How Consent for War Is Created

War does not begin with the first shot

On a map, war begins when an army crosses a border, when the first bomb falls, or when a state officially launches a military operation. In the public mind, however, it often begins much earlier. Before a state can send tens or hundreds of thousands of people into combat, accept major economic costs, and justify human casualties, there must be an explanation that makes all of this acceptable. The adversary must become a threat. The threat must become immediate. Military action must become necessary. And possible alternatives must become increasingly implausible, irresponsible, or simply unthinkable.

This does not mean that wars are merely the result of propaganda. Real attacks, occupations, mass atrocities, genocides, and security threats exist. Nor are the sides in a conflict necessarily equally responsible for its outbreak. But even a real threat has to be presented to the public. Between an event and the way the population understands it there is therefore always an information space. And it is precisely within that space that consent for war can begin to be created.

The most powerful message is not: “You want war”

In democratic societies, public support carries particular weight. Citizens vote. They pay taxes. Their family members become soldiers. Parliaments approve military budgets. The media report the dead. Society bears the economic and political consequences. A prolonged war is therefore not only a military project but also a political one. The public does not necessarily have to be made enthusiastic about war. It is often enough for a sufficient number of people to accept the belief that there is no other reasonable option. That is an important distinction.

The most powerful war propaganda often does not tell a person:

“You want war.”

A far more effective message is:

“We would all prefer to avoid war, but the enemy has left us no other choice.”

Once that point has been reached, war is no longer presented primarily as a political decision. It is presented as a necessity.

When propaganda became a mass industry

The First World War was one of the periods in which the deliberate management of public opinion reached a scale that had previously been unimaginable. After the United States entered the war, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information on April 13, 1917, headed by journalist George Creel.

The U.S. National Archives lists among its functions the dissemination of government information, maintenance of morale, and administration of a system of voluntary press censorship. The committee used publications, posters, film, photography, and an organized network of speakers. Among the best known were the so-called Four Minute Men, who delivered short speeches around the country in support of the war effort.

Creel himself described the committee's work as a vast undertaking in salesmanship or advertising. The National Archives today explicitly describes its activities as propaganda conducted both at home and abroad. The important innovation was not only technological. The understanding of the public changed. If a mass audience can be mobilized through symbols, emotions, authority figures, images, and repetition, then public opinion is no longer merely something politics observes. It becomes something that can be deliberately shaped.

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A complex conflict needs a simple story

Real political conflicts are complicated. They have history. Economic interests. Fears. Broken agreements. Domestic political goals. Geopolitical calculations. Ethnic and religious tensions. The mistakes of generations of politicians. For mass mobilization, however, complexity is a problem. An effective war message must simplify the conflict. On one side, a victim emerges. On the other, an aggressor. On one side, defense. On the other, attack. On one side, civilization. On the other, barbarism. In some conflicts, such a basic picture may accurately reflect the question of direct aggression and responsibility for it.

The problem arises when moral classification of the sides begins to replace verification of individual pieces of information. Once we have already accepted someone as a criminal, a new accusation against them seems more plausible. And that is precisely why stories of atrocities have such extraordinary power in war propaganda.

Kuwait: when testimony becomes a symbol of war

In October 1990, a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, presented only as Nayirah, appeared before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus. She described a scene from a Kuwaiti hospital. She claimed that she had seen Iraqi soldiers remove babies from incubators and leave them to die. The story contained almost every element of an extraordinarily effective war message:

children, a hospital, armed soldiers, helpless victims, and an emotionally shaken eyewitness. The testimony spread widely, and U.S. President George H. W. Bush also referred to the incubator stories in his public appearances. At the time, the public did not know one important fact. Nayirah was Nayirah al-Sabah, the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir al-Sabah.

Her identity was withheld from the broader public for purported security reasons, although some organizers of the appearance knew who she was. At the same time, Kuwait was funding an extensive campaign to win U.S. public support, in which the major public-relations firm Hill & Knowlton participated. Later verification showed that several different questions needed to be separated.

Iraqi occupation forces committed serious violations and abuses in Kuwait. There were also reports of damage to or removal of hospital equipment. But the dramatic nature and scale of the originally circulated story about babies being systematically removed from incubators became the subject of serious dispute. An investigation by Kroll Associates, commissioned by the Kuwaiti side, found with regard to Nayirah's own testimony that the direct incident she said she witnessed lasted “at most a moment.”

The case is therefore important not only because of the question of exactly what happened in a particular hospital. The more important question is:

what did the public know about the person telling it the story?

