War / Peace

In his State of the Union address, President Bush asked Americans to imagine what would have happened if the Sept. 11 hijackers had been armed with poison gas or germs. "However, U.S. officials and private analysts said Bush's suggestion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein might give such weapons to terrorists - and the implication that the risk of American retaliation can no longer deter him - stretches the analysis of U.S. intelligence agencies to, and perhaps beyond, the limit," reports Warren P. Strobel.

"The model for me for someone in the public relations business is, to a certain extent, the U.S. military," journalist and Watergate legend Bob Woodward said in a keynote address to the Public Relation's Society of America's National Capital Chapter in Washington, D.C. PRSA's Strategist reports how Woodward, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, defines the model PR professional. "The best sources for straight information were people in the U.S.

For the past two decades, the U.S. Army has been shipping out career officers for a year-long PR training at the Pittsburgh office of global PR firm Ketchum, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. "The two sides were paired through a call from the Pentagon. It seems someone thought it would be a good idea to get public relations training," the Post-Gazette's Teresa F. Lindeman writes.

Veteran war reporter Chris Hedges has written a book examining the continuing appeal of war to the human psyche. "The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation," he writes. He discusses the myths that accompany war in an interview with TomPaine.com: "Once you enter a conflict, or at the inception of a conflict, you are given a language by which you speak.