Have been reading the following articles about the world slowly lurching it’s way to war and the ridiculous means the Bush Administration has stooped to change opinions in it’s ‘Allies’ populace. They have obviously been hard at work in the UK, spreading their war propoganda, none too successfully, it seems –
Marketers face tough task of selling Bush to Britain
By Rachel Sylvester in London
January 25 2003
Weeks after two aircraft crashed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, the White House hired an advertising executive to help “rebrand” America.
Charlotte Beers had promoted Head and Shoulders shampoo, Gillette razors and American Express. George Bush thought she could market the US too.
For the past year, Ms Beers has been concentrating on trying to sell America to the Arab world. She set up radio stations in Jordan and Iran, pumping out “popoganda” to Islamic youth. She bought time on commercial Arabic television stations and broadcast interviews with American Muslims, explaining why they loved their country. In an overwhelmingly hostile market, Ms Beers has had rather limited success.
Now, the “Brand USA” marketing machine is targeting Britain. For months, the White House has been privately polling people in Britain and across Europe to try to work out what is behind the growing mood of anti-Americanism. As the situation in the Gulf heats up, the Bush Administration is going into overdrive, with masses of opinion research about what is fuelling British opposition to the war.
With polls showing that only 15per cent of Britons would support a campaign in Iraq without United Nations approval, the White House thinks the situation is serious.
Mr Bush and his advisers know that it will become increasingly difficult for the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to stay “shoulder to shoulder” with the Americans if the public remains overwhelmingly hostile.
“There’s no immediate casus belli. People accept Saddam Hussein’s a vile tyrant but they think why now? There’s an element of Saddam fatigue,” a Downing Street insider admitted.
Another problem is that Britain and America are trying to send different messages to different audiences. This is a traditional propaganda strategy – but, in an age of satellite television, when identical images are beamed across the world simultaneously, it is impossible. When Mr Blair ramps up the bellicose rhetoric, he may be shouting at Baghdad but he is heard just as loudly in Birmingham.
Similarly, there is a conflict between what will appeal to domestic audiences in the United States and Britain. If Mr Bush describes Saddam’s behaviour as a “rerun of a bad movie”, for example, middle America may cheer but middle Britain reaches for the sick bag. Mr Bush is so disliked in Britain that he damages “Brand USA” every time he opens his mouth.
In a recent speech, Ms Beers set out her marketing philosophy. “It’s not what you say,” she said, “it’s what they hear.” That applies as much in Britain as in the Arab world.
The Telegraph, London
But it seems our own idiot members of the press seem to have swallowed Mr Kissinger’s thoughts hook, line and sinker –
Bush Churchillian? About as much as Mr Ed
By Mike Carlton
January 25 2003
Truth will be the first casualty in the coming war, as it always is, with the corpse of commonsense a close second: “As we approach war with Iraq, it’s becoming obvious that George W. Bush is really a modern Winston Churchill,” gushed Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian last Thursday.
This is a mighty leap. Before becoming prime minister, Churchill had escaped from a Boer POW camp, had ridden in the British army’s last cavalry charge at Omdurman, had sat in the House of Commons for both the Conservative and Liberal parties, been First Lord of the Admiralty at the outbreak of World War I, had bungled the Gallipoli campaign, had commanded an infantry battalion in the trenches of France, had been home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, had broken a general strike, had advised a king on his abdication, had won respect as a landscape painter and written profoundly literate works of British and American history.
Bush, by contrast, has run a plodding oil exploration company and a Texas baseball team, the Vietnam War somehow taking place without him. He was bulldozed into the White House by his father’s former courtiers and a few hundred hanging chads scraped together by his brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida.
Sheridan, starry-eyed, was writing fresh from an audience with Dr Henry Kissinger, who has been offering his invaluable views around Sydney this week. All off the record, of course, but the Oz’s foreign affairs pundit felt able to vouchsafe that “he is a wholehearted supporter of action against Iraq”.
