
The failure of influential American journalists,
such as the New York Times' Judith Miller, to test the accuracy of
information played a critical role in the Bush administration's
successful effort to incite the American public to attack a country
which was not threatening us.
Though she was far from alone in selling the case for war, Miller --
through her seemingly uncritical reliance on dodgy informants -- was
probably responsible to a larger degree than any other American
journalist for spreading the fear of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction.
As such she and other influential journalists who failed in this way bear a share of moral, if not legal, responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees and all the other carnage, devastation and human suffering of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."
Some prominent American media figures, however, went considerably further than simple failure to check sources. Some actively and passionately encouraged Americans to commit and/or approve of war crimes, before and during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Prominent among these was Fox News' Bill O'Reilly who -- regarding both Afghanistan and Iraq -- advocated such crimes forbidden by the Geneva Convention as collective punishment of civilians (Gen. Con. IV, Art. 33); attacking civilian targets (Protocol I, Art. 51); destroying water supplies (Protocol I Art. 54 Sec. 2) and even starvation (Protocol I, Art. 54 Sec. 1).
