there's another way to think about this.
1. is it the case that any military involvement requires a marketing campaign?
2. if any war requires a marketing campaign, what distinguishes one from the other?
it is obviously in the nature of marketing to persuade political actors/consumers (and in this there is no meaningful distinction between the terms) to support the action.
it seems to me that if it is the case that any war must be sold, then it is all the more incumbent on the administration that is doing the selling that the sales job not be predicated on false information, on generating and maintaining hysteria, on misdirection: on lies in short.
this because any marketing campaign runs close to the true/fiction division.
because marketing war is a problematic business.
what we have with the rumseld memos is exactly what rekna and ratbastid say above: confirmation of what anyone who has been awake and not in the camp of those who for whatever reason supported the iraq debacle have already known, have known from 2003, have known from 2001. the "war on terror" is a charade. the notion of the "terrorist" a self-serving fiction. the notion of "islamofascism" a conservative meme, cheap sloganeering to keep the backwater stirred up. that the center of bushworld has been the marketing of itself through the marketing of hysteria. that links between iran and iraq were simply devices to maintain and intensify hysteria. that the centerpiece of this hysteria is a flirtation with racism. that the right understood itself as standing to benefit politically (and its patronage network financially) from this hysteria and its lovely racist core.
that the marketing of the iraq debacle was a top-down affair.
that the secretary of defense understood as part of his function to suggest ways to manipulate the american public.
that there still are conservatives for whom all this is ok.
disturbing stuff.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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