Marketing War

by Norman Solomon

The American trend of euphemistic fog for such enterprises began several decades ago. It's very old news that the federal government no longer has a department or a budget named "war." Now, it's all called "defense," a word with a strong aura of inherent justification. The sly effectiveness of the labeling switch can be gauged by the fact that many opponents of reckless military spending nevertheless constantly refer to it as "defense" spending.

During the past dozen years, the intersection between two avenues, Pennsylvania and Madison, has given rise to media cross-promotion that increasingly sanitizes the organized mass destruction known as warfare.

The first Bush administration enhanced the public-relations techniques for U.S. military actions by "choosing operation names that were calculated to shape political perceptions," linguist Geoff Nunberg recalls. The invasion of Panama in December 1989 went forward under the name Operation Just Cause, an immediate media hit. "A number of news anchors picked up on the phrase Just Cause, which encouraged the Bush and Clinton administrations to keep using those tendentious names."

As Nunberg points out, "it's all a matter of branding. And it's no accident that the new-style names like Just Cause were introduced at around the same time the cable news shows started to label their coverage of major stories with catchy names and logos." The Pentagon became adept at supplying video-game-like pictures of U.S. missile strikes at the same time that it began to provide the big-type captions on TV screens.

Ever since the Gulf War in early 1991, people across the political spectrum have commonly referred to that paroxysm of carnage as Operation Desert Storm -- or, more often, just Desert Storm. To the casual ear, it sounds kind of like an act of nature. Or, perhaps, an act of God.

Either way, according to the vague spirit evoked by the name Desert Storm, men like Dick Cheney, Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell may well have been assisting in the implementation of divine natural occurrences; high winds and 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs raining down from the heavens.

Soon after the Gulf War a.k.a. Desert Storm ended, the Army's chief of public affairs, Maj. Gen. Charles McClain, commented: "The perception of an operation can be as important to success as the execution of that operation." For guiding the public's perception of a war -- while it is happening and after it has become history -- there's nothing quite like a salutary label that sticks.

In October 2001, while launching missiles at Afghanistan, the Bush team came up with Operation Infinite Justice, only to swiftly scuttle the name after learning it was offensive to Muslims because of their belief that only Allah can provide infinite justice. The replacement, Enduring Freedom, was well-received in U.S. mass media, an irony-free zone where only the untowardly impertinent might suggest that some people had no choice other than enduring the Pentagon's freedom to bomb.

If you doubt that the Executive Branch is run by people who plan U.S. military actions while thinking like marketers, you're (no offense) naive. It was a candid slip of the tongue a couple of months ago when the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, told the New York Times: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Not coincidentally, the main rollout of new-and-improved rationales for an upcoming war on Iraq did not take place until September.

Looking ahead, the media spinners at the White House are undoubtedly devoting considerable energy to sifting through options for how to brand the expected U.S. assault on Iraq. Long before the war is over, we'll all know its reassuring code name. But we won't know the names of the Iraqi people who have been killed in our names.