Something is coming, and we must stop it.

In 2003, millions of people from all over the world marched against the US-led invasion of Iraq. The protest was large enough to cause a political headache for war’s architects. The war lobby had tried to sell the war using a professional “James Bond” intelligence operation: Iraq, they said, had a Dr Evil array of weaponry that could threaten western nations in as little as 45 minutes. Britain was “45 minutes FROM DOOM” The Sun newspaper famously roared. Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, infamously presented this evidence to the UN security council, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources," he said. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

This “intelligence-led” rationale for the war failed on two counts. Firstly, it didn’t successfully convince the public, because 10 million people are thought to have protested the war in up to 60 countries. Those protests remain absolutely unprecedented in modern history. The second intelligence failing was as predictable as it is damming: Powell’s ‘facts’ were made up. Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and none were ever found. Nevertheless, in the following years, Iraq was completely destroyed and perhaps a million people were killed in the process. It is possible a genocide took place in Fallujah, detailed in gut-wrenching detail in 2008 by veterans who had been there. Twenty years on, Iraq resembles a failed state.

As we now know, Powell’s intelligence presentation to the UN security council was all theatre. Revealed in the secret Downing Street Memo are the notes of a meeting between US officials and the UK Government, which took place on July 23rd, 2002, eight months prior to Powell’s attempts to sell the war at the United Nations. In the explosive memo, we learn the UK government was aware “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Emphasis mine.

The UK Government knew that the US wanted the war, and that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Fully cognizant of this reality, the UK Government went along with it anyway. It was already decided… now there was the thorny problem of dealing with the public, since after all, the UK and its western allies are supposed to be democratic. So what would the strategy be? It was simple: the public would be dragged to war by a sophisticated propaganda campaign. Colin Powell speaking at the UN, holding up test tubes and talking up the ‘45 minutes from disaster’ line was all part of the propaganda theatre.

The UK would use theatre too. There was a debate in UK parliament on March 18th, 2003, at the tail end of a months-long media campaign that made the case for war. Blair needed his democratic mandate, and because he was such a great orator, he actually got it. He convinced UK parliament to back him, but the case he made was all theatre because he had already committed to the war machine nine months prior. “We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action” the memo said, which also revealed that strategic military plans for the war were already advanced. The military was preparing for war, what was now needed was public support, and that was the role for politicians and the media. Tony Blair, in this infamous meeting, was exploring strategies he could use to bolster the political support for the war, the memo paraphrased him as saying “If the political context were right, people would support regime change.” So that’s what the architects of the war went out and created.

One can argue, that despite best efforts to do this, the intelligence-led pitch for the Iraq war had failed, because millions saw through it and marched against the invasion. But you could just as easily argue that the campaign had worked, because there was just enough political cover to ensure the war went ahead. As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can not fool all of the people all of the time,” shall we dare to complete Lincoln’s point? It’s now clear that leaders do not need to fool all of the people all of the time, because political science allows top-tier political operators to work out which people to fool and when. Make no mistake, wars are decided on deep inside the government’s many corridors of power. They are sold to the public with calculated propaganda.

In propaganda terms, the second Iraq war was a close shave, but they did get it over the line. Just. But ‘intelligence-led’ propaganda operation had left the war machine wide open to criticism from weapons experts like David Kelly, who argued that the case for war against Iraq had been ‘sexed up’. He was later found dead in an apparent suicide, the book end of a botched propaganda campaign that nearly cost the war machine their prized (and disastrous) war in Iraq. It was a mistake to adopt the dossier strategy, and when you study the war machine carefully, you learn that propagandists learn from their mistakes.

And so in the ashes of Iraq, another tactic to sell war has become much more successful. No longer would the architects of war rely on snazzy dossiers and satellite pictures to sell their conflicts, they’d adopt a much simpler and more effective strategy. Support for war would be won by endlessly repeating how despotic a leader was. It would become a moral duty to remove a morally impure leader.

The West is now at the doorstep of yet another war, one certain to become even more disastrous than Iraq, but unlike in years past, you’ll find almost no detractors to this disastrous war. There aren’t millions of people on the street because they’ve become indifferent to the looming war. They know Putin is awful, and apparently that’s enough. The propaganda campaign has become devastatingly effective. I call this the moral component of war, and in this series of articles I want to show how to unravel it.

