Steven Livingston is Professor School of Media and Public Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs (George Washington University)
The fluidity of the enemy in American political imagination is one of the more extraordinary aspects of the war in Iraq. As one looks back over the past six years of public debate about the war one sees a shifting array of justifications for fighting it. It began as a war to eliminate the presumed threat of a nuclear Iraq with alleged ties to al Qaeda. When no weapons were found and claims of ties to al Qaeda proved baseless, the emphasis shifted to the argument that the United States would bring freedom, democracy and human rights to Iraq. After the human rights abuses associated with occupation were revealed and violence among various religious and ethnic factions tipped towards chaos and civil war, this noble aspiration, too, was called into question. Finally, with the Sunni Awakening and the US military “surge” — the introduction of additional US combat troops in Iraq in 2007 — the creation of political stability and the abatement of violence seemed to become the measure of success in Iraq.
In short, there hasn’t been a single, sustained rationale for the war and occupation of Iraq; instead, there has been a shifting array of explanations, justifications and definitions of goals and objectives – and along the way, enemies to be vanquished. For many people, especially, it would seem, Americans, Iraq has been a blank canvass waiting to be filled. Too often, misperceptions have filled the empty space. But many of these misperceptions have not been random or merely the product of a uniquely American strain of intellectual laziness or ignorance. Rather, they have been the product of the nature of contemporary television and calculated efforts to shape perceptions.
Put simply, my argument is that television has been used as an instrument of deception aimed at people ill-equipped to defend themselves against highly charged but intellectually bankrupt and mendacious claims made repeatedly by the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies in US Congress and the political intelligentsia. To make this argument I begin with a review of US involvement in Iraq, citing in particular the PR campaign in 1990-91 that shaped US public perceptions about a little known Iraq. In doing so, a template was created for interpreting future claims of a new and different Bush administration in 2002. I will then look more closely at the political effects associated with watching ideologically driven commercial TV.
1990-91 War
Writing in the midst of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, William Dorman and I found that the American press paid little attention to the historical relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein. In particular, we found that there was practically no mention of the support given to Saddam in his war against Iran by presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, including the provision of operational intelligence that directed Saddam’s war machine. Nor was there mention of the international commercial commodity credits that helped pay for the war by freeing up needed cash to buy weapons. The Reagan and Bush administration looked the other way for some eight years while Saddam’s forces used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilian populations.
A very different approach was taken in 2002-03 when the principal argument for military action against Saddam’s regime was its alleged links to terrorists and the claim that it possessed WMD. Vice President Dick Cheney even insisted that Iraq had a direct link with the 9/11 attackers. Although steadfastly focusing on claims of Iraqi ties to terrorism, what the American press didn’t discuss in 2002 and 2003 when these assertions were made was that in 1982 the Reagan administration dropped Iraq from the State Department’s list of terrorist sponsoring nations. Doing so reflected political calculations, not an actual change of behavior by Iraq. To make the point requires us to take just a moment to describe the terror list and what happened.
The U.S. Congress requires the State Department to maintain an accounting of terrorist organizations and of the states that support them. States on the list are prohibited from maintaining commercial relationships with the United States. With this provision presenting an obstacle to US support for Saddam in his war against Iran, Saddam’s regime had to be dropped from the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring nations, even though it continued to support and play host to the same terrorist groups as before. A decade later, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, Iraq was once again returned to the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring nations, though again, nothing had changed substantive concern his government’s relationship with terrorist organizations. What had changed was Saddam’s political utility vis-à-vis US foreign policy interests. His utility to US foreign policy had changed, but nothing more.
With each turn, much of the mainstream American media followed suit. When off the list, Saddam’s association with known terrorists was, on the whole, not discussed by American journalists; when highlighted by the Bush administrations (both of them before, during and after different wars), the media followed in step. This was not the result of censorship or overt intimidation. Rather, it reflects the strong statist orientation of US media, especially concerning war. News in the United States too often is what officials say it is.
