Ebook: Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War against Iraq

With nearly 60 per cent of Americans initially against a preemptive war without sanction from the United Nations - and even higher anti-war numbers in most other nations - the 2003 war against Iraq quickly became an enormous public relations challenge for the George W. Bush administration. The subject of Weapons of Mass Persuasion is a war in which American patriotism became so mired in commercial jingoism that the demarcations between entertainment and political conduct disappeared.
In this engaging and disturbing book, Paul Rutherford shows how the marketing campaign for the war against Iraq was constructed and carried out. He argues not only that the campaign epitomized the presentation of real-time war as pop culture, but that it constitutes a significant chapter in the history of modem democracy. Situating the war against Iraq within an existing tradition of war as narrative, spectacle, and, more broadly, commodity, Rutherford offers a brief overview of the history of civic advertising and propaganda, then examines in detail the different dimensions of the war as it became a branded conflict, processed and cleansed to appeal to the well-established tastes of veteran consumers of popular culture.
Weapons of Mass Persuasion includes incisive analyses of speeches, editorial cartoons, media political commentary, and news reports of such sound-bite events as the bombing of Baghdad, the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue, and the rescue of captured soldier Private Jessica Lynch, as well as extensive polling data from around the world and interviews with the actual consumers of TV war. The work chronicles the making and selling of a Hollywood-style war against Iraq: a fast-paced and heroic struggle between good and evil resulting in a triumphant, sanitized, and commodified outcome.
paul rutherford is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.