9/11, The Useful Incident, and the Legacy of the Creel Committee

Any understanding of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the subsequent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the representation of these events by the media must attend to a pattern of U.S. involvement in interimperial and colonialist wars dating back at least to the Spanish-American War. While pundits regard the post-9/11 period as a new epoch in a world forever changed, neither this apocalyptic rhetoric nor the ideological assumptions within it deviate significantly from traditional U.S. ruling-class behavior. Notions of a new cold war may be as intellectually dubious as the particularizing of the "original" cold war, which had its origins not in the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy era but in the long history of state repression of progressive movements dating at least to the early nineteenth century.

Differences in war policy and uses of propaganda reside in developments within media technology and changing imperialist needs; the key point is that the historical pattern demonstrates the use of a persistent, recurrent set of strategies designed to force public acquiescence in the state policing of the U.S. colonial domain.¹ Since the beginning of the last century (one can argue that the Mexican War was the precedent),² U.S. conquest of its colonial properties and advancement as an empire have depended virtually without exception on doomsday us-versus-them hysteria; a propaganda machine wherein the private-sector media advance state policy; and, perhaps most important, highly suspect, provocative episodes of violence that fuel public hatred of the evil Other and undergird dominant interests.

Those alarmed at talk of a "clash of civilizations"(the democracy-loving West versus the barbaric East) might note that Alfred Mahan, a key military strategist of the William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt years who well represented those administrations' racial views during the capture of Cuba and the Philippines, felt that European and American civilization must "receive into its bosom and raise to its own ideals those ancient and different civilizations by which it is surrounded and outnumbered."³ For Mahan, "the world of civilized Christianity" had to complete its divinely ordained mission to control the barbaric hordes or "perish."⁴

Theodore Roosevelt's close friends Owen Wister and Frederick Remington, two fabulists of the American frontier, were more blunt about the needs of late-nineteenth-century American expansionism. Remington wanted the annihilation of "Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns—the rubbish of the earth." Wister was anxious about "encroaching alien vermin."⁵

Just as these racialist notions are not new, neither is the cooperation of the corporate media with the state apparatus in using propaganda to advance war aims. Two months after the 9/11 attacks, White House political operative Karl Rove met with Hollywood executives to discuss the direction of film and television during the "war on terrorism."⁶ If we view the Rove meeting as emblematic of the reconfiguration of a propaganda apparatus advancing war aims and expansionism, appreciation of history is again relevant.

William Randolph Hearst, long acknowledged as a key supporter of U.S. war aims during the McKinley and Roosevelt confrontation with Spain, dispatched his artist Frederick Remington to Cuba before the U.S. incursion, with the intention of finding provocative rationales for an American invasion. Remington allegedly notified Hearst that he could find nothing warranting such a war, to which Hearst replied, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." Such remarks could be read as puffery (and for some, apocrypha), but they accurately capture the role of both Hearst and the emerging mass media in supporting government ambition. In February 1898, the USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor. The Maine episode is especially important in the post-9/11 period as a model of how corporate news and popular culture can use a provocative incident to enforce state doctrine.

While Spain was immediately blamed for the sinking of the Maine, there is wide historical consensus today that an explosion in the ship's hold caused the vessel to sink...