Such a surprise. But I was pleased to hear it, for ever since Vietnam I have found it unerringly useful to discover what the good doctor thinks on any international crisis and then to take exactly the opposite view.
Kissinger’s pioneering successes in “regime change” – that crisp new euphemism for the violent overthrow of a foreign government – gave us the murder of the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Better, I think, to heed that greatest of Middle East correspondents, Robert Fisk, who warns in The Independent of London that truth already lies adying as the Pentagon spins the world’s TV networks. When the war comes, he says, beware of reporters seen wearing bits of military uniform or carrying weapons, those referring to the units they are with as “we”, and those who use the words “collateral damage” when they mean “dead civilians”. This is sound advice.
But back to George. Alert, but growing more alarmed with each chapter, I have just finished reading Bush at War, an account of the destruction of the Taliban written by Bob Woodward, the famous Watergate journalist.
It is scary stuff. Woodward had access to the great and good of Washington, including long hours with the President himself, and he expends much ink on gratefully brown-nosing them in return but, despite this, there emerges a fearsome picture of an administration of the Republican new right hell-bent on a Manichean crusade to remake an evil world in its own Christian fundamentalist image.
Bush appears, at best, as a well-meaning but ignorant, untravelled man with grandiose goals. “There is nothing bigger than to achieve world peace,” he tells Woodward, but he wants his National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to get the plans for it down to two sheets of paper.
“If I have asked once, I have asked 20 times, I want to see the cash-flow projections of the Afghan Government,” he snaps at one point. It has not occurred to him that the gun-toting mountain warlords the CIA has so expensively regime-changed into Kabul might not be too hot on dirigiste fiscal number-crunching.
But the really spooky guys are the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, the mega-hawkish Paul Wolfowitz. These men were avid for war with Iraq during what they sneer at as the milksop Clinton years, and now their hour has struck.
Rumsfeld (who personally and warmly shook Saddam Hussein’s hand as a welcome US ally back in 1983) comes across – there is no better way of putting this – as a bullying smart-ass profoundly impressed by his own mordant wit on the podium in the Pentagon briefing room.
Woodward’s book ends with an (unintentionally) chilling account of CIA men in Afghanistan swearing to avenge September 11. “We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defence of our great nation,” vows one.
I fear we Australians are about to join them in this enterprise.
My partner and I took 10 days off in Bali after Christmas. Friends were surprised we would risk this so soon after the bombing, but we were damned if we were going to let a fear of terrorism deter us. This may sound more than a bit Rumsfeldian, I know, but to stay away would be to hand Jemaah Islamiah another little victory.
Thousands of tourists have gone elsewhere, though, and Bali is hurting. Streets and beaches that would normally be packed with Australians, Americans and Japanese were almost empty.
At a shop just up from that haunting bomb site in Jalan Legian I bought the latest tourist souvenir, a F— TERRORIST T-shirt, but they weren’t selling many.
Speaking Indonesian as I do, you find that people will tell you a little more. Time and again they would assure me that Bali aman sekarang – “Bali is safe now.”
“Please tell the Australians to come back,” they urged. I hope we do. The Indonesians have stepped up their security and their hunt for the Kuta murderers has been extraordinary, with several Balinese speaking in grateful admiration of the work of the Australian Federal Police. We must not desert these people now.
The final opinion piece is truly interesting, comparing the obsessions with silliness and superficiality of life in our increasingly “celebrity-driven” culture, with the hard realities and immoral decisions made in the seats of power –
Count the hours as we are led by the nose to war
January 25 2003
She was an eloquent speaker, a passionate pacifist and an extraordinary writer whose words have affected millions. But, 60 years after her death, all we seem to be talking about is the size of Virginia Woolf’s nose. Julia Baird writes.
