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The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq
The war in Iraq may be remembered as the point at which the propaganda model perfected in the twentieth century stopped the world is too complex, information is too plentiful, and-as events in Iraq reveal- propaganda makes bad policy.
The Best War Ever is about a war that was devised in fantasy and lost in delusion. It highlights the futility of lying to oneself and others in matters of life and death. And it offers lessons to the current generation so that, at least in our time, this never happens again.
As the team of Rampton and Stauber show in their first new book since President Bush's reelection, the White House seems to have fooled no one as much as itself in the march toward a needless (from a security perspective) war in Iraq. As the authors argue, one of the most tragic consequences of the Bush administration's reliance on propaganda is its disdain for realistic planning in matters of war. Repeatedly, when faced with predictions of problems, U.S. policymakers dismissed the warnings of Iraq experts, choosing instead to promulgate its version of the war through conservative media outlets and PR campaigns. The result has been too few troops on the ground to maintain security; failure to anticipate the insurgency; and oblivious disregard, even contempt, for critics in either party who attempted to assess the human and economic costs of the war.
Even now that withdrawal seems imminent, however, the administration and its allies continue their downplaying civilian deaths and military injuries; employing marketing buzzwords like "victory" repeatedly to shore up public opinion; and botched attempts, through third-party PR firms, at creating phony news.
The Bush administration entered Iraq believing that its moral, technological, and military superiority would ensure victory abroad, and that its mastery of the politics would win support at home. Instead, it found a morass of problems that do not lend themselves to moralistic, technological, or propaganda-based solutions.
The Best War Ever is about a war that was devised in fantasy and lost in delusion. It highlights the futility of lying to oneself and others in matters of life and death. And it offers lessons to the current generation so that, at least in our time, this never happens again.
As the team of Rampton and Stauber show in their first new book since President Bush's reelection, the White House seems to have fooled no one as much as itself in the march toward a needless (from a security perspective) war in Iraq. As the authors argue, one of the most tragic consequences of the Bush administration's reliance on propaganda is its disdain for realistic planning in matters of war. Repeatedly, when faced with predictions of problems, U.S. policymakers dismissed the warnings of Iraq experts, choosing instead to promulgate its version of the war through conservative media outlets and PR campaigns. The result has been too few troops on the ground to maintain security; failure to anticipate the insurgency; and oblivious disregard, even contempt, for critics in either party who attempted to assess the human and economic costs of the war.
Even now that withdrawal seems imminent, however, the administration and its allies continue their downplaying civilian deaths and military injuries; employing marketing buzzwords like "victory" repeatedly to shore up public opinion; and botched attempts, through third-party PR firms, at creating phony news.
The Bush administration entered Iraq believing that its moral, technological, and military superiority would ensure victory abroad, and that its mastery of the politics would win support at home. Instead, it found a morass of problems that do not lend themselves to moralistic, technological, or propaganda-based solutions.
255 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 2, 2020
This book is an important part of exposing the lies and deception employed by The US leading up to it's invasion of Iraq. The authors reveal chapter by chapter the lies and propaganda employed by supporters of war to create the favorable scene for War and then they sold it as very easy task.
As the history tells us now it wasn't the case, but as the book very rightly states that the journalism in US was more or less Pro-War as it did negligible cover for the important anti-war voices outside of US. It kept on feeding false information to it's population. The book further exposes the lies used by US leadership to it's allies and overall the mess in Iraq.
I would like to applaud US for one thing though it takes Freedom of Speech to the very core of its existence how else would you find this book printed during Bush's presidency over here in India authors would be harassed and their book would have been banned before ever seeing the light of the day. Hope to see true freedom of Speech in India as well where few individuals can't dictate terms and ban movies, books etc.
People who don't read generally ask me my reasons for reading. Simply put I just love reading and so to that end I have made it my motto to just Keep on Reading. I love to read everything except for Self Help books but even those once in a while. I read almost all the genre but YA, Fantasy, Biographies are the most. My favorite series is, of course, Harry Potter but then there are many more books that I just adore. I have bookcases filled with books which are waiting to be read so can't stay and spend more time in this review, so remember I loved reading this and love reading more, you should also read what you love and then just Keep on Reading.
