Officially, President Bush is claiming that he sees war with Iraq as an option of last resort, and many members of the American public seem to have taken him at his word. In reality, say journalists and others who have closely observed the key players in decision-making positions at the White House, they have already decided on war. In the Fourth Quarter 2002 issue of PR Watch, released on the web this week, Laura Miller examines the PR and marketing campaign currently underway to convince the public that war is necessary and inevitable.

Enron Corp. ran a formidable lobbying machine in Washington and state capitals that gained favorable treatment from state and national governments on no fewer than 49 occasions from the late 1980s to the company's scandal-ridden bankruptcy last year.

PR industry analyst Paul Holmes notes that the corporate scandals of last year created a "chronic crisis, as constituents - shareholders, employees, regulators, the public at large - began to question whether the entire American corporate system was hopelessly corrupt." (As an indicator of how bad things got, Holmes was forced to combine Enron, Worldcom and Tyco into a single item in his "top 10" list of the year's worst PR disasters.) "Ordinarily," Holmes writes, "such an epidemic of ill-considered corporate behavior would have elevated the role of the senior corporate communications execu