Twelve years after the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, it’s easy to forget that support for the war hinged on the demonization of dictator Saddam Hussein. Weapons of mass destruction may have been the motive and the September 11 attacks provided the opportunity, but it was years of media portrayals of Hussein as worse than Hitler that enabled the Bush administration to rally elite and public support for the war.
By the time Hussein was dispatched in December 2006 after a show trial and botched execution, Washington had found a new face of evil in the form of religiously motivated resistance to the Occupation. The shift was remarkable. The enemy seamlessly transitioned from Hussein, whose roots were as a modernist authoritarian socialist, to al-Qaeda offshoots, which tend to be medieval fundamentalists.
This shift reveals how all sides in the “war on terror” use propaganda to shape the perception of the war and even the battlefield itself. Propaganda, though, is a one-way question for the West where commentators obsess over media produced by the Islamic State. Often referred to as ISIS, the extremist group regularly releases videos of mass beheadings, immolations, and parading prisoners in cages.
ISIS has honed an image at once terrifying, effective, dedicated, and vengeful. It uses it to draw recruits from the West, financing from wealthy Gulf State patrons, and the allegiance of militants from Egypt to Indonesia. But ISIS’s real skill is in exploiting power vacuums in Iraq, Syria, and Libya resulting from Western intervention and weak sectarian states. Likewise, its propaganda is a reflection of and response to the West, mainly the atrocities the United States has inflicted upon Iraq and other countries in the region.
Of course, this is not a contest of equals. The United States is a global power, and ISIS is little more than a paper tiger. Analyst Gary Brecher notes ISIS has a relatively small fighting force with little ability to defeat a conventional army, which is how nearly all wars are won, or govern a population, which is how the peace is secured.