If a television viewer had known that the witness was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador and that Kuwait was running a professional campaign in the United States to build support, they might have listened to her testimony differently. They might still have believed her. They might not. But they would have had information relevant to assessing her position. Propaganda therefore does not necessarily require every spoken word to be fabricated. Sometimes the decisive factor is what the audience is not told.

Why are children so effective?

A child has no geopolitical interest. A child does not form military alliances. Does not draw borders. Does not impose sanctions. A child represents innocence. If the enemy is killing children, the political debate changes rapidly. A person no longer thinks primarily about the history of the conflict, economic interests, diplomatic alternatives, or the consequences of military intervention. They think:

This must be stopped.

That is precisely why, when dealing with stories of wartime atrocities, we must be both humane and especially demanding about evidence. Real atrocities must be documented and their perpetrators held accountable. But precisely because of their moral power, such stories are also extraordinarily effective tools for mobilizing the public.

Vukovar and two informational realities

The wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia showed how quickly a shared information space can split into multiple national realities. In its examination of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Human Rights Watch warned about the use of state media to spread nationalist propaganda, restrict opposing information, and encourage ethnic polarization. It documented in particular the control of the information space in Serbia and the use of media to create hostile images of other communities. Vukovar is one of the most harrowing examples.

But in this case we need to distinguish between two phenomena that were later often merged. The first is actual mirror-image wartime rhetoric. The second is a later viral edit that amplified the appearance of symmetry. Croatian television presenter Mladen Stubljar and Serbian television presenter Milorad Komrakov did in fact use almost mirror-image formulations in reports about Vukovar. One side spoke of Belgrade propaganda and murdered Serbs, the other of Zagreb propaganda and murdered Croats.

But a crucial piece of context is that Komrakov was not independently reading some mysterious identical script. Radio Free Europe described his appearance as paraphrasing the introduction of his Croatian counterpart. A later documentary excerpt removed the part in which Komrakov says that he will introduce the segment in the style of Croatian television. Once that context was removed, the clip created an extremely convincing impression that both presenters had independently received almost identical text in which only the nationalities had been swapped.

We will examine this viral excerpt in greater detail later in the series. For war propaganda, however, something else is more important.

Both information environments presented the conflict through a national frame in which our victims and their victims belonged to two different stories.

This is characteristic of mirror propaganda: we defend, they attack; our dead prove their barbarism, while their dead are explained as a consequence of war, self-defense, or the actions of their own side.

41 murdered children

An even more direct example from Vukovar is the story of allegedly murdered Serbian children. On November 20, 1991, information spread through Reuters that 41 Serbian children had reportedly been found dead in Borovo Naselje. The story was extraordinarily graphic. Children around five to seven years old were said to have been brutally killed. Serbian television devoted extensive attention to the report. But no bodies were found that would confirm such a mass killing.

The next day Reuters withdrew or corrected its original report. Historical accounts of the case state that the source admitted he had not actually seen and counted the bodies he had described. By then, the story had already taken on a life of its own. This illustrates one of the most important rules of crisis information environments:

the first report and its correction do not have equal power.

The first arrives at the moment of greatest attention. It has a dramatic headline. Television images. An emotional response. Commentary. Political reactions. The correction comes later. It is often shorter. Less dramatic. A person who saw the first story may never see the second. For a propaganda effect, therefore, false information does not necessarily have to survive for decades. Sometimes it only has to survive long enough to perform its function.

Tonkin: how much uncertainty may disappear on the way to the public?

In August 1964, events in the Gulf of Tonkin helped create the political conditions for a major U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam. On August 2, an actual clash took place between the U.S. destroyer USS Maddox and North Vietnamese vessels. Two days later, the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy reported a second attack. The information was unclear. Radar and sonar produced different signals. Weather conditions were poor. Reports from the ships contained uncertainty.

Nevertheless, the alleged second attack became an important part of the political moment in which the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, enabling President Lyndon Johnson to greatly expand military action. Decades later, U.S. National Security Agency historian Robert Hanyok concluded on the basis of declassified signals-intelligence data that the second attack on August 4 did not occur.

More importantly, he found that signals-intelligence data had been presented in a way that prevented decision-makers from receiving a complete and objective picture of the event. But here, too, precision matters. A later internal NSA commentary agreed that it did not dispute Hanyok's ultimate conclusion that the second attack did not occur, while also warning that SIGINT data alone cannot conclusively prove whether a physical attack did or did not take place. Crew reports, radar, and sonar also influenced the decision. That detail is exactly what makes Tonkin so important.

The propaganda problem is not necessarily:

“Someone invented a completely false event.”

It can be much subtler: within the system, uncertainty exists, but in the political message, that uncertainty disappears. In the internal data:

maybe.

