The marketing plan for war

Like many other documentaries about the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's foreign policy, "War Made Easy" states its case with persuasive details. There's just so much evidence to support the assertion that several wars have been sold to us like a consumer product we need to survive, and that the American public — and more important, the shockingly compliant free press — has bought the sales pitch hook, line and sinker.

Produced by the Media Education Foundation; narrated by Sean Penn (which automatically invites derision from the political right); and assembled from a telling variety of news clips, sound bites and archival war footage, "War Made Easy" is based on the 2005 book by political and media critic Norman Solomon, and deliberately limits its focus to Solomon as its only interview subject.

Armed with decades of documentary evidence, Solomon asserts that, especially since World War II, U.S. presidents have repeatedly sold avoidable wars based on fallacious arguments and deceptive manipulation of public support.

For much of the citizenry, Solomon, Penn and the filmmakers are preaching to the choir. But even the most ardent supporters of President Bush's policies would find it difficult to refute Solomon's thesis, which touches on the historical nature of propaganda, bombing raids approved under the pretense of political "altruism" and the manipulation of news media through omitted facts and outright lies designed to encourage pro-war sentiment while anti-war voices (the film mentions CNN's Peter Arnett and MSNBC's Phil Donahue) are summarily silenced.

It doesn't end there, and Bush is presented as merely the latest practitioner of pro-war manipulation. From the squelching of "Vietnam Syndrome" (the notion that Vietnam left a cynical American public resistant to future declarations of war) to the glaring repetition of slogans designed to lull the public into pro-war submission, "War Made Easy" (available on DVD from www.warmadeeasythemovie.org) combines historical perspective with contemporary relevance, focusing on recent events as further evidence that deceptive strategies to justify war are nothing new, but rather an ongoing pattern of calculated misdirection that has proved tragically effective.

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net