So in 1990, when Saddam fell from graces with the US president, newspaper columnists spoke of Iraq “cultivating terrorist ties” and that terrorism was Saddam’s “ultimate fifth column.” (1) The ebb and flow of terrorist threats from Iraq had more to do with US geo-political needs, and far less with actual conditions on the ground in Iraq. In our analysis of US press coverage of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Dorman and I found that during a crucial period of the lead-up to the war — a 98-day period between August 2 and November 8, 1990 — The Washington Post and The New York Times published a combined total of 4,214 stories, editorials, or columns concerning Iraq, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia. (2) This is an average of 43 per day. This is an enormous outpouring of interest.
In reviewing this flood of attention we found little attention paid to the history of political alliance between the Reagan/Bush administrations and Saddam’s repressive regime. Doing so would have put the situation in a clearer and more complex context and, frankly, blunted the administration’s efforts to sell the war against an evil other. It may have led readers and viewers to ask, “If, as the PR was telling us, Saddam was so evil, why did we support him?”. In all we identified 20 articles out of 4,214 that mentioned in the least the support the US had given Saddam in the previous decade. Twenty items in the context of over 4,000, spread out over almost 100 days, were diluted and obscured by the flood of news and analysis that conformed to a script provided by the G. H. W. Bush administration and its commercial allies. What was that script? What did the Other look like as he was created?
Saddam as Hitler
At the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, most Americans knew little about Iraq and even less about Saddam Hussein. The entire region was distant and poorly understood by many Americans. One survey found that only about one in four Americans could identify Kuwait as a monarchy, even after the flood of coverage following the Iraqi invasion and G. H. W. Bush’s ultimatum to Iraq to withdraw its forces. (3)
Public ignorance such as this constituted an opportunity for the administration to paint Kuwait and Iraq in shades and colors of its choosing. As Clyde Wilcox and his colleagues remarked, “Most Americans did not enter this crisis with much information about or interest in Middle East politics, and this provided political elites with substantial potential for persuasion.” (4) American held no firm beliefs, no fixed opinions, no clear mental landscape about Iraq. The content was in part provided by Saddam Hussein himself in his April 1990 threat to “scorch half of Israel” if it attacked Iraq. In response, the New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. (5) In this statement Rosenthal established a rhetorical gambit that would dominate discourse and thought four months later. Other columnist, commentators, and eventually the G. H. W. Bush administration settled on it as the key framework for thinking and talking about Saddam.
After the August 2 invasion of Kuwait the Hitler analogy exploded. Between August 2 and January 15 the Washington Post and New York Times published 228 items that invoked the Hitler analogy. G. H. W. Bush was the single greatest source for the analogy. He first made it on August 8, the day he announced the first deployment of US combat personnel to the region. It soon became a daily occurrence. It was, as E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post remarked, “everywhere.” (6) Journalists and columnists seemed to be quite well aware of what the administration was trying to accomplish with its campaign to rhetorically tie the dictator of a small, pre-industrial and relatively backward country with the leader of one of the “superpowers” of the early 20th Century, Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Post ran articles on two occasions that drew attention to the process.
On August 9, Majorie Williams remarked, “ He (Saddam Hussein) has undergone a striking transformation, over this past week, in the American media and the American imagination. Once a dictator whom most Americans could not identify, but with whom the United States has sided for most of the past decade, Saddam Hussein is now suddenly revealed as a fiend in human form.” Rather than expanding the debate about Iraq in 1990 by raising in a sustained way the relevant policy dynamics of the US, UK, Iraqi, Iranian, and Kuwait in the region, the media accepted the facile Hitler analogy. The global PR firm Hill and Knowlton was eventually hired by the administration to sell the war to the ill-informed but reluctant American public. Hill and Knowlton’s focus group findings suggested that the critical factor for American public support for a war with Iraq was not sympathy or identification with Kuwait but antipathy toward Saddam Hussein. Of the fifty prospective message strategies considered by Hill and Knowlton, the campaign was narrowed to a single message designed to reinforce the “Saddam-as-enemy” sentiment embodied in the Hitler analogy.
