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Norman Solomon

War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death Paperback – June 1, 2006

by Norman Solomon (Author)

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War Made Easy cuts through the dense web of spin to probe and scrutinize the key ""perception management"" techniques that have played huge roles in the promotion of American wars in recent decades. This guide to disinformation analyzes American military adventures past and present to reveal striking similarities in the efforts of various administrations to justify, and retain, public support for war. War Made Easy is essential reading. It documents a long series of deliberate misdeeds at the highest levels of power and lays out important guidelines to help readers distinguish a propaganda campaign from actual news reporting. With War Made Easy, every reader can become a savvy media critic and, perhaps, help the nation avoid costly and unnecessary wars.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Wiley
Publication date

June 1, 2006
Dimensions

6.18 x 0.92 x 9.3 inches
ISBN-10

047179001X
ISBN-13

978-0471790013
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"A sobering and essential book that Americans should read, share, and discuss."
—JOHN STAUBER, coauthor of Weapons of Mass Deception

You've heard it all before, and you will no doubt hear it again. "Our leaders will do everything they can to avoid war." "They attacked us." "Our enemy is a modern-day Hitler." "This is all about human rights." And, at some point after these and other pronouncements had echoed through the media for weeks or months, American troops marched into Vietnam, Panama, or Iraq.

In War Made Easy, Norman Solomon cuts through the dense web of spin to probe and scrutinize the key "perception management" techniques that have played huge roles in the promotion of American wars in recent decades. In addition to documenting a long series of deliberate misdeeds at the highest levels of power, it lays out important guidelines to help us distinguish elements in a propaganda campaign from actual news reporting. By following these simple suggestions, every citizen can become a savvy media critic and, perhaps, help the nation avoid the next costly and unnecessary war.

"An engaging book that helps explain how the myth-making machine works."
—The Texas Observer

"If you want to help prevent another war (Iran? Syria?), read War Made Easy now. This is a stop-the-presses book filled with mind-blowing facts about Washington's warmongers who keep the Pentagon budget rising."
—JIM HIGHTOWER, author of Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush

"A definitive historical text . . . an indispensable record of the real relationships among government authorities and media outlets."
—The Humanist

"Our media has a history of enabling Washington's foreign misadventures. Perhaps if enough people read—and act on—this book, it won't be so easy next time."
—MARK HERTSGAARD, author of On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency

About the Author

NORMAN SOLOMON is a nationally syndicated columnist and the Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He has appeared on many television and radio news programs and is the coauthor of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wiley; First Paperback Edition (June 1, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 047179001X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0471790013
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.18 x 0.92 x 9.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,077,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,274 in War & Peace (Books)
- #2,144 in International Diplomacy (Books)
- #3,802 in National & International Security (Books)

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43 ratings

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James E. Egolf

Suffering and Death Made Too Easy

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

Norman Solomon's book titled WAR MADE EASY is a funny yet sobering account of US foreign policy. Solomon relied on sources and contradictions rather than "convenient history" to undermine disastrous " official truth." Solomon used contradictory policy and media compliance to undermine "apprehensively conventional" views of US foreign "policy" whatever that means at any given moment.

Solomon mentioned the US invasion of Panama on December 26, 1989 to oust the Noriega regime. The invaders attacked innocent civilians and medical personnel who tried to rescue the injured civilians. Noriega was in good graces while he used Panama as a conduit for drug trafficking to help the Contras. When he said he was done with these efforts, he suddenly became a "bad guy."

Solomon exposed the nonsense during the Nixon Administration. Toward the end of the Vietnam War, Nixon wanted to use nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese. He was unaware that the Soviets and the Chinese, who supported the North Vietnamese, had nuclear weapons and one must rhetorically ask who had more people.

Solomon had good material re US "policy" in Western Asia and the Middle East. From 1988-1990, Iraq was viewed as an "ally" vs. the Iranians during the Iraqi-Iranian war from 1980 to 1988. Suddenly Iraq became and enemy, and US forces invaded Iraq between 2002-2003. As Solomon mentioned, US authorities gave weapons and ammunition to Hussein's opposition grounds which are now being used against US troops. Solomon also cited the refusal of US policy makers to give accurate statistics on innocent civilian casualties.

Solomon's diagnosis of events in Afghanistan is informative. Policy makers forgot that Afghanistan has been "The graveyard of empires." Solomon cited chapter and verse of the US policy makers who got the US involved in tar baby wars in both Afghanistan of Iraq. To be blunt, no one knows who the "enemy" at any given moment. Yet, as Solomon, remarked several times, the loss of innocent lives means the loss of people like us and the subsequent tragedy and sadness.

Another issue that Solomon examined is dissent. The current "official" view is that anyone who dissents from a chaotic foreign policy is somehow "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" whoever that may be at any given instant. As an aside, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) once wrote that if the truth be treason make the most of it. Dissent and truth should be protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Unfortunately, foreign defines and often distorts whom we are. Solomon wrote at the end of this book that government and media should not define our conscience. We do. The undersigned remembered some young man who was among a very few who protested against nuclear weapons and nuclear war. A journalist asked this young man if he thought he could change the world. The young man said no. The journalist the young man why he was protesting. The young fellow said he could change the world, but he protested because he demonstrated that the world could not change him.