Years after the invasion of Iraq, in the years following the Arab Spring, I was editing a YouTube channel called Truthloader; a citizen journalism news channel produced by ITN Productions. “Citizen journalism” was a mystery to ITN Productions at the time; their specialty was making ITV and Channel Four News. Think studio lights, suits, earpieces, and ‘joining me live from Cairo’ style journalism. They were excellent at it, but “Citizen Journalism” for a YouTube channel?! Truthloader was was left to work out this exciting new frontier by itself, and I had a front-row seat. Within that context, the Syrian civil war was starting to ramp up…

We were powered by a startup “social news agency” called Storyful. I could log on each morning and see a smorgasbord of “citizen journalism” videos, which we’d use for our edgy news stories. In practice, this meant that every single day I saw multiple militia groups filming themselves ‘do’ war. This wasn’t embedded journalism; this wasn’t war reporters on the front line in bullet proofvests and hard hats; this was a revolution in journalism. The militia’s fighting the war were filming it on their phones and uploading it onto the internet. Before long, I was plugged into a whole network of Syrian propaganda campaigns.

These groups would film themselves doing…everything.

It’s only in hindsight that I can make sense of that period, because I now realise it was an overwhelming experience. Not only for the videos I saw, which were awful, but for the dislocation it created from the ‘standard’ interpretation of the Syrian conflict. One part of that experience still stands out to me years later: the massive disconnect between the folk idea of war, and what war actually looks like in practice.

I would read articles in The Guardian describing the resistance in heroic terms; you’d imagine a ragtag group of freedom fighters taking on their oppressive government. For most normal people, these kinds of reports are as close as they get to ‘looking’ at the war. This, I argue, is the folk understanding of conflict. Sometimes it’s described as ‘the bloodless’ perspective of war, something I was no longer going to have. On the same day as hearing friends, family and coworkers talk in ‘folk’ terms about Syrian rebels, I’d poke around my brand new citizen journalism feeds and see hardline Islamist groups fighting alongside them by cutting people’s head off and parading them around the streets. In one video I remember, a well trained militia (which would eventually become ISIS), filmed themselves taking men from the Syrian army hostage. They tied their hands behind their backs with zip ties, laid them face down on the floor, and executed them point blank in the back of the heads. It is no exaggeration to say this was far from the worst thing I saw in that period of work.

There was an unmovable disconnect between the mainstream logic which framed the war and the gut-wrenching mess of what the war had become. Mainstream discussions invited people to hold a political view by casting the main characters along commonly understood storylines; “There’s a bad guy, and he’s awful, and he’s hurting the people, and there’s a resistance, and they’re taking the fight to him.”

This new moral component to war emerges long before the first bullets are fired. At the time, if you tried to manoeuvre a conversation towards some nuanced position, you could easily predict the talking points you’d be met with, “Well Bashar al-Assad is an evil dictator!” It was just a given that the Syrian leader was the worst person ever, all the Syrians hated him, and therefore anyone fighting him must be in the right. Because Assad was awful and hated, the resistance must be noble.

Within the circles that mattered, there was an immense social pressure to just go along with this story, so I did. Privately I realised I could argue the case that Assad was awful just as well as I could argue that he wasn’t. In private, I thought that even if Assad is as awful as they say, he surely can’t be as awful as the war. In private, I realised the story was complex and the characters miscast.

Like almost everything in our world, the political war was a complex mess, but the actual war, the fighting, the murder, the looting and the carnage was a total disaster. A disaster apparently supported by democratic western nations, who in theory can’t support wars without the support of their people. As such, how the people understand a war is of critical importance. Knowingly or not, journalists were playing a role in shaping that understanding in ways that aligned with government policy. The UK government recognised the rebels as “the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people” on November 20th 2012. It’s a remarkable policy because it casts all support for Bashar al-Assad as illegitimate, which to those paying attention was obviously not the case.

Tens of thousands of people march in support for Assad in 2011.

To ‘the protectors of the narrative’, all of the people in huge demonstrations for Assad were there under duress. Official UK government policy stated that these people and their support of Assad were illegitimate. It’s no wonder, then, that these videos, which unambiguously show massive support for Assad, were hardly seen in the west. Why? Because they’d have undermined the moral component of the war, which painted Assad as a unique evil, as a despot defying the will of his people, a tyrant who must be overthrown. Do unambiguous tyrants have hundreds of thousands of people marching the streets for them? As should be commonly understood, people can demand reforms from their government and still support it. People can want change and remain committed to their current leadership. They can demand new policies and remain fearful of foreign interference. This is as true for the UK, France, and the USA as it is for Syria.

