Excerpts

Spin doctors have used six tools over and over again through the years.. These are like wrenches designed to twist the mind.

One of the most common is the atrocity accusation. When a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl testified before Congress during the Gulf War to the effect that Iraqi troops in Kuwait were killing premature babies and stealing incubators to take them back to Iraq, she twanged many a heartstring. The world was not told that she just happened to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington and a member of the royal family, or that her appearance was stage-managed by the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm on behalf of the Kuwaitis.

Of course, propaganda need not be false. Widespread accounts of Iraqi brutality in Kuwait were confirmed when reporters arrived after the Iraqis were driven out. But atrocity stories, both true and false, have been a staple of war propaganda. In World War I, writes Taylor in his excellent history of war propaganda, Munitions of the Mind, Allied propagandists constantly invoked 'Images of the bloated Prussian "Ogre"... busily crucifying soldiers, violating women, mutilating babies, desecrating and looting churches.'

Half a century later, atrocity stories were important in the Vietnam War, during which accounts of the My Lai massacre by American soldiers disgusted wide sectors of the American public and fed the anti-war fervor. Atrocity stories, both true and false, filled the air during the Serb-Bosnian conflict.

A second common tool is hyperbolic inflation of the stakes involved in a battle or war. Soldiers and civilians are told that everything they hold dear is at risk. President Bush pictured the Gulf conflict as a war for a new and better world order. At stake was not simply the independence of Kuwait, the protection of the world's oil supply, or elimination of a potential nuclear threat from Saddam, but, supposedly, the fate of civilization itself. As for Saddam, the war was not about his failure to pay back billion of dollars borrowed from the Kuwaitis during the earlier Iran-Iraq war; it was - he claimed - about the entire future of the 'Arab Nation.'

A third mind-wrench in the military spin doctor's kit bag is demonization and/or dehumanization of the opponent. For Saddam as for his enemies in next-door Iran, America was the 'the Great Satan,' Bush was 'the Devil in the White House.' In turn, for Bush, Saddam was a 'Hitler.' Baghdad radio spoke of American pilots as 'rats' and 'predatory beasts' An American colonel described an air strike as 'almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying there, and were killing them.'

A fourth tool is polarization. 'Those who are not with us are against us.'

A fifth is the claim of divine sanction. If Saddam draped his aggression in Islamic garb, President Bush also called upon God's support .... the phrase 'God Bless America' ran through American propaganda.

Finally, perhaps the most powerful mind-wrench of all is meta-propaganda - propaganda that discredits the other side's propaganda. Coalition spokespeople in the Gulf repeatedly and accurately pointed out that Saddam Hussein had total control of the Iraqi press and that, therefore, the people of Iraq were denied the truth and Iraqi airwaves were filled with lies. Meta-propaganda is particularly potent because, instead of challenging the veracity of a single story, it calls into question everything coming from the enemy. Its aim is to produce wholesale, as distinct from retail, disbelief.