Weapons of mass distraction.

• Position: Note from a Worldwatcher - Pro-war propaganda campaign in US

Soon after the start of the U.S. war on Iraq, polls found that only about 25 percent of Americans opposed the attack. Once the game got under way, with bombs bursting in air and tanks racing toward Baghdad, that U.S. opposition shrank still further. Yet, in most other countries where opinions were polled, over 90 percent of the people opposed the invasion. Majority opposition was virtually universal outside the United States, whether those countries were mainly Muslim or Christian, rich or poor. It didn't matter whether the country was part of Bush's "coalition of the willing" or not, as even the populations of "willing" allies Britain and Spain were overwhelmingly opposed, never mind what positions their governments were taking.

So, how could public perceptions around the world have been so different from those of the gung-ho Americans, even in countries that have free press and that presumably have access to the same information Americans have?

One explanation is that the information to which people have access is not the same as that to which they are actually exposed. In the United States, the public was exposed to a pro-war propaganda campaign of unprecedented magnitude. American media are far more omnipresent now than in the eras of World War II, Vietnam, or even Gulf War I. For tens of millions, the TV or radio or Internet is now always on. During the months of run-up to Iraq, the core group of ideologues who so urgently wanted this war were able--via an unending stream of highly publicized press conferences, talk shows, and flows of "information" to compliant columnists-to get free exposure for which public-interest advertisers would have had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars. Those who did not want the invasion got only a tiny fraction of that free exposure. And what coverage they did get almost never included discussion of their reasons for opposition--only those ubiquitous TV glimpses of protesters shouting and waving signs.

One of the cardinal principles of advertising and propaganda, of course, is that repetition works. Familiarity becomes confused with truth. Tell us something often enough, and we stop wondering about it. Walk past the guard dog often enough, and after a while it stops barking at you. We heard that one reason Iraqis never overthrew Saddam, beyond the fear instilled by his brutality, was that portraits of his paternalistic visago were so omnipresent that he became an unquestioned part of the Iraqi mental landscape. We Americans didn't stop to wonder whether the same thing could have happened to us, as we watched George Bush talking day after day about the "threats" confronting us. After a while, those threats were so familiar that we stopped questioning whether, in fact, they were real. Saddam was planning to attack us. We heard Bush talking about Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" so many times that we began to think, if Saddam is threatening us with these weapons, obviously the weapons have to be destroye d. Somewhere along the way, the "if"--if he was threatening us, and if he even had any such weapons at his disposal--dropped out of the thought.

Because the presumption of that looming threat seems to have been the basis of Americans' willingness to watch their...