Reviews and Interviews about The Best War Ever

BuzzFlash Reviews
... In a reign of government propped up by propoganda, deception and fantasy, Rampton and Stauber are keen guides into understanding how so many Americans are misled over and over and over again. In short, they are experts in unraveling "spin." One of our favorite conclusions in "The Best War Ever" is, "The question of whether they were liars or fools, however, is less important than the question of whether they have shown themselves qualified to lead. Clearly, they have not."
David Swanson, Camp Democracy
"You'll read it in one sitting, because it's more entertaining than the corporate media whose infotainment is the book's focus. While this book is every bit as well researched as Congressman John Conyers' 350-page report 'The Constitution in Crisis,' it's written as a compelling narrative rather than a list of evidence or a draft indictment. ... Rampton and Stauber recount the twists and turns in this war's narrative from the point of view of careful consumers of media. Because the media has repeatedly erased old storylines and begun anew, a review of where we've actually been is helpful."
Kevin Zeese, Democracy Rising, interview with Sheldon Rampton
"The reason they were so determined to tell people the war would be quick and cheap was that they realized the public would have misgivings about getting into an expensive, unending quagmire. The resulting paradox is that the current mess in Iraq is a consequence of the brilliant marketing campaign waged by the Bush administration originally to sell the war to the American people—a campaign so successful that the war planners came to believe it themselves. It gives us no pleasure to point out that we predicted this could happen, but we did. ... During the 20th century, the United States became a world superpower, with military bases around the world and economic end political interests everywhere, yet paradoxically we remain isolationist in our attitudes toward the rest of the world. Very few Americans take a serious interest in events outside our borders or learn to speak a foreign language. This combination of cultural isolationism and international interventionism has taken political form under Bush as unilateralism: the idea that we can successfully invade and occupy a country as far away and alien to our own culture as Iraq. The result is that we have troops attempting to impose order in a country where almost none of them know how to speak the language or read trafffic signs, let alone understand the nuances of Iraqi culture or politics. This is a big part of why the war has gone so badly, and it's not all the fault of Bush or his advisors, although certainly they epitomize it."
FAIR/Counterspin, interview with John Stauber, September 15-21, 2006
"Every administration seems to take propaganda to a new level. ... I think what's so frightening about the current situation is that what worked in selling the Iraq war was something called the big lie tactic. ... The people in power state the most audacious sorts of information, that they know to be false, but that they know will incite the public: 'Saddam was behind 9/11. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Saddam is in league with Al Qaeda.' ... Because the mainstream media echoed and repeated those statements in the United States, and because the mainstream media refused to challenge those lies and deceptions, the big lie tactic was allowed to work. There's not much more you can say that's a worse indictment of a nation's news media."
Willamette Week Online (Portland, Oregon), interview with John Stauber, September 20, 2006
"We need a lot more critical thinking and media criticism taught in schools at a very early age. What we see happening with people not being skeptical and not demanding good journalism, not being held accountable for their lies, is that we're really losing our democracy--which is ultimately ironic, because the basic claim that the administration makes is that they're pursuing the war on terror to preserve freedom and democracy."
Bill Berkowitz, "Is it the PR, or the Policy?" Working for Change, September 21, 2006
"The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on media campaigns that have been spectacularly ineffective," Rampton told me in a telephone interview. "That the enemy has been more effective in communicating its message to the world is not so much a reflection of their media savvy as it is on the ineffective message of the United States."
Buzzflash review
"In a reign of government propped up by propoganda, deception and fantasy, Rampton and Stauber are keen guides into understanding how so many Americans are misled over and over and over again. In short, they are experts in unraveling 'spin.'"
Publishers Weekly, October 2, 2006
"Having dissected the events and reporting that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003's Weapons of Mass Deception, Rampton and Stauber now unravel the Bush administration's "web of disinformation" around its handling of the war. In the tradition of Austrian journalist Karl Wiegand, who observed after WWI that "Politicians lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print," the authors detail the work of Bush's PR apparatus and the media's uncritical response. They provide elegant, effective analysis of examples including the media's approach to Colin Powell's now infamous UN speech affirming the existence of Saddam Hussein's WMDs, the politics behind the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent, the Pentagon's use of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi as an inside source, and the complicated relationships New York Times reporter Judith Miller (who also reported on Iraq's possession of WMDs) had with the high ranking people in the administration. Rampton and Stauber make their argument with verve while carefully documenting their claims; this is muckraking without mudslinging."
Interview with John Stauber, September 8, 2006

Here is footage of one of Stauber's early interviews given on September 18 in Seattle at radio station KEXP-FM to its "Mind Over Matters" program host Mike McCormick.
Interview with John Stauber on Mother Jones Radio, October 10, 2006: Stream | Download
"I think they do believe their own spin. These folks are creating a truth, they appear to believe it, they repeat it over and over and insinuate it, and the mainstream media either echos it or certainly fails to correct it."

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