The 2003 War
My point in reviewing this history is to make the claim that much of the misperception and even hysteria seem in 2003 can be tracked back to a PR campaign in 1990. Saddam was indeed a brutal dictator. I am not questioning that in the least. Instead, I want to know more about the mixing effects of political calculation, PR, and television.
By the time the presidential administration of G. H. W. Bush’s son developed its intent to “finish the job in Iraq,” Saddam’s profile was clearly known to the American pubic. He was regarded as the prototypical 21st Century dictator, but that wasn’t enough. His evil reputation, certainly well deserved, needed a boast. His evilness needed freshening, we could say. To accomplish this, Saddam’s Iraq was tied to al Qaeda and 9/11. If Saddam was made into Hitler in 1990, in 2003 he was made into Osama bin Laden’s accomplice, too. With Lucas Robinson in 2004 I analyzed U.S. media coverage of the alleged ties between al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq. We focused on the crucial period of September 2001 to September 2002, ending just 6 months prior to the start of the war. It was during this time that the G. W. Bush administration formed its justifying frames for another war with Iraq.
According to survey data, few Americans drew connections to between 9/11 and Iraq. On September 24, 2001, The New York Times reported that just 6 percent of the American public thought that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, either directly or indirectly. Yet by March 2003, just as the war was about to start, about half the American public believed that Saddam had a role in the attacks. How did this shift occur? It wasn’t until after G. W. Bush’s State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on January 27, 2002 that the rhetorical links became robust. This was the speech that saw Bush declare that North Korea, Iran, and Iraq constituted an “Axis of Evil.” Seen by millions of Americans, Bush linked WMD, terrorism, and Iraq. This speech set the stage for a major push by the administration to link Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Secretary of State Colin Powell next gave a major speech before the United Nations in February where he said that Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi was a senior leader of Al Qaeda who had had been given safe haven in Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s regime. In this way Zarqawi was the embodiment of the administration’s claimed links between Saddam and al Qaeda. (7) The Times reported the administration claims without equivocation. “The Qaeda network based in Iraq has operated for the last eight months under the supervision of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin who is also a veteran of the Afghan war against the former Soviet Union, Mr. Powell said.”
Powell also said that Islamic extremists were operating a poisons factory in the Kurdish region of northern. But according to the Times, his assertion “appeared to surprise Kurdish officials, who greeted the claim with a mix of satisfaction and confusion." (8) After a few days to absorb the opportunity the Bush administration had given them to score points against their archenemy Saddam Hussein, and perhaps after they had been given messaging guidance, the Kurdish leadership got on message. A few days later the Times contradicted its own reporting with the following story:
Senior Kurdish officials have expanded on Mr. Powell’s remarks, saying in recent days that the camp was used to experiment with toxins on animals, and that Ansar (the terror organization associated with Zarqawi) managed to develop poison paints and ointments, toxic creams that could be put on doorknobs for assassination attempts, and even poison-laced cigarettes that they had tried to sneak into public markets. (9)
This is material straight out of a James Bond movie. But when Ansar al Islam invited Western journalists to tour the alleged poison factory, they found something very different. They found a “wholly unimpressive place — a small and largely undeveloped cluster of buildings that appeared to lack substantial industrial capacity. For example, the structures did not have plumbing and had only the limited electricity supplied by a generator.” When one of the journalists asked one of the members of Ansar al Islam why he thought Mr. Powell had singled out the compound as one reason to risk war, he said, "We ask that question to ourselves, and we are still looking for an answer." (10)
But stories such as these, stories that questioned the administration’s claims, collapsed under the weight of the White House news machine. By the late summer 2002 U.S. public opinion had swung in an entirely new direction. As I mentioned earlier, immediately following 9/11 only six percent of the public thought Iraq was linked to 09/11. By August 2002, not yet a year later, 86 percent said that Iraq trains and supports terrorists. (11) Newsweek reported that 75 percent of Americans believe that “Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq is harboring al Qaeda terrorists and helping them to develop chemical weapons.”(12) We need to dig deeper into this shift in opinion by focusing on the role of television.