As the history tells us now it wasn't the case, but as the book very rightly states that the journalism in US was more or less Pro-War as it did negligible cover for the important anti-war voices outside of US. It kept on feeding false information to it's population. The book further exposes the lies used by US leadership to it's allies and overall the mess in Iraq.
I would like to applaud US for one thing though it takes Freedom of Speech to the very core of its existence how else would you find this book printed during Bush's presidency over here in India authors would be harassed and their book would have been banned before ever seeing the light of the day. Hope to see true freedom of Speech in India as well where few individuals can't dictate terms and ban movies, books etc.
People who don't read generally ask me my reasons for reading. Simply put I just love reading and so to that end I have made it my motto to just Keep on Reading. I love to read everything except for Self Help books but even those once in a while. I read almost all the genre but YA, Fantasy, Biographies are the most. My favorite series is, of course, Harry Potter but then there are many more books that I just adore. I have bookcases filled with books which are waiting to be read so can't stay and spend more time in this review, so remember I loved reading this and love reading more, you should also read what you love and then just Keep on Reading.
August 27, 2019
They mean for Ahmed Chalabi
Rampton and Stauber are the authors of "Weapons of Mass Deception," which won my personal award for best book title of the decade (so far). Here the irony is a bit over the top. So are these alternative titles I've thought up for them: "Nice Welfare Program for Halliburton," or "Generals Test Toys, Get Bored," or "Don't let the sand get in your eyes; Don't let the shrapnel break your heart," or "Pallets of Hundred Dollar Bills, Forked-Lifted to Eternity!" Or how about "Arabian Nights in the Green Zone, Shooting Pool with My Buds--Not" or "Thank You, Mr. President, I've Been Born Again (In a Flagged-Draped Coffin) and My Eyes Can See Clearly Now: There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel."
No tunnel, no eyes, and that's just as well since Halliburton does not do Walter Reed or any other stateside hospital for our guys--don't you know we've got a budget crisis and we need to stimulate the economy with more corporation tax cuts.
What Messrs. Rampton and Stauber are all about here however is not satire or cheap noir laughs. The sad truth is the book is just another closely documented, clearly reasoned indictment of the most colossal foreign policy blunder of the twentieth century by an American president, and how it happened.
After an introduction in which the authors recall Tom DeLay enthusing, "We're no longer a superpower. We're a super-duper-power. We are the leader that defends freedom and democracy around the world...When we lead others follow," there's Chapter 1 "The Victory of Spin," in which the war is spun out according to the Cheney-Rumsfeld vision: shock and awe, and garlands of flowers around our heroic necks, and Mission Accomplished! photo ops. We are reminded of just who told what lie and how cowardly were our sycophantic media and cowering Congress.
Chapter 2 is about "Plamegate" (get the SOB's wife!) and the yellowcake road while Chapter 3 gets into the WMDs that were not there and recalls all the lies and misinformation and how the White House and the media kept tantalizingly predicting the imminent finding of same. And then a chapter on how Ahmed Chalabi with help from adorning neocons scammed the US government and made himself and pals rich, richer and--well, not as rich as ExxonMobil or Halliburton execs, but rich enough.
Why do I keep mentioning Halliburton? Well, the book is entitled "The Best War Ever" and if there is anybody in this great big wide wonderful world that might, just might, think the title is purely denotative, it would be Halliburton and subsidiaries.
Chapter 4 celebrates the rewriting of history, George Orwell style. The authors finish up with a couple of chapters focusing on the effect of the war on the Iraqis themselves (huh?). First there was (and is) the dire necessity to under count the civilian dead and maimed. And then there's the melancholy experience of how "victory" faded after the staged fall of Saddam's statue like a ghostly mirage in the desert.
"The new boss, just like the old boss," once sang The Who.