But the Star Wars idea of the war, rebels vs. government, was stubborn and effective. Once seeded into the minds of the west, it proved incredibly difficult to dislodge. It hardly moved an inch when challenged by inconvenient morsels of information emerging from Syria. Reality had almost no influence on the pre-existing conclusion that Assad had to be removed no matter the cost. The moral component of war is most effective if the cost of upholding the moral outcome is concealed from people. The public would only have to see a handful of ‘war things’ before their support to overthrow the government would evaporate. It’s something Tony Blair was apparently aware of when he explained to American war planners that “If the political context were right, people would support regime change.”

In Syria, we were seeing it all over again, but this time with a focus on the moral failings of the leader, rather than the terrifying capabilities of his weapons.

Most people holding the ‘moral understanding’ of the conflict did not actually have to fight the war, or become a victim of it, or in my case, look at it every day. When you’ve watched someone have their head slowly removed with a knife, the horror and fear consuming that person’s face as it happens, their head finally removed from their body, still seemingly alive, twitching and terrified, dripping with blood as it’s held at arm’s length and paraded through the streets like an 18th century lamp, the clear cut political interpretation of the conflict seems an irrelevance.Trying to solve the war with just a bit more war seemed an absolute dead end to me.

You’re banking on one team ‘doing the war’ with what? A little more humility? A little more humanity? We’d commit to more killing, but we’ll do it with some dignity and professionalism? It was obvious if you were paying attention, that stopping the fighting, then working out how to settle the political conflict was the only logical solution. But you could only reach this perspective by understanding that Assad had some support and could be reasoned with because, in that context, you could see the conflict as something that could be mediated.

But the strange binary morals of the war stubbornly remained. Even as the ‘rag tag’ Free Syrian Army morphed into a hardline Islamist group called Jabhat al-Nusra. Even as that group morphed into actual ISIS, even as that group started executing people en masse by slitting their throats and throwing them into a river. Even in this context, the initial “Assad bad” framework to proved difficult to budge. It was providing useful cover to money and arms flowing into rebel hands from the west. By the time the handful of real journalists and reporters had wrapped their heads around the story, the horse had long since bolted, the country was already destroyed, and the news cycle had moved on.

By 2019, legendary reporter Robert Fisk, who wrote for The Independent, produced a masterful takedown of the Western delusions and propaganda that had propped up the war for eight years. “While David Cameron was fantasising about the 70,000 Free Syrian Army ‘moderates’ fighting the Assad regime – there were never more than perhaps 7,000, at the most”

“We didn’t predict the arrival of al-Qaeda, now purified with the name of Nusrah. We did not imagine that the Isis nightmare would emerge like a genie from the eastern deserts… Still today, I am only beginning to learn how Syria’s ‘moderate’ rebellion turned into the apocalyptic killing machine of the Islamic State,” Fisk said.

The ‘moral component’ in propaganda elevates the crimes of your opponent and justifies the crimes of your allies. For this reason, Fisk’s work on Syria meant he became hated by the media establishment. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t able to get his work published - he was a legendary reporter, after all - it means he fell out of favour because he’d demonstrated a moral failure over the crimes committed in Syria. By showing that the revolution in Syria might be as awful as the Syrian Government, Fisk had committed a moral crime. He had chosen the wrong side to feel sorry for. As was fairly typical of the time, Fisk’s work was derided as a ‘whitewash’ for the crimes of Assad. The people accusing Fisk of whitewashing Assad rarely if ever considered if they’d been doing something similar for the “moderate” rebellion. Holding both of these perspectives at once was culturally impossible.

One thing that the moral binary achieved was to drastically reduce the chance for the public to see Assad as anything more than a despot. Within a moral binary, by definition, there’s no room for nuance or negotiation. The moral component of war ensures this space is choked out. Any desire to open a proper dialogue is seen as a moral failure. Apologism. Any attempt to contextualise the conflict, to draw attention to western policy failure, is seen as providing political cover for our enemies. Why?

Because this strategy forces culture’s hand. Negotiation, dialogue, compromise and reconciliation aren’t useful when dealing with uniquely evil despots; therefore war is the only tactic left. With the cloud of ‘despotic psychopath’ successfully mediating all understanding of Assad, the public hardly realised he was fluent in English and held reasoned arguments for his actions. Sure, you could disagree with him, despise him too, but there was a person here with some kind of intellect that could be reasoned with, and clearly, dialogue might be useful. These are dangerous notions to the war machine.