In When the Press Fails, we found that the American news media seemed to think that it wasn’t their responsibility to challenge the administration’s claims. Some networks, particularly Fox News Channel (but also CNN and MSNBC) often took support for the war one step further. They became vocal advocates of war. Fox News coverage, for example, included screen symbols of American flags and digital eagles that morphed into jets bombs. Correspondents used the personal pronoun “we” when referring to US troops. Television news so understood succeeded in creating public sentiment in support for war, but it did so at the expensive of public understanding of the reasons for war in the first place.
Public Opinion and War
For the first nine months of 2003, Stephen Kull at the University of Maryland’s PIPA/Knowledge Networks Poll conducted seven separate surveys concerning the war in Iraq. The polls were designed to gauge a broad range of attitudes about the administration’s policies in Iraq. In the course of analyzing the data Kull and his colleagues discovered three broad and quite important misperceptions held by the American public.
In a poll in January, it was discovered that a majority believed that Iraq played an important role in 9/11. A substantial minority even held the belief that they had seen “conclusive evidence” of such involvement. Thus in February in a follow-up study Kull and his associates offered respondents four options for describing “the relationship between the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein and the terrorist group al-Qaeda.” In response, 20% chose the option that “Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11 attacks.” Another 36% chose the position that “Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaeda, but was not involved in the September 11th attacks” – still a position at odds with the dominant view of the intelligence community, but less egregiously so. Twenty-nine percent chose the position that has some evidence in support of it, that “a few al-Qaeda individuals visited Iraq or had contact with Iraqi officials.” Just 7% chose the option, “There was no connection at all.”
Other surveys found even higher proportions of Americans holding these fail beliefs. Kull asked in June, July, and August- September: “Is it your impression that the US has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization?”. In every case, large percentages (45-52%) evidence has been found. A second misperception concerns the existence of weapons of mass destruction, one of two prime reasons for invading Iraq. Of course, no weapons or weapon programs were ever found. Yet in May, two months after the invasion, substantial numbers of Americans said that WMD had been found in Iraq. Kull first asked in May whether respondents thought that the US has or has not “found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and 34% said the US had (another 7% did not know).
Americans also incorrectly believed that Iraq actually used weapons of mass destruction in the recent war with the US. Kull asked respondents whether “Iraq did or did not use chemical or biological weapons in the war that had just ended.” In May, 22% of respondents said that it had. In mid-June, ABC/Washington Post asked “do you believe that Iraq did or did not use chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops during the war earlier this year?” and 24% said that that they thought it had.
What about American understandings of world opinion? On February 15, 2003, massive protests against a looming war in Iraq broke records all over the world. Millions of people protested, in approximately 800 cities around the world. Listed by the 2004 Guinness Book of Records as the largest protest in human history, protests occurred in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Syria, India, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and even McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The largest demonstration occurred in London, where 2,000,000 protesters gathered in Hyde Park. Yet according to polls conducted between May and September 2003, just a few months later, Americans misunderstood how the rest of the world viewed their country’s actions. Only a minority of Americans believed that world opinion was against the war. A significant minority even believed that the US enjoyed worldwide support.
In March 2003, shortly after the war started, Kull asked respondents “How all of the people in the world feel about the US going to war with Iraq.” Only 35% perceived correctly that the majority of people opposed the decision. Thirty-one percent expressed the mistaken assumption that views were evenly balanced on the issue, and another 31% expressed the egregious misperception that the majority favored it. Kull and his colleagues wanted to know more about the people who held these misperceptions. Among other questions, they wanted to know if the source of the tendency to misperceive reality found in weather they get their news from television versus print. Misperceptions were not limited to a small minority that had repeated misperceptions. A majority of 60% had at least one of these three unambiguous misperceptions, and only 30% had no misperceptions. So the problem was distributed broadly.
