The Sales Pitch Begins -- Iran

A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. -- George Orwell, 1984



A new paperback had suddenly appeared all over America. It had an olive-toned Middle Eastern looking face, swarthy, foreign, expressionless, with eyes which seemed to follow you everywhere you went, except when you looked into those eyes, where you see mushroom clouds -- the symbol in the popular imagination for the end of Western civilization, no matter how that might come about. The image has been plastered on every pulp-novel shelf, in every supermarket, every B. Dalton's, and every Wal-Mart, even outnumbering the books about George W. Bush. The people of America, who polls indicated had been tiring of the War, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. -- GIR, 2005

Now, you all remember the Andy Card quote about not introducing a marketing campaign for a new product in August when everyone is enjoying the summer on vacation... but this time, they've apparently (for whatever reasons) decided to start early -- at the beginning of spring 2005, for the marketing effort for the coming war on Iran -- brought to you by (drum roll please) Jerome Corsi, the "Harvard Ph.D" behind the Swift Boat book, and now the Iran Freedom Foundation. He gave a presentation at the Heritage Foundation this week, which included the standard "mushroom cloud over Manhattan" stuff [forward past the first 15 minutes of dead airtime to watch].

So here we are, where we were in September 2002, at the beginning of the last sales pitch for war. This one is even more sophisticated in terms of marketing savvy and presentation (it's even got a TV commercial!)

What are we going to do to counteract this? [The first thing I'd suggest is to email this post to yourself, then forward it to your entire address book. People have to be aware that when they see this, they're being subjected to a sophisticated advertising pitch, not "news."]

The other thing to point out is the "unsophisticated" nature of the presentation. Yes, Jerome Corsi may try to impress you with the fact that he's a "Harvard Ph.D" who held a Top Secret clearance. Poppycock! Inside the Beltway -- the world where Gorillaintheroom lives -- a good third of the population has security clearances. That doesn't mean we all have the inside scoop on everything. And a "Harvard Ph.D," hell, of the people on my street in an upper-middle-class area of Northwest DC, probably a third of them have Ivy League degrees, and probably 20% have Ph.D's. (And they didn't go into academe, if they can afford the housing prices here -- they're probably lobbyists!) That's the reality of elite areas like this, so don't think that the fact that he's a "Harvard Ph.D" means that he has any expertise on the Middle East. This guy is just a PR hack.