Irony.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Rampton and Stauber are the authors of "Weapons of Mass Deception," which won my personal award for best book title of the decade (so far). Here the irony is a bit over the top. So are these alternative titles I've thought up for them: "Nice Welfare Program for Halliburton," or "Generals Test Toys, Get Bored," or "Don't let the sand get in your eyes; Don't let the shrapnel break your heart," or "Pallets of Hundred Dollar Bills, Forked-Lifted to Eternity!" Or how about "Arabian Nights in the Green Zone, Shooting Pool with My Buds--Not" or "Thank You, Mr. President, I've Been Born Again (In a Flagged-Draped Coffin) and My Eyes Can See Clearly Now: There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel."
No tunnel, no eyes, and that's just as well since Halliburton does not do Walter Reed or any other stateside hospital for our guys--don't you know we've got a budget crisis and we need to stimulate the economy with more corporation tax cuts.
What Messrs. Rampton and Stauber are all about here however is not satire or cheap noir laughs. The sad truth is the book is just another closely documented, clearly reasoned indictment of the most colossal foreign policy blunder of the twentieth century by an American president, and how it happened.
After an introduction in which the authors recall Tom DeLay enthusing, "We're no longer a superpower. We're a super-duper-power. We are the leader that defends freedom and democracy around the world...When we lead others follow," there's Chapter 1 "The Victory of Spin," in which the war is spun out according to the Cheney-Rumsfeld vision: shock and awe, and garlands of flowers around our heroic necks, and Mission Accomplished! photo ops. We are reminded of just who told what lie and how cowardly were our sycophantic media and cowering Congress.
Chapter 2 is about "Plamegate" (get the SOB's wife!) and the yellowcake road while Chapter 3 gets into the WMDs that were not there and recalls all the lies and misinformation and how the White House and the media kept tantalizingly predicting the imminent finding of same. And then a chapter on how Ahmed Chalabi with help from adorning neocons scammed the US government and made himself and pals rich, richer and--well, not as rich as ExxonMobil or Halliburton execs, but rich enough.
Why do I keep mentioning Halliburton? Well, the book is entitled "The Best War Ever" and if there is anybody in this great big wide wonderful world that might, just might, think the title is purely denotative, it would be Halliburton and subsidiaries.
Chapter 4 celebrates the rewriting of history, George Orwell style. The authors finish up with a couple of chapters focusing on the effect of the war on the Iraqis themselves (huh?). First there was (and is) the dire necessity to under count the civilian dead and maimed. And then there's the melancholy experience of how "victory" faded after the staged fall of Saddam's statue like a ghostly mirage in the desert.
"The new boss, just like the old boss," once sang The Who.
Irony.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
October 11, 2013
BIG LIES: BUSH, THE MEDIA & IRAQ
With the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan becoming the new foreign policy fiasco, the War in Iraq has, along with it's chief "planner" Bush and his wide-eyed assistant Blair, largely retired from public view. This book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of the Centre for Media and Democracy is a useful reminder of the level of mendacity that was a feature of the lead up to war as well as the war itself.
The opening section of the book picks up from the point their earlier work "Weapons of Mass Deception" concluded. It covers the activity at the UN including Colin Powell's "give war a chance" spiel. Powell's presentation only seemed to be accepted in the media because, well you know, Powell's a nice guy, he's not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld: he doesn't tell lies. In effect his PR persona triumphed over the reality of his claims, which were, to quote Powell's initial reaction to the script: "Bulls--t!".
Also covered are the Plame affair in which senior administration figures destroyed Valerie Plame's career in order to punish her husband for debunking the nonsense spoken about Iraqi attempts to purchase Niger Uranium. The case of the "journalist" Judith Miller, who was involved in the administrations outing of Plame's as a C.I.A. agent, is also brought to light. Her links to Ahmed Chalabi and her dissemination of his propaganda in The New York Times both before and after the war with regard to Weapons of Mass Destruction are breathtaking. There is an interesting section where the authors (partially) list the amount of times that Fox News and others reported the finding of WMD with certainty, when in fact nothing was ever found. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad surveys found that 34% of Americans believed that WMD had been found, and a preposterous 22% believed they had been used (though not so preposterous in the unlikely event that they meant depleted uranium). The later efforts of the Bush administration and their media supporters to re-write the history of the conflict are also examined and filed under fantasy.
