the spinning of Gitmo

updated with a link and a footnote

Frank Rich wrote a long cry of anguish *** about how the Bushies sold us the war in Iraq under false pretenses—and I sympathize with his feelings of betrayal. Sort of.

If Rich were less an anti-Bush partisan and more an honest critic of the marketing culture of all of public life, he would turn his eye to other snow jobs, like the ony so ably described by Debra Burlingame in today’s WSJ:

In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to accomplish two things: put a sympathetic “human face” on the detainees and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a part of al Qaeda’s jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a “teacher on vacation” who went to Afghanistan in 2001 “to help refugees.” The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden’s chief spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became the innocent victims of “bounty hunters.”

A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families’ full-service Web site which fed propaganda–unsourced, unrebutted and uninvestigated by the media–aimed at the media all over the world. Creating what Mr. Levick calls a “war of pictures,” the site is replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out yellow ribbons.

No matter how much you loathe its success and no matter how clever you are in exposing the details of it later, there is no arguing with a successful PR campaign.

Just as the remedy for speech you don’t like is more speech, the remedy for a successful PR campaign for the other side is an even more successful PR campaign for your side. All’s fair in love and the culture war.

That’s all she wrote.

———

*** Interestingly, Oprah had Rich on her show to talk about the book even though she doesn’t usually do political books. For what it’s worth, she was lukewarm. She likes Rich and liked the book, but she was disappointed that it was a “rant.” Also: she questioned Rich about whether the Bushies had lied—had deliberately led us into war for bad reasons—or whether they just got “bad information.”

She wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I would consider her view the mainstream view, and I would consider Rich’s accusation of deliberate lying by the Bushies (i.e., with its innuendo of evil intent) a non-mainstream and thus off-putting point of view.
But what do I know?