My thanks go first of all to the hundreds of individuals throughout the world whose opinions and curiosity about America inspired me to write this book. Some are named in the text; all are thanked here. Im also grateful to the authors and journalists whose work I quote, and I urge readers to explore their writing in depth.
I also thank my literary agents, both at home and abroad; Im especially grateful to Ellen Levine and Diana Finch in New York for representing this book with such passion and skill.
To my editors and publishers around the world: Thank you, colleagues, for believing in this book and sending it forth into the world. I particularly thank Jonathan Galassi in New York and, in Europe, Eva Cossee and Christoph Buchwald for the conversation at their kitchen table in Amsterdam that showed me the way.
Thanks to Michael Lerner and the staff at Commonweal for providing me with a quiet and beautiful writing space, and to my colleagues at NPRs Living on Earth program for picking up the slack while I was occupied with this book.
Thanks to all my early manuscript readersDenny May, Mark Cohen, Tom Devine, Mark Schapiro, Francesca Vietor, John Alves, Diana Finch, Ellen Levine, Christoph Buchwald, Jonathan Galassi, Bill Swainson, and the gang at Bloomsburyfor comments that were swift, sure, and illuminating. I also thank Paul Slovak, Nathan Johnson, Mark Dowie, Steve Talbot, David Fenton, Lisa Simeone, David Corn, Steve Cobble, Camilla Nagler, Joan Walsh, Jonathan King, Beth Daley, Paul Robbins, Stephanos Stephanides, Mark Childress, Jane Kay, Eric Brown, Sarah Anderson, John Dinges, and Shoon Murray for advice, information, and support. Finally, special thanks to the always capable James Wilson at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
My warmest thanks go to my friends and family, and above all to my wife, Francesca Vietor, who stood with me in so many ways throughout this project, and even helped find the title. Youre the best.
WHY AMERICANS SEE THE WAR, AND WORLD, DIFFERENTLY
T he night the missiles began falling on Baghdad in March 2003, I was in Munich on a book tour, speaking before some three hundred people at the Literatur Haus. As in Spain and Italy, where Id spent the previous week, opinion polls in Germany indicated that 90 percent of the public opposed the impending U.S.-led war in Iraqa sharp contrast to the United States, where support was 60 percent and climbing. After my talk, a ruddy-faced older German stood up and asked the same question I had heard repeatedly in recent days from audiences and journalists alike: Why is George Bush insisting on this war, and why is the American public supporting him?
When I replied that Mr. Bush had convinced many Americans that this was a war of self-defense, groans of dismay erupted from the crowd. The moderator, Stefan Kornelius, foreign editor of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung , one of Germanys leading newspapers, asked for quiet.
If you want to understand why so many Americans support this war, I continued, one number you need to know is forty-five. Forty-five percent of the American people believethat Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Now it was Korneliuss turn to be stunned. But there is no evidence for that! he blurted out.
He was right, of course. And everyone in the room knew it, because his newspaper, like most European papers, had made the point clear in its coverage. So had European television. (Indeed, two nights earlier in Cologne, I had gotten the same reactionBut there is no evidence for that!from Stefan Seibert, an anchor with the German TV network ZDE) The European media had, of course, reported the Bush administrations repeated suggestions that Saddam and al-Qaida were linked. But they had given equal weight to the lack of proof for such a linkfor example, by highlighting Czech president Vaclav Havels discrediting of an alleged meeting in Prague between agents of Saddam and al-Qaida.
If Americans and foreigners regarded the Iraq war and its aftermath differently, it is not because Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus, as former Reagan adviser Robert Kagan has dubiously suggested. A better explanation is that Americans rely on different information than non-Americans do, because the U.S. media by and large report international affairs from the perspective of Washington while foreign media do not. The main sources of information for most American news stories about foreign affairs are the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House, and the stories end up reflecting both the substantive claims and the ideological assumptions held by these and other parts of Washingtons governing class.
Though its rarely acknowledged in the United States, the ubiquity and power of official propaganda in American political life is immense. The CIA itself had declared that therewas no apparent link between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaida network that carried out the September 11 attacks. Nevertheless, the Bush administration and its right-wing allies sold that ideaand thus the implication that war on Iraq was an act of revenge and self-defenseto a sizable portion of the American public, thanks to the help of a cowed and compliant news media and the publics own gullibility and laziness.
A speech Bush gave on February 26, 2003, illustrates how the White House linked Saddam to the horrors of September 11 while distracting attention from Osama bin Laden, the real author of the attack, who remained at large. Bushs speechwriters were shrewd enough not to have him state outright that Saddam and al-Qaida were connected, precisely because there was no evidence of such a link. Instead Bushs speech relied on guilt by association, making its argument in four steps.
In step one, Bush invoked the sacred memory of September 11, when terrorists brought unspeakable grief and suffering to Americans. Next, the president vowed that terrorism must never again be allowed to strike the United States. In step three, Bush declared that Saddam was a terrorist who had weapons of mass destruction that endangered America. In step fourpresto!Bush concluded that Saddam must be removed to prevent a recurrence of the September 11 tragedy.
It was a nifty sleight-of-hand: because terrorism had struck America, Saddam had to go, even if there was no evidence he was behind the strike. Luckily for Bush, the American media left his sleight-of-hand unmentioned when covering the speech. Television, as usual, was the least critical. Evening newscasts led with flattering images of Bush delivering his text, while anchors blandly repeated his assertion that oustingthe dictator would lead to democracy in Iraq and peace in the Middle East. The closest a major media outlet came to cautioning Americans about the credibility of the speech was when the New York Times called it a dramatic example of the administrations public relations strategy.
Repetition is the secret to effective propaganda, and the Bush administration was disciplined about repeating the same message for months during the run-up to war, even if many of the specific claims made in the process proved false. Besides the CIAs denial of a link between Saddam and al-Qaida and Havels discrediting of the alleged meeting in Prague, the Los Angeles Times exposed that the Bush claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger was based on obviously forged documents. But most American news media reported such items briefly if at all. The Niger expose, for example, was ignored altogether by American television. Thus these occasional contradictions of the official line had limited effect on public awareness, especially when compared to the constant drumbeat of anti-Saddam rhetoric. Repetition triumphs over truth.
