White House chief of Staff Andrew Card famously said – in explaining why the Bush administration delayed until September 2002 to make its case for war in Iraq:
From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.
War is – indeed – marketed just like soda or toothpaste.
In fact, the government hired some of the top public relations experts to sell the Iraq and other wars. See this and this.
As the head of Santa Clara University’s Center for Applied Ethics wrote in 2003:
Am I the only one who’s queasy that the Bush Administration has quite publicly announced plans to sell us on war with Iraq the same way a soda pop company might hype a new soft drink?
Everyone knows that truth is the first casualty of war.
Countries need to lie about their enemies in order to demonize them sufficiently so that the people will support the war.
That is why intelligence “failures” – such as the following – are so common:
- The U.S. Navy’s own historians now say that the sinking of the USS Maine — the justification for America’s entry into the Spanish-American War — was probably caused by an internal explosion of coal, rather than an attack by the Spanish.
- It is also now well-accepted that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which led to the Vietnam war was a fiction (confirmed here).
- And two lies were used to justify the 1991 Gulf War: the statement that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies and the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)(technically, the statement about Kuwaiti babies did not come from the U.S. government, but from a public relations firm hired by the government).
Of course, the demonization process is catapulted far and wide by the mainstream media. Indeed, the corporate media is instrumental in spreading the lies so as to support war.