Solomon - War Made Easy (2005) - Synopsis

UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging Deeper: March 17, 2008 Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (John Wiley & Sons, 2005) Prologue: Building Agendas for War. U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 is an example of false propaganda used to justify a war (1-9). Also Panama in 1989 (9-21). Also Grenada in 1983 (21-22). Rhetorical analysis of what is essentially an advertising campaign (22-26). "The following chapters probe and scrutinize key 'perception management' techniques that have played huge roles in the promotion of American wars during recent decades (26). Ch. 1: America is a Fair and Noble Superpower. "[I]t is routine to ascribe lofty motivations to U.S. foreign policy" (29; 26-31). Historical details that are inconsistent with this message, like the U.S. use of U.N. inspections for spying, drop out of the narrative (31-33). Ch. 2: Our Leaders Will Do Everything They Can to Avoid War. "[P]residents are at pains to proclaim that they despise war," relying on the implicit trust of the people in the president (35; 35-41). Contrary information, like Appendix B in the 1999 Rambouillet negotiations, is suppressed (41-44). "[P]antomimes of diplomacy" can be used to justify war, like Adlai Stevenson's 1964 and Colin Powell's 2003 presentations to the U.N. Security Council (44-47). Media display a preference for war over diplomacy, as with Iraq—1998 and 2003 compared (4753). Ch. 3: Our Leaders Would Never Tell Us Outright Lies. "Our leaders never lie to us—unless you mean lying by omission, lying with statistics, lying via unsupported claims, or lying with purposeful obfuscation, misleading

statements, and successions of little white lies" (57; 55-61). Ch. 4: This Guy Is a Modern-Day Hitler. Comparing U.S. enemies to Hitler, while ignoring the U.S.'s part in the evils condemned, has been de rigueur since the end of World War II (6373). Ch. 5: This Is about Human Rights. Manipulation and hypocrisy characterize U.S. assertions that wars are motivated by human rights abuses and atrocities (75-86) Ch. 6: This Is Not at All about Oil or Corporate Profits. The links between business and war are "evaded or downplayed in standard political journalism" (90; 87-95). Ch. 7: They Are the Aggressors, Not Us. "The inversion of victimizer and victim is common in wartime media coverage" (97-102). Ch. 8: If This War Is Wrong, Congress Will Stop It. The August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (103-09) Congressional abdication of authority is common (109-11). Ch. 9: If This War Is Wrong, the Media Will Tell Us. The militaryindustrial complex influences the media (113-15). Reporters are generally supportive of U.S. foreign policy and willingly cooperates (115-20). NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and Iraq in 2003 (120-26). The media is easily influenced by the administration (126-32). "To a notable degree, reporters seem to await signals from politicians and high-level appointees to widen the range of discourse" (130).

Ch. 10: Media Coverage Brings War into Our Living Rooms. Edward Jay Epstein, in Between Fact and Fiction (1975), and Daniel C. Hallin, in The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam (1989), have debunked the myth that TV coverage caused discontent with the Vietnam War (133-42). Media present a fantasy version of war (14244). The effect of graphic images is overestimated (144-46). The military also manipulates information (146-50). The embedding of reporters was a successful means of "dominat[ing] the information environment" (153; 150-54). Ch. 11: Opposing the War Means Siding with the Enemy. Many rhetorical dismissals of critics are available: lack of patriotism and antiAmericanism, naïveté, ignorance, etc., etc., but substance is often neglected altogether in reporting on opponents of war (155-65). Barbara Ehrenreich, in Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), argues that deeply ingrained militarism of U.S. society has enfeebled present-day antiwar movements (165-66) Ch. 12: This Is a Necessary Battle in the War on Terrorism. The notion of a "war on terrorism" is propagandistic in its essence, forcing a choice of sides (16876). Ch. 13: What the U.S. Government Needs Most Is Better PR. Government and military deliberately use a public relations approach (177-83). Ch. 14: The Pentagon Fights Wars as Humanely as Possible. Horrors are presented abstractly (with an emphasis on technology), and war is presented as humanitarian in as many ways as possible (185-202). E.g. Fallujah (19497).

Ch. 15: Our Soldiers Are Heroes, Theirs Are Inhuman. "Boilerplate psychological mechanisms seem frozen in time," opposing the heroic to the heinous (203-09). Ch. 16: America Needs to Resolve to Kick the “Vietnam Syndrome.” The way the discussion of the "Vietnam Syndrome" is framed reveals an effort to legitimate war (211-19). Ch. 17: Withdrawal Would Cripple U.S. Credibility. The credibility argument enables the government to present war as the least bad option, and to promote war even to those who originally opposed it (221-31). Afterword. Epigraphs from Joe McDonald, King Lear, Hermann Goering, and Daniel Ellsberg (233-34). "For the White House and its domestic allies in the realms of government, media, think tanks, and the like, the political problem of war undergoes a shift after the Pentagon goes into action in earnest. Beforehand, it's about making the war seem necessary and practical; if the war does not come to a quick, satisfactory resolution, the challenge becomes more managerial so that continuation of the war will seem easier" (235-36). Our media system "mostly keeps us in the dark" (236). "There remains a kind of spectator relationship to military actions being implemented in our names" (236). But the public retains the power to "define the limits and possibilities of conscience" (237). Notes. 53 pp., chapter by chapter, often detailed and with quotations. Acknowledgments. Associates, friends, and family. Index. 12 pp. [About the Author. NORMAN SOLOMON, born in 1951, recently described his early

years in a memoir entitled Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State (PoliPoint Press, 2007). He has been an activist since the age of 15. He dropped out of Reed College and devoted himself to opposing nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the late 1970s and the 1980s. In 1982 he published Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, co-authored by Harvey Wasserman. Solomon has been associated with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) since its beginnings in the mid-1980s. He worked at the

national office of the Fellowship of Reconciliation from 1984 to 1986, though he "didn’t quite" consider himself a pacifist (Made Love, Got War, p. 109). He worked as a freelance journalist in Moscow in the late 1980s. Moving to Santa Cruz, CA, he co-authored a book on media bias entitled Unreliable Sources (1990), and has concentrated on this subject since, founding the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org) in 1997. He is a prominent critic of the Iraq war.]