Will the nine o’clock bulletin end it all? – our lives, oh yes, and everything for the next 50 years? Everyone’s writing, I suppose, about this last day. I walked on the downs; lay under a cornstack and looked at the empty land and the pinkish clouds in a perfect blue summer afternoon sky, not a sound. Workmen discussing war on the road – one for it, one against. There’s a vast calm cold gloom. And the strain. Like waiting for a doctor’s verdict. And the young – young men smashed up. But the point is, one is too numb to think. How to go on, through war? – that’s the question. – Virginia Woolf, August 28, 1939.
She was an eloquent speaker, a passionate pacifist and an extraordinary writer whose words have affected millions. But, 60 years after her death, all we seem to be talking about is the size of Virginia Woolf’s nose.
Or rather, the size of the prosthetic nose glued to Nicole Kidman’s face when she played Woolf in The Hours. To hear the hype, you would think Woolf was just a body behind an extremely large, unattractive honker. Not the great intellect who advised young women to drink wine and get a room of their own.
Despite the fact that she was just doing her job, reporters have flocked to Kidman, whose own features are widely copied by plastic surgeons, to ask about the Great Nose Trauma: how did she cope? What a relief it must be, they pant, to have your own nose again.
The implication seems to be that it was somehow degrading to put a slightly larger nose on her face so she could better resemble a magnificent English writer. How daring! What a risk!
Douglas Perry, writing for Star telegram.com, declared: “The fake nose shows us, shockingly, how tenuous her beauty is, how utterly dependent it is on perfection.”
The way Woolf has been portrayed – frumpy, dowdy, “decidedly unglamorous” – you would think she was hideous, not a handsome woman with patrician features and enormous eyes, her limbs elongated like a Modigliani muse.
Woolf’s biographer, Hermione Lee, says that while Woolf disliked her looks, others thought her beautiful. What people remembered about her was: “Her thinness, her fine bones, her fragility, her eyes, her voice, her laugh, and her mixture of angularity and awkwardness.” Not her nose.
In reviews of the film, Woolf has been repeatedly described as a “suicidal writer”, as well as a “mentally tortured feminist”. It is almost as though she did not live 59 long and productive years until wading into a river with rocks in her pockets, her life is reduced to the act of her death.
It’s even odder when you consider, as we send our troops to the Persian Gulf despite widespread opposition, that Woolf wrote a major polemic on war – Three Guineas – in 1938, just as World War II was about to break out. I can’t help but wonder what Woolf – who obsessively kept newspaper clipping files about war – would have thought of the fact that in the same week young Australians set sail for the Middle East, our papers have carried lengthy discussions about her nose, of all things.
Woolf was not nationalist or patriotic, and claimed to have no loyalty to a country which did not recognise her rights: “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
She wrote for different times, and concentrated on both the masculine nature of war and the tyranny of dictatorships, but her writing still prompts questions about conflict and diplomacy carried out at an elite level while civilians scratch their heads.
The problem is how to make sense of it all. And how pacifists can adequately respond to the many-tentacled threat of terror. It is puzzling that while there is an overwhelming opposition to joining any war on Iraq without UN backing, we have sent off our troops regardless.
As yesterday’s front-page headline declared: “We’re off to war, UN or not.” Letter writers have continually expressed frustration about the lack of debate or consultation about forward deployment. “They’re our troops, John, not yours,” wrote Margaret Nelson yesterday. “Ask us, don’t tell us.”
In the late ’30s, Woolf’s diary entries were imbued with the sense that something dramatic was about to happen at a global level, a feeling of imminence and fear. Despite her part in the fierce public debate, she felt powerless in the face of the oncoming conflict. She struggled to make sense of her impotence.
Woolf’s 29-year-old nephew died fighting in the Spanish Civil War as she was writing Three Guineas. A few months earlier, she had written to him: “I have never dreamt so often of war. And what’s to be done? It’s rather like sitting in a sick room, quite helpless.” When Hitler invaded Prague in March 1939, she wrote in her diary: “My comment anyhow is superfluous. We sit and watch.”
Just as we do now, 64 years later.
Jbaird@smh.com.au
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