Branding New and Improved Wars
by Norman Solomon
Dissident Voice
October 29, 2002
Marketing a war is serious business. And no product requires
better brand names than one that squanders vast quantities of resources while
intentionally killing large numbers of people.
The American trend of euphemistic fog for such enterprises
began several decades ago. It's very old news that the federal government no
longer has a department or a budget named "war." Now, it's all called
"defense," a word with a strong aura of inherent justification. The
sly effectiveness of the labeling switch can be gauged by the fact that many
opponents of reckless military spending nevertheless constantly refer to it as
"defense" spending.
During the past dozen years, the intersection between two
avenues, Pennsylvania and Madison, has given rise to media cross-promotion that
increasingly sanitizes the organized mass destruction known as warfare.
The first Bush administration enhanced the public-relations
techniques for U.S. military actions by "choosing operation names that
were calculated to shape political perceptions," linguist Geoff Nunberg recalls.
The invasion of Panama in December 1989 went forward under the name Operation Just
Cause, an immediate media hit. "A number of news anchors picked up on the
phrase Just Cause, which encouraged the Bush and Clinton administrations to
keep using those tendentious names."
As Nunberg points out, "it's all a matter of branding.
And it's no accident that the new-style names like Just Cause were introduced
at around the same time the cable news shows started to label their coverage of
major stories with catchy names and logos." The Pentagon became adept at
supplying video-game-like pictures of U.S. missile strikes at the same time
that it began to provide the big-type captions on TV screens.
Ever since the Gulf War in early 1991, people across the
political spectrum have commonly referred to that paroxysm of carnage as
Operation Desert Storm -- or, more often, just Desert Storm. To the casual ear,
it sounds kind of like an act of nature. Or, perhaps, an act of God.
Either way, according to the vague spirit evoked by the
name Desert Storm, men like Dick Cheney, Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell
may well have been assisting in the implementation of divine natural
occurrences; high winds and 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs raining down from
the heavens.
Soon after the Gulf War a.k.a. Desert Storm ended, the
Army's chief of public affairs, Maj. Gen. Charles McClain, commented: "The
perception of an operation can be as important to success as the execution of
that operation." For guiding the public's perception of a war -- while it
is happening and after it has become history -- there's nothing quite like a
salutary label that sticks.
In October 2001, while launching missiles at Afghanistan,
the Bush team came up with Operation Infinite Justice, only to swiftly scuttle
the name after learning it was offensive to Muslims because of their belief that
only Allah can provide infinite justice. The replacement, Enduring Freedom, was
well-received in U.S. mass media, an irony-free zone where only the untowardly
impertinent might suggest that some people had no choice other than enduring
the Pentagon's freedom to bomb.
If you doubt that the Executive Branch is run by people who
plan U.S. military actions while thinking like marketers, you're (no offense)
naive. It was a candid slip of the tongue a couple of months ago when the White
House chief of staff, Andrew Card, told the New York Times: "From a
marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Not
coincidentally, the main rollout of new-and-improved rationales for an upcoming
war on Iraq did not take place until September.
Looking ahead, the media spinners at the White House are
undoubtedly devoting considerable energy to sifting through options for how to
brand the expected U.S. assault on Iraq. Long before the war is over, we'll all
know its reassuring code name. But we won't know the names of the Iraqi people
who have been killed in our names.
Norman
Solomon's latest book is The Habits of Highly
Deceptive Media. His syndicated column focuses on media and politics.
Email: mediabeat@igc.org