By 2015, with the unambiguous rise of ISIS and Al-Nusrah inside Syria, the situation had become impossibly absurd for the moral component of the western narrative. Everyday people, even those with no interest or knowledge of the war in Syria, knew that ISIS was truly dreadful. There had been ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris, first against Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, in which 11 people were killed. There were attacks on the trains, attacks in supermarkets, culminating in the devastating Paris attacks in November 2015 which killed 130 people, and left another 416 people injured.

How could the narrative make sense of Assad being an enemy of the West when he was a leader in the Middle East, with a decent amount of support, fighting a war against ISIS and Al-Nusra? If there were airstrikes against Assad’s army, does that mean we’re supporting the objectives of ISIS and Al-Nusra? Is the enemy of my enemy not my friend? Shouldn’t the West have been assisting Assad in the destruction of this unambiguously dreadful enemy? It was becoming clear that the West had lost control of the narrative, and by proxy, when you lose control of the narrative, you lose control of the war. In February 2015, in a remarkable moment, Assad appeared on the BBC. He was speaking with Jeremy Bowen, in what turned out to be a remarkable interview. For many it must have been like having some character from your nightmare suddenly manifest into reality, but wearing a nice suit and tie whilst it spoke politely, with a lisp, to a nice man from the BBC.

It’s really worth watching if you get a chance. Bowen acknowledged that Assad “of course” had his supporters, but this was antithetical to the folk war understanding which had been cultivated over the past five years. It was antithetical to the UK Government’s policy, but here was Jeremy Bowen actually saying it. It suggested that support for the rebels was political rather than moral. Bowen even said “there are people who are now saying you could be a partner, in the fight against ISIS, that you could be a part of the solution, not part of the problem”

It was the beginnings of normalising relations with Assad because it was becoming clear that overthrowing him wasn’t happening. Years had passed, hundreds of thousands were dead, an insane death cult had emerged, Assad had mostly faced them down, but Syria was devastated, and Assad still remained. The cultivated support for an Assad “regime change” looked defeated against the unambiguous backdrop of an insane ISIS insurgency. But prior to those moments, and even now, as Fisk found out, to even suggest that there was nuance to discuss made you a pariah. To even slightly challenge the story that Syria was a unique evil would leave you out in the cultural doldrums. The moral component had served its purpose, and so now, it is mostly forgotten.

What’s most fascinating and concerning about this phenomenon is that it’s usually enforced by the ghosts of people once with strong anti-war voices. How dare you say that! What are you, an Assad apologist?! He’s awful! He needs to go! As I’ve explained, that perspective is only unambiguous if you fail to investigate who might replace him or what the costs of achieving that objective might be.

Does this culture sound familiar? Because there’s a clear lesson here in very recent living memory. We were sold a restricted and juvenile perspective about Syria and it prolonged and deepened a devastating war, which may as yet continue.

The incredible new development here is that it is often our most liberal companions who seem most intoxicated by the ‘unique evil’ narrative which serves as the precursor to war. Creating a moral component to conflict has been devastatingly effective, because here we are in 2024, teetering on the edge of a massive conflict, and there’s barely a single iota of resistance to it. Any person who has tried to contextualise the conflict has been met with the same incredible resistance along moral lines. Search Twitter for ‘Putin apologist’ and you’ll be amazed at the cacophony of liberal voices. Whether they know it or not, they are an accessory to war.

Putin is a murderer; he is a despot; he was a member of the KGB, after all. We don’t have to like Putin to know that he’s rational enough for dialogue to be a better path forward than all-out war, but the moral component of the propaganda campaign obliterates the cultural space that would allow us to understand this. You only have to look at the hysterical response to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin to see how far down the path of moral certainty we have walked. For all the moral grandstanding we’re currently hearing, it won’t matter if we allow our leaders to drag us to war. Very quickly we’ll have wished we charted a different path, but by then it will be too late.

So what do we do? Reject the moral certainty of the debate. Unravel the idea of unique evils and binary morals. Have uncomfortable conversations. Ensure that your peers understand you can be pro-democracy, pro-ukraine, against Putin and supportive of dialogue over war. These are not new ideas; they’ve been the cornerstone of progressive ideas since the Vietnam war, but in 2024 they feel like radical concepts.

Right now, it looks like our leaders want to bring us to war; we must do everything we can to inform them we don’t want that. That isn’t Putin apologism or moral failure, it’s the only rational path away from disastrous conflict.

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