Bibliographic record
Abstract
WEAPONS OF MASS PERSUASION Marketing the War Against Iraq Paul Rutherford Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. xii, 220pp, $45.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8020-8995-X), $19.95 paper (ISBN 0-8020-8651-9)It still remains to be determined how far the Bush administration actually believed the extraordinary mass of nonsense it peddled by way of justification for the Iraqi of liberation. That term itself, redolent of Marxist days long since passed, was ordered up without irony by the marvelously named office of global communications in the White House and presumably found wide resonance within. My favourite utterance, not one found in Paul Rutherford's worthy but uneven work, comes as might be expected from the annals of the incomparable Donald Rumsfeld: no debate in the world as to whether they have those weapons. There's no debate in the world as to whether they're continuing to develop and acquire them. We all know that. A trained ape knows that. All you have to do is read the newspaper. The splendidly dismissive attitude, exuding a certitude of truly frightening proportions, makes one wonder if Rumsfeld has subsequently spent a single moment regretting that he uttered these words, however spectacularly wrong he happened to be in substance. Facts come and go. Words come and go. The mission remains.Paul Rutherford's punning title, actually invented by the Pentagon itself to describe opinion campaigns in Iraq, indicates that he is more interested in how the Iraqi freedom was sold, literally, to the world, than he is in the phenomenological universe of US policymaking. What he makes clear is that the initiation of the war in Iraq was probably the most discursively overloaded event of its kind. The Bush administration is nothing if not obsessively concerned with words and how they are managed, obsessed with ideology and narration. Thus Rutherford maps the intense period of ideological preparation, execution, and immediate aftermath of the war, roughly the latter part of 2002 and the first half of 2003. The marketing in his subtitle is not a metaphor, for his frame is indeed taken critically from that peculiar world. He is concerned both with technique, the technique of selling a product, as well as how successful it is. He has many probing things to say about the first aspect and some about the second. It is good to be reminded, in fact to have demonstrated, just how carefully and massively the war campaign was planned and carried out as far as the selling was concerned. Some readers, at least in the United States, will be moved to reflect that it would have been a good thing if the administration had spent as much time and care on planning what to do once the Saddam regime was shot to pieces. Rutherford points, in particular, to the qualitative difference between this operation and other post-Vietnam endeavours of similar ilk: discursive plenitude and embeddedness instead of darkness and removal, manipulation and control by way of inclusion rather than exclusion. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.046 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".