In the public space:

they attacked us.

When the level of certainty changes, the public's willingness to accept war can change as well.

Iraq: when a possibility gradually becomes a fact

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the American and British publics spent months hearing claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear ambitions, and links between Saddam Hussein's regime and terrorism. Iraq was not a country without a history in this area. Saddam Hussein's regime had actually used chemical weapons in the past. It had concealed parts of its programs. It had violated international obligations. There were legitimate reasons for suspicion and verification. That is precisely why the story was so persuasive.

A later investigation by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that most of the key conclusions in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs were overstated or were not sufficiently supported by the available intelligence. The committee also described the phenomenon of group think: a collective assumption that Iraq was actively continuing and expanding WMD programs, which made analysts more inclined to interpret ambiguous information as confirmation of such programs and to discount contrary evidence. But another finding from the same report is also important:

at this stage of the investigation, the committee found no evidence that administration officials pressured analysts to change their professional assessments of WMD for political purposes. This means that an incorrect intelligence assessment by itself is not evidence of political manipulation. But the story does not end there. A later, second phase of the Senate investigation specifically compared the administration's public statements with the intelligence available at the time.

In 2008, the committee published findings that numerous public statements about Iraq's connection to Al Qaeda, the possibility of transferring weapons of mass destruction, and certain Iraqi weapons capabilities were not supported by the available intelligence or were contradicted by it. There are therefore two separate problems:

the intelligence community made serious analytical errors on important points;

and

some political public statements went further than even that flawed intelligence supported.

This distinction is essential. If we collapse both processes into the simple sentence “it was all a lie,” we lose part of the story.

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When uncertainty disappears

For war propaganda, Iraq is almost a textbook example of changing levels of certainty. At the beginning there are data. The data are fragmentary. Some sources are reliable. Others are not. Some analysts agree. Others have reservations. A politician has to explain all of this to the public in a few sentences. The media have to turn it into a headline. And so:

possibility

can become probability, and probability can become fact. The most effective propaganda story is often not completely detached from reality. Much more effective is a story composed of real elements from which qualifications, reservations, and uncertainty gradually disappear.

935 statements

In 2008, the Center for Public Integrity published an extensive analysis of public statements by President George W. Bush and seven senior members of his administration from September 2001 to September 2003. Its database contains at least 935 statements that the Center, on the basis of later official findings, classified as false regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The statements were made on at least 532 separate occasions. This matters especially because of the cumulative effect. One false claim may be an error.

The same basic claim repeated for months in speeches by the president, vice president, defense secretary, secretary of state, and press officials becomes an information environment. A person no longer experiences it as one competing hypothesis among others. It becomes something that continually appears as the starting point of discussion.

What did the public believe?

Researchers from the PIPA program and Knowledge Networks measured three misconceptions about Iraq in a series of public-opinion surveys in 2003: that weapons of mass destruction had already been found in Iraq, that evidence had been found of close cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and that a majority of world public opinion supported the U.S. decision to go to war.

In combined measurements from June to September 2003, 48 percent of respondents incorrectly believed that evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda had been found, 22 percent that WMD had been found in Iraq, and 25 percent that world public opinion supported the war. Overall, 60 percent of respondents held at least one of these misconceptions. The association with support for the war was very strong. Among people who held none of the three misconceptions, 23 percent supported the war. Among those with one misconception, 53 percent.

With two, 78 percent. With all three, 86 percent. The researchers explicitly cautioned that these findings could not simply prove that the misconceptions caused support for the war. The direction of causality may also partly run the other way: someone who already supports the war may more readily accept information that confirms their position. But the association remains extremely important.

What people believe about a threat is closely connected to how much military action they are willing to accept.

When the journalist becomes a stenographer for power

This brings us to the media. The state has ministries. The military. Intelligence services. Press officers. Briefings. Confidential sources. Satellite imagery. Experts. Senior officials who can step in front of cameras at any time. The journalist has a deadline for the evening news. If a minister tells them that secret intelligence exists about a dangerous weapons program, the journalist faces a problem. They often cannot independently verify the claim. If they do not publish it and it turns out to be true, they have missed a major story.

If they publish it without enough distance, they may become a conduit for the government's message. This is where a phenomenon critics describe as stenographic journalism emerges:

The minister said X.

The sentence may be completely true. The minister really did say it. But the headline:

“Minister: Iraq has weapons”

is not the same as:

“Iraq has weapons.”

In the first case, the information is clearly attributed to a source. In the second, the source's claim has become the media outlet's claim. A small grammatical change can produce a major epistemological change.

Why is skepticism hardest when it is needed most?

