WAM: Film Review

War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death

The Mark of Cain

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film reviews

War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death

This new film from the Media Education Foundation is a compelling critique of the media’s contemporary wartime role. Based on the book of the same title by US journalist and media analyst Norman Solomon, War Made Easy features an extended interview with the author, inter-cut with extensive archive footage, the whole tied together with a voiceover narrated by Sean Penn. The title refers to the film’s central argument: that over many years, ‘by withholding crucial information about the actual reasons and potential costs of military action’, the US media have presented ‘an easier version of war’s reality … a steady and remarkably consistent storyline designed not to inform, but to generate and maintain support and enthusiasm for war.’

In making this comparative assessment, a number of post-1945 wars and interventions are discussed, but particularly those in the period since Vietnam. Indeed, the film draws several direct parallels between Vietnam and more recent events, most especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Such comparisons are often made in contemporary discussions of war, of course, though seldom so aptly as they are here. It is in the context of the US elite’s repeated attempts to ‘kick the Vietnam syndrome’ that the role of the media in helping them to stage spectacular, quick and ‘easy’ wars has assumed a new importance.

Superbly researched and professionally produced, the great strength of the film is its use of archival footage to demonstrate vividly the patterns that Solomon discerns across a number of conflicts. Having noted the ‘repeated claim that the United States uses military force only with great reluctance’, for example, the film show us Lyndon Johnson’s assertion that ‘We … seek no wider war’, Ronald Reagan’s declaration that ‘The United States does not start fights’, and George Bush Sr’s claim that ‘America does not seek conflict’. All these statements were made on the eve of war, of course, as was Bill Clinton’s protestation that ‘I don’t like to use military force’ and George Bush Jr’s announcement that ‘Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly’. Similarly, when they do, reluctantly, go to war, US leaders routinely insist that they are only doing so in order to maintain peace. ‘We seek peace. We strive for peace’, said Bush Jr as he sent in the troops – just as his father had somewhat absurdly maintained a decade earlier that ‘even as planes of the multinational forces attack Iraq, I prefer to think of peace, not war’.

British media critics might feel that the film lets UK journalists off too lightly. At once point, British coverage of Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations about Iraqi WMD is contrasted favourably with the US media’s enthusiastic endorsement of the ‘irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence’ he supposedly presented. UK press coverage, it is argued, showed that critical questions could have been asked by US journalists had they chosen to. However, at the London premier of the film (at the Frontline Club in November 2007), Solomon did not allow his British audience any room for complacency, reminding them of the key role played by Tony Blair and New Labour in consistently agitating for Western military intervention. According to Solomon, one aspect of the film that did not go down so well with left/liberal audiences in the US was its inclusion of President Clinton’s emotive appeals for war-for-peace against Yugoslavia in the 1999 Kosovo conflict. Some British viewers may have the same sinking feeling as they see just how closely the ‘humanitarian’ militarism of the Clinton–Blair years fits the pattern that Solomon identifies.

For those of us who teach about war and the media this film is a valuable resource, bringing colour and immediacy to arguments that might otherwise appear abstract and intangible. The idea that the media sound a ‘drumbeat for war’ is a familiar one, for example, but it is striking actually to see pundit after pundit emphasising that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was ‘inevitable’ and ‘unavoidable’. Similarly, it has frequently been noted that the media tend to fetishise military technology, yet watching excited reporters’ professions of ‘love’ (yes, really) for various pieces of military equipment one cannot help but be astonished. It is one thing to note that the mainstream media tend to rely on official sources, but quite another to see CNN”s Eason Jordan boasting on air about having asked the Pentagon to vet the network’s list of potential ex-military commentators.

War Made Easy might be criticised on the grounds that it does not delve too deeply into the underlying dynamics of the near-permanent drive to war that it describes so well, and that it overstates the power of the propaganda. In some instances – notably Iraq – the supposedly ‘easy’ war has turned to bloody stalemate. This too raises a comparison with Vietnam, particularly with respect to declining public support for the war, but the film has time for only a brief consideration of the possible causes and consequences of this. Such issues are, however, given much fuller treatment in the accompanying book (published by John Wiley & Sons in 2005), and the film certainly does succeed in raising questions and provoking debate.

Phil Hammond, London South Bank University