War / Peace

What should President Bush do now that the propaganda that deceived a nation into war is being exposed? G. Clotaire Rapaille, a marketing expert whose work we describe in our book Weapons of Mass Deception, told the New York Times that "The important thing is to tell a story. 'I would have an Iraqi child, and I would make a hero of this child. And then we have him on television telling, `Today I went to school, I talked to my grandmother, and this is what my future is going to be now.

"Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council today temporarily banned two popular Arab satellite television stations from covering the council's news conferences and entering government ministries because of what it called 'irresponsible activities' that threaten the country's 'democracy and stability' and encourage terrorism," the Washington Post reports. Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya were slapped with a two-week "penalty" for allegedly violating "media-conduct rules," which were outlined for the first time in today's edict.

"Critics say the Bush administration had no plan for postwar Iraq. In fact, before the war, hundreds of Iraqis were involved in discussions with Washington about securing and stabilizing their country after military action," David Phillips writes in the New York Times.

"Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief (director of communications, in the current parlance), once said that if you are going to lie, you should tell a big lie," Chicago Sun-Times' Andrew Greeley writes. "That may be good advice, but the question remains: What happens when people begin to doubt the big lie? Herr Goebbels never lived to find out. Some members of the Bush administration may be in the process of discovering that, given time, the big lie turns on itself. ... 'War on terror' is a metaphor. It is not an actual war, like the World War or the Vietnamese or Korean wars.