In a crisis, several pressures converge. The public demands information. The newsroom demands a story. Officials have the freshest data. Military and intelligence sources carry institutional authority. The journalist needs access. Competitors have already published the information. After an attack or during a period of national danger, a skeptical question may even be perceived as a lack of patriotism. And when several major media outlets use the same institutional sources, another mechanism appears:

information begins to confirm itself.

A politician makes a claim. Television reports it. A newspaper reports on the television reaction. Another politician cites the newspaper. A commentator then speaks about the issue as if it were commonly known fact. The original source disappears. Consensus remains.

Propaganda does not need one big lie

The examples of the First World War, Kuwait, Vukovar, Tonkin, and Iraq are not the same. They do not share the same historical context. They do not involve the same degree of intent. They do not rely on the same kind of evidence. That is precisely why they are instructive together. They show several different paths by which public consent for war can be shaped. In one case, a state organizes a mass propaganda infrastructure.

In another, emotional testimony acquires extraordinary political impact while the audience does not know important background about the witness. In a third, a false story about murdered children spreads faster than its correction. In a fourth, an uncertain intelligence situation becomes much more certain in the public message. In a fifth, claims are repeated for months while qualifications and contradictory information disappear. The common denominator is therefore not:

“Everything is fabricated.”

A more precise conclusion is:

the public often does not see the same amount of uncertainty, contradiction, and competing interest that exists behind the information.

Seven steps by which war begins to feel inevitable

Several recurring mechanisms can be extracted from historical examples.

1. Defining the threat

The opponent is no longer merely a political rival or a state with opposing interests. It becomes a danger.

2. Personalization

A complex conflict acquires a face. A dictator. A general. A terrorist. A fanatic. It is much easier to mobilize emotion against a person than against several decades of political history.

3. Moral polarization

We defend. They attack. Our violence is a response. Their violence proves their nature.

4. Atrocity stories

Children. Hospitals. Mass graves. Rape. Torture. Such events can, of course, be entirely real war crimes. That is precisely why they possess enormous power.

5. Authority

The claim is made by a president. A general. An intelligence service. A diplomat. A doctor. An alleged eyewitness. Institutional position lends weight to the claim.

6. Repetition

When the same threat is repeated day after day by politicians, television, newspapers, experts, and commentators, it becomes part of the taken-for-granted informational background.

7. Narrowing the range of possible solutions

Once the danger is large enough and the enemy immoral enough, diplomacy begins to look naive. Negotiation looks like weakness. Waiting looks dangerous. Military intervention looks like the only responsible option. At that point, an important part of manufacturing consent has already been accomplished.

A central plan is not always necessary

Sometimes an organized propaganda operation really exists. At other times the process is not centralized. A politician wants support for a policy. The military protects operational information. An intelligence service defends its assessment. A media outlet needs a story. A journalist needs access. An audience facing danger seeks clarity. Each actor may be pursuing its own interest, yet the information flow can still move in the same direction. That is why searching for a single hidden center is often less useful than following the information itself.

Who created it?

Who published it first?

Who was able to verify it?

What was lost between the source document and the television headline?

How much uncertainty existed at the beginning, and how much remained at the end?

What happened to information that did not fit the story?

These questions allow us to demonstrate a concrete mechanism rather than speculate about one.

The hardest question comes before the war

After a war, verification is easier. Archives open. Documents are released. Witnesses speak. Intelligence becomes public. Investigative commissions write reports. Twenty years later, we can clearly show what was wrong. But citizens have to form their views at the moment when they do not yet have those documents. That is precisely why critical journalism is most important before the bombs fall. When a state presents a reason for using force, it is not enough to ask:

“Could this be true?”

We need to ask:

What is the evidence?

Who collected it?

How direct is it?

What information contradicts it?

What is a confirmed fact and what is an intelligence assessment?

How great is the uncertainty?

Is the same level of uncertainty preserved in the headline?

What other options exist?

At the moment of greatest fear, such questions are hardest to ask. And that is precisely when they matter most.

What happens when the journalist enters the war?

Creating consent is only the first part of the story. Once war begins, the journalist's position also changes. The journalist is no longer necessarily in a newsroom comparing statements. They may travel with a military unit. Sleep alongside soldiers. Come under fire with them. Their transportation, access, and sometimes their life depend on the people they are reporting on. They see what their unit sees. They do not see the places they cannot access. Meanwhile, the audience at home watches the war through their camera.

Such reporting can provide the public with valuable information it would otherwise never receive. But it raises a new question:

can a journalist remain a completely external observer of war when they become physically, informationally, and emotionally dependent on one of the belligerent sides?

That will be the subject of the next article.