Public Relations Preparations For 2003 Invasion Of Iraq
In late 2001, with the Pentagon's focus on information warfare as an integral facet of the American war doctrine increasing, the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was formed. This office was created with a mandate to propagandize throughout the Middle East, Asia and Western Europe, with the help of the Rendon Group, a Washington, DC based public relations firm with close ties to the US government, and which had had a prominent role in promoting the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group of Iraq exiles. In February 2002, amid a backlash of public outcry resulting from a New York Times article, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed he lacked knowledge of the program and the OSI was closed down. The contract with the Rendon Group, however, continued.
In January 2003, President George W. Bush formally announced "the creation of a White House 'Office of Global Communications' to broadcast the United States' message worldwide ahead of possible war on Iraq,"; the office had been effectively operating for several months prior. According to the White House, the office was to disseminate the policies of the U.S. Government to media sources, domestic and foreign, and send "teams of communicators to international hot spots, areas of media interest." With the new office having a similar mission to the now-defunct OSI, many skeptics questioned its legitimacy.
Read more about Public Relations Preparations For 2003 Invasion Of Iraq: Government Statements That Set The Stage For War, Success of The Public Relations Campaign
Famous quotes containing the words public, relations, preparations and/or invasion:
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete; being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry. The rest might wait. The preparations of new carriages and furniture might wait for London and the spring, when her own taste could have fairer play.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“In our governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of government contrary to the sense of the constituents, but from the acts in which government is the mere instrument of the majority.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)