Despite the cartoons that grace the front of all of Stauber and Rampton's books they are serious, comprehensively sourced works of debunking. In the case of the Bush Administration, the war in Iraq as well as the mainstream media's failings and collusions in the covering of the later stages of the lead up to that war and the war itself. It is disappointing that this book, unlike their other works, never had a British edition when it was published in 2006 and I had to buy it second hand from the U.S. Definitely a work of enlightenment, and well worth getting your hands on if you prefer reality to myths.
With the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan becoming the new foreign policy fiasco, the War in Iraq has, along with it's chief "planner" Bush and his wide-eyed assistant Blair, largely retired from public view. This book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of the Centre for Media and Democracy is a useful reminder of the level of mendacity that was a feature of the lead up to war as well as the war itself.
The opening section of the book picks up from the point their earlier work "Weapons of Mass Deception" concluded. It covers the activity at the UN including Colin Powell's "give war a chance" spiel. Powell's presentation only seemed to be accepted in the media because, well you know, Powell's a nice guy, he's not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld: he doesn't tell lies. In effect his PR persona triumphed over the reality of his claims, which were, to quote Powell's initial reaction to the script: "Bulls--t!".
Also covered are the Plame affair in which senior administration figures destroyed Valerie Plame's career in order to punish her husband for debunking the nonsense spoken about Iraqi attempts to purchase Niger Uranium. The case of the "journalist" Judith Miller, who was involved in the administrations outing of Plame's as a C.I.A. agent, is also brought to light. Her links to Ahmed Chalabi and her dissemination of his propaganda in The New York Times both before and after the war with regard to Weapons of Mass Destruction are breathtaking. There is an interesting section where the authors (partially) list the amount of times that Fox News and others reported the finding of WMD with certainty, when in fact nothing was ever found. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad surveys found that 34% of Americans believed that WMD had been found, and a preposterous 22% believed they had been used (though not so preposterous in the unlikely event that they meant depleted uranium). The later efforts of the Bush administration and their media supporters to re-write the history of the conflict are also examined and filed under fantasy.
Despite the cartoons that grace the front of all of Stauber and Rampton's books they are serious, comprehensively sourced works of debunking. In the case of the Bush Administration, the war in Iraq as well as the mainstream media's failings and collusions in the covering of the later stages of the lead up to that war and the war itself. It is disappointing that this book, unlike their other works, never had a British edition when it was published in 2006 and I had to buy it second hand from the U.S. Definitely a work of enlightenment, and well worth getting your hands on if you prefer reality to myths.
August 8, 2008
This book is an excellent summary of the build up to the Iraq War. It documents all the half-truths, lies, forgeries, mistakes, and deliberate attempts to mislead the world and the almost comical failure of the media to do serious reporting on any of it.
It's important to note that there is a vast resource of web links to articles and other documents, so that you can look up the assertions in the book for yourself without going to the college library.
The book is short, pithy, extremely clear, and extremely damning. Hand this to anyone who needs to be informed.
It's important to note that there is a vast resource of web links to articles and other documents, so that you can look up the assertions in the book for yourself without going to the college library.
The book is short, pithy, extremely clear, and extremely damning. Hand this to anyone who needs to be informed.
May 13, 2009
This book has been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for almost two years; finally I managed to get to it. Despite the info being dated and well-known by now, I still enjoyed it. This is a well-written and exhaustively researched condemnation of the Bush Administration's handling of the fiasco that it insisted on starting in Iraq. With 35 pages of references, the book makes a very good argument against how the war was handled by the Shrub and his cronies, and does so in an entertaining way. Good stuff, all around.
April 21, 2010
A good, if dated review of all the lies, deceptions, half-truths, distortions, fabrications, falsifications, obfuscations, manipulations and prevarications that were used to justify, rationalize, moralize and excuse this latest round in American imperialism.
November 19, 2014
as with Solomon's Target Iraq, it's not wrong (and here, it's authors strengths to point out PR manipulation)--but did every lefty have to write an anti-bush regime book? all lefties knew that bush is fascist scum and that the war was a lie.
June 30, 2011
Like most of Rampton's books, it is well-researched but one-sided. This book would be better formatted as an op-ed piece in a newspaper, rather than a book.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews