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Introduction
War by Disney: that is how Glenna, an artist I interviewed, described the Iraq War
she had witnessed on television and read about in Toronto newspapers. 'You could
almost say this was a war invented and produced by Disney studios. It was
monumental, it was full of slogans and images, it was like a production. And it
happened, and [they] got it over so fast, they got away with it too.' The House of
Mickey had nothing to do with the actual war. But the way the war was presented, at
least in North America, seemed very similar to the style of shows the Disney
studios, and other major production houses, had offered audiences in recent years.
It bore the signature of some of the most successful products of a made-in-America
popular culture that had captivated the world in past decades.
This book discusses the peculiar nature of the war so neatly summarized by Glenna.
For the record, I was opposed to the attack on Iraq because that action lacked the
sanction of the United Nations - had Washington secured the support of the UN, thus
won legitimacy, I would have supported the war, and in particular the removal of
Saddam Hussein. But I am not writing about the justice or otherwise of what
happened in the spring of 2003. Nor do I intend to chronicle the diplomatic
manoeuvres in the year preceding the invasion, the military operations of the
coalition forces during the roughly three weeks of conflict, or the aftermath of
disorder and confusion and resistance - at least not directly. Rather I will
explore the experience of war, chiefly in North America, and to some extent in the
world at large. I will treat the war as narrative and spectacle, as a form of
'infotainment' and, more broadly, as a commodity, something that was consumed by
millions of people via the media. The intervention became a branded war, a
co-production of the Pentagon and of newsrooms, processed and cleansed so that it
could appeal to the well-established tastes of people who were veteran consumers of
popular culture. This triumph of marketing is one reason to count the war against
Iraq significant: it marked a new stage of the ongoing story of democracy,
particularly in America.
Much of what follows details the efforts of two groups of producers, which for the
sake of convenience I will call the Pentagon and the newsrooms, meaning chiefly the
American television networks, to sell the war to a variety of domestic and foreign
audiences. The crisis and then the invasion captured the attention of media and
people throughout the world. The Internet made it possible to sample an
extraordinary wealth of information about the marketing exercise. So my evidence
derived not so much from my own experience of using the media as from a wide
assortment of materials - television clips, radio interviews and documentaries,
newspaper reports, magazine stories - all readily available via the Internet. I
could inspect the leaflets the Americans had dropped over Iraq as part of their
'PsyOps' campaign in the months before the conflict: these were available at the
website of Central Command. I could see the live report offered by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) of the bombing of Baghdad on 21 March, the day when
commentators argued the Americans had initiated the infamous 'Shock and Awe'
campaign. I could read the English version of reports posted by Al-Jazeera, itself
one of the success stories of the war. I could view the British Broadcasting
Corporation's (BBC) version of what happened in Baghdad on 9 April, that day of
triumph and chaos when the Iraqi regime collapsed.My focus on the marketing
exercise, however, has necessitated two special features of the book. Whatever its
prominence these days, marketing has remained a kind of communication that is both
criticized and widely disdained. It works but often not perfectly. I have made
extensive use of editorial cartoons drawn from publications around the world,
though mostly from North America, to offer another way of seeing what this war
meant. The crisis and the war provoked all kinds of talented people, of different
persuasions, to produce a wealth of images mocking the pretensions and the
behaviours of the antagonists. Humour, especially satire, has a marvellous way of
highlighting conventions and contradictions. Its ability to exaggerate the import
of ideas, words, and actions, to caricature figures and faces, renders public
affairs grotesque, and does so in very interesting ways. The serious business of
politics is invaded by the spirit of carnival. And so, samples of these cartoons
are scattered throughout the text, to enliven, to enlighten, to criticize. (Nearly
all of these cartoons I secured online in the summer of 2003.1 have cited the
artists and permission data with the actual cartoons, and the sources and the
dates, where available, of this material in the 'List of Figures.')
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Likewise I have incorporated the views of a select group of 'consumer voices' in
what I will call a 'citizens' panel.' (The two monikers express the double nature
of these volunteers, as an audience and as a public.) The analysis of any marketing
exercise requires attention not only to what the producers were doing but to the
responses of consumers as well. Did they buy into the rhetoric and the images? In
May, right after President Bush declared that the war was won, I interviewed twenty
people in the region of Toronto about their experience of the crisis and, most
especially, the conflict itself. As one reader correctly pointed out, this panel
was 'more Starbucks than Tim Hortons': it was not representative of the whole
public. I chose women and men who belonged to the articulate public, people inside
and outside the university community, who paid a lot of attention to public affairs
- members of what is sometimes called 'the political class.' My purpose was to
capture a wide variety of views, at one moment in time, before the course of future
events had fogged memories. Most of the participants were interviewed individually,
though I also held three joint sessions to probe how people discussed the war. I
sought a rough balance among the competing views. Some subjects were peace
activists, a few were sympathizers or supporters of the coalition, and still others
were just alienated consumers. Some participants were retired; others were
students. I managed to talk to 'newly minted' and 'native' Canadians, to citizens
who were on the right and the left, to people who were Christian, Jewish, and
Muslim. The interviews, lasting about an hour and a half, were designed to explore
the meanings people derived from the experience of watching the invasion from afar.
Their opinions are identified in the text by a first name and, if necessary, a last
initial, to ensure their anonymity as well as to mark their special status as
voices of consumers and citizens. (The participants and their affiliations are
outlined in a brief appendix.) What I discovered forms much of the chapter entitled
'Consuming War.' But their views are also scattered throughout the book. The
opening comment by Glenna was one of those views.
Of course this citizens' panel can only be counted as an expression of the type of
opinions present in one city in one country. There is an old saying in the real
estate business: 'location, location, location/ A similar maxim prevails in
communications, even in this era of global marketing. The way a public responds to
any message depends on its past experiences, its collective memory, in a word on
its locale. So I have supplemented the findings of my interviews with a wide
variety of data drawn from polls, letters, and newspaper stories that report views
among the populace, particularly in North America but also globally, and notably in
the Arabic world. Polls proved especially important. This is an era when the public
mind is continually being scrutinized by all kinds of agencies. The significance of
the Iraq crisis and the succeeding invasion meant these agencies went into a frenzy
of sur6 veying. While their findings do not make for the most interesting reading
of the mind of citizens, polling results remain an invaluable way of understanding
that elusive but significant property we call public opinion. The results are found
chiefly in two companion chapters entitled 'The War Debate' and 'Perceptions of
War.'
My argument explores the recent history of journalism, marketing, and entertainment
because the convergence of these supposedly distinct discourses fashioned the
character of the war commodity consumed by North Americans. Likely the emphasis on
pop culture will seem the most peculiar thrust. Yet the practices and the character
of entertainment were central to how people explained and interpreted what they
saw: 'War becomes the ultimate reality TV,' announced a typical headline in
Toronto's National Post (25 March). Mass culture has become so ubiquitous that it
guides both the actions and understandings of producers and consumers in the realm
of politics. I have favoured hit movies, and especially the action/adventure genre,
because they construct and popularize icons, stereotypes, archetypes, visual
cliches, sayings and slogans for such a wide audience that they offer us (and in
this case 'us' takes in much of the world's population) the means to comprehend
what happens in public life, in the corridors of power, and on the battlefield.
In summary: this book tracks how the weapons of mass persuasion were deployed, what
their effect was, and why the experiment was significant.

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