It also had clear effects. Before the war, those who believed that Iraq was directly involved in September 11 showed greater support for going to war even without UN approval. In a January PIPA/KN poll, among those who wrongly believed that they had “seen conclusive evidence” that “Iraq played an important role in September 11th attacks,” 56% said they would agree with a decision by the President to proceed to go to war with Iraq if the UN Security Council refused to endorse such an action. Among those who said they had not seen such evidence but still believed it was true that Iraq was involved in September 11, 42% said they would support such a decision. Among those who said they had not seen such evidence and were not convinced that it was true, only 9% said they would agree with such a decision.
In a poll conducted by Kull and his associates in late March 2003, shortly after the onset of the war, among those who wrongly believed that the majority of the people in the world favored the US going to war with Iraq, an overwhelming 81% said they agreed with the President’s decision to go to war with Iraq, despite his failure to garner UN Security Council approval. Among those who, also incorrectly, believed that views were evenly balanced on this question, 58% said they agreed. Among those who correctly believed that the majority of people opposed it, only 28% said they agreed with the President’s decision. What are the origins of these misperceptions? What role does news play? Did people vary in the frequency of their misperceptions according to their source of news?
To answer this question three PIPA/KN polls conducted in June, July, and August-September, an aggregate sample of 3,334 respondents was asked “Where do you tend to get most of your news?” and offered the options of “newspapers and magazines” or “TV and radio.” Overall, 19% said they tend to get most of their news from print media, while 80% said they tend to get their news from TV and radio. Respondents were then asked which network, if any, is their primary source of news.
An analysis of those who were asked all of the key three perception questions does reveal a remarkable level of variation in the presence of misperceptions according to news source. Standing out in the analysis are Fox and NPR/PBS–but for opposite reasons. Fox was the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions. NPR/PBS are notable because their viewers and listeners consistently held fewer misperceptions than respondents who obtained their information from other news sources.
Misperceptions correlate strongly with media source. People who watch Fox News as their primary news source were much more likely to be incorrect on the questions of links to al Qaeda, WMD and world opinion than those who watched any other source. People who got their primary news from television were more likely to have misperceptions than people who got their news from print media, and NPR/PBS.
Notes:
1) See Bruce Hoffman, “Saddam Hussein’s Ultimate Fifth Column – Terrorists,” Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1990; Ronald J. Ostrow and Robin Wright, “U.S. Fears Iraq is Cultivating Terrorist Ties,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1990.
2) Dorman and Livingston, p. 67.
3) Tracking surveys were conducted by the Wirthlin Group from August 22 to December 2, 1990. The survey included a total of 16,903 respondents from all 48-continental states.
4) Clyde Wilcox, J. Ferrara, and D. Alsop, “Before the Rally: The Dynamics of Attitudes Toward the Gulf Crisis before the War,” Paper presented at the 1991 meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC 1991, p. 4.
5) A. M. Rosenthal, “We are Warned,” The New York Times, April 5, 1990, p. A29.
6) E. J. Dionne, “Mainstream Reporting and Middle East Extremities: What is Fair Reporting When it Comes to Saddam Hussein?,” The Washington Post, September 1, 1990, p. C1.
7) Patrick Tyler, Threats and Responses: Terror Network: Intelligence Break Led U.S. to Tie Envoy Killing to Iraq Qaeda Cell,” The New York Times, p. A1.
8) C. J. Chivers, “Kurds Puzzled by Report of Terror Camp,” The New York Times, p. A22.
9) C. J. Chivers, “Islamists in Iraq Offer a Tour of ‘Poison Factory’ Cited by Powell,” The New York Times, p. A17.
10) Ibid.
11) Program on International Policy Attitude, Conflict With Iraq. http://wwwamericans-world.org/digest/regional_issues/Conflict_Iraq/linkstoTerr.cfm
12) ibid.