James E. Egolf

May 22, 2016

4 people found this helpful

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David C N Swanson

Disturbing

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2005

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This book opens with a disturbing prologue. The U.S. media has refused to give serious coverage to the Downing Street Memos on the grounds that they are "old news." In the initial pages of his book, and supplemented by the rest, Solomon makes a case that both outdoes and undoes that claim.

Solomon outdoes the "old news" claim by providing evidence that the Bush Administration's campaign to take the country to war in Iraq on the basis of lies was remarkably similar to President Lyndon Johnson's use of the media when he wanted to attack the Dominican Republic and Reagan's when he was inclined to invade Grenada, not to mention Bush the First's when Panama was his chosen victim. In fact, Solomon draws disturbing parallels to Johnson and Nixon's lies about Vietnam, Reagan's about Libya and Lebanon, Bush the First's about the First Gulf War and about Haiti, Clinton's about Haiti, Yugoslavia, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, and Bush Jr.'s all too recent lies about Afghanistan. There just doesn't seem to be anything new about a president taking this country to war on the basis of laughably bad lies that anyone who was paying attention never fell for.

Solomon undoes the "old news" claim by documenting how hard the media has always made it for people to be paying proper attention. Not only are the Downing Street Memos not old news to most American media consumers, who've never been told what's in them, but the facts about many past wars are still not known to much of the country. The Washington Post has never apologized for or retracted the Jessica Lynch fictionalization, but that itself is nothing new. Solomon writes:

"In July 1998 I asked a number of Washington Post staffers whether the newspaper ever retracted its Gulf of Tonkin reporting. Finally, the trail led to someone with a definitive answer. 'I can assure you that there was never any retraction,' said Murrey Marder, a reporter who wrote much of the Washington Post's political coverage of Tonkin Gulf events in August 1964. He added: 'If you were making a retraction, you'd have to make a retraction of virtually everyone's entire coverage of the Vietnam War.'"

The Washington Post further distinguishes itself in Solomon's account of past media coverage of wars with this opinion it published when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the Vietnam War:

"King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

Damn liberal media!

Of course, many of the facts that Solomon employs in his critique of the media's role as megaphone for presidential warmongering falsehoods come from the media. But they come from passing stories in lower paragraphs on back pages, not from endlessly repeated headlines and sound bites. Solomon does not present a lot of new information in his book, but by gathering together key facts from extensive research he performs the reporting that he criticizes the media for failing to have done.

A good analogy for much of the U.S. media's coverage of war, I think, is the coverage Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, gave to Columbus in a text book critiqued by Howard Zinn in the opening pages of "A People's History of the United States." Zinn writes:

"One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.

"But he does something else - he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important - it should way very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world....

"To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice."

Of course, there's plenty of lying outright in the US media's coverage of wars, but there's a lot more Morisonizing.

Solomon's book is not a chronology and does not have any plot that progresses from event to event. Nor is it organized in a predictable manner around an argument. In fact, it reads a little like a book written by someone who's used to writing 700-word columns. But that is, of course, something that Solomon does with a brilliance that is seldom surpassed. And, while there is something I prefer about his columns, this book doesn't fall far short of brilliant itself.

It's organized by a series of statements often made by our media pundits. These serve as chapter headings. If they strike you as false and damaging, this book will provide you with the ammunition to refute them. In that way, this is a resource book that can be regularly consulted. If any of the statements strike you as true, then you really must read this book. Here's a sampling from just the first five chapters:

1. America is a Fair and Noble Superpower

2. Our Leaders Will Do Everything They Can to Avoid War

3. Our Leaders Would Never Tell Us Outright Lies

4. This Guy Is a Modern-Day Hitler

5. This is About Human Rights

57 people found this helpful

Helpful

S. Freeman

superb documentary

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2013

Verified Purchase

War Made Easy presents in very clear and precise terms how presidents, too often with the compliance of an unquestioning media, lead the American people into ill conceived, unjustifiable, immoral, illegal wars through systematic lying, distortion and misrepresentation of fact. We say we are a "peace loving nation". While that may be true for the American people in general, it is not true for the ruling oligarchy or the government it controls almost absolutely. As a nation, we have fought 100 wars, and have spent 67% of our history at war. That hardly is a record of a "peace loving nation." For many (most?) of the wars we have fought, the American people, in the runn-up to the war, opposed war. Certainly that has been the case for every war since WWII with the possible exception of the invasion of Afghanistan. Yet, in every instance, the American people ultimately came to support whatever war the oligarchy and government drug us into, and with a large percentage of the population. "War Made Easy" explains this process well. For viewers who do not have the time or inclination to read the numerous excellent books on U.S. foreign policy (Kinzer or Bacevich, to name only 2), viewing "War Made Easy" constitutes an excellent "crash course" in why we find ourselves endlessly mired in some war some place fighting against a people who, more often than not, have done noting to us, and pose no threat to us (e.g., Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Viet Nam, Lebanon, Iraq--just to name a few).

2 people found this helpful

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customer

Well worth reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 7, 2013

Verified Purchase

It's well written and has lots of detail about what original sources said or admitted, and the role of the press is constantly examined, particularly it's role in creating the climate of opinion plus commentary/editorials. There are some very good insights: e.g. to be questioning an official narrative is to be automatically biased or anti- country X or Y, rather than trying to delve into the issues. Also, the options are limited in scope ommitting those that might seek proper negotiation and peace, so the choices aren't a genuine wide specrtrum.

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