Fahrenheit 9/11 - The Iraq War

          This was an interesting prompt, and I actually loved getting into the research.  I decided to look at one of Eric Louw’s concepts: The Iraq War section of chapter eight.  The Iraq War section discusses the ways that President Bush and the government planned the war in accordance with their PR-ized warfare model and revised model. I will relate all these points made by Louw, to the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.  This is an extremely informative documentary that uncovers many issues about George W. Bush and the US war on Iraq. 

          First off, The Iraq War was the majority of Moore’s focus for the first half of the documentary; it was also a pretty large focus of chapter ten from Louw.  Both Moore and Louw agree that there was a PR-ized warfare model that President Bush followed.  The first point Louw makes simply states, “Saddam Hussein was demonized in the lead-up to the war” (156).  This is expressed in Moore’s film many times.  He actually makes fun of Bush several times for his stupidity and decision making.  He also puts a fantastic interview into his film from a man named Richard Clarke.  You should listen for at least a minute and a half because the content is extremely insightful.  Clarke actually gets a quote from Donald Rumsfeld saying, “There are no good targets in Afghanistan; let’s bomb Iraq.”  What a ridiculous thing to say right?  This administration, beginning with Bush, had an agenda and they demonized Saddam in order to spin it in the direction they wanted.

          Louw mentions, in his second point, that Bush and other privileged higher-ups assisted in getting twenty-four members of Bin Laden’s family out of the country even though the airlines were completely shut down in the days after the attacks.  Moore dives into this further telling us that there were private as well as commercial jets deployed to take these Saudi’s out of the country.  Moore talks about how in any type of criminal situation the police always look to the suspect’s family for questioning.  This situation was treated differently because, again, Bush had an agenda.

            The third point of Louw’s PR-ized warfare model states that war was justified by creating victims.  The US – and I remember this from living through it – did this by talking about how oppressed the Iraqi people were because of Saddam.  Bush and the government made it seem as if they were going to war to save a group of oppressed and helpless people.  That was never the intention of Bush; he had different ideas.

This original warfare model was then revised.  Louw suggests that it was revised to address more specific issues that arose in Iraq.  Some of his points include, “Ensuring that the Pentagon stories were always much more exciting,” and, “Making sure that the opposition’s stories were simply drowned out and smothered” (157).  Moore illustrates this to perfection in his film.  He finds tons of prominent news networks introducing all kinds of scare-stories in an attempt to keep American’s minds on what they wanted them to hear and off what they didn’t.  The media was directed by Bush and the Feds to put out these outrageous stories and then contradicted them with mixed messages in order to confuse the publics.  This tactic worked to perfection; pertinent information was kept from the public, while they were fed outlandish stories by the media.

This documentary is honestly very eye-opening.  Moore brings all these important facts to light that are echoed by Louw in chapter eight.  The Iraq War was controlled by Bush and his administration, and they were able to take it in whatever direction benefited them and their allies the most.  They used Saddam as a scape-goat.  They demonized him through the American media in order to gain public support.  Louw also states that in order to gain the war some support, you have to create victims.  The government did just that by showing oppressed citizens of Iraq and saying it was all because of there horrible dictator Saddam Hussein.  He was made into the villain, and that combination got us into a war with Iraq for no real reason.