With the 2004 presidential-election campaign well under way, the invasion of Iraq has become a central concern. In debating the action's merits, we have an important opportunity to reflect on the impact on democratic politics of how our government mobilizes Americans for war.

In 1927 Harold D. Lasswell, who would go on to be one of the most influential political scientists of the 20th century, published his doctoral dissertation as a book entitled Propaganda Technique in the World War. A close study of the propaganda campaigns waged by both Central and Allied powers during World War I, the book bears rereading now as charges fly over whether or not intelligence estimates used to justify invading Iraq were just plain wrong or were distorted for political reasons. Though we may consider ourselves sophisticated when it comes to government uses of the news media to manipulate public opinion, the techniques chronicled by Lasswell, developed in the early decades of the 20th century, are still used at the dawn of the 21st. While we obscure their enduring power by calling them "spin" or "PR," rather than "propaganda," the methods used to mobilize populations in 1914 to 1918, to support a war that was fought for obscure reasons and that left tens of millions dead, are quite familiar to anyone who has lived through the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. The issue is less whether there is some truth to the propaganda claims made by government -- even the worst atrocity stories of World War I had a core of truth -- than the continuing implications for democracy of the techniques used by governments to mobilize populations for war.

Lasswell argued that mobilizing public opinion through propaganda was a prerequisite for modern war, since conflict had become total, requiring conscript armies and the marshaling of a nation's entire resources. The justification for war had to be widely understandable and capable of fostering total popular commitment to the conflict. Since it's difficult to communicate to a mass audience the inevitably complex and usually debatable reasons for one nation's use of force against another, the leader of the enemy state must be used to stand for the entire nation and then demonized. Lasswell meant the term quite literally: The enemy leader must be portrayed as the incarnation of evil, the devil himself. Sound familiar? Just as Saddam Hussein became the personification of both Iraq and evil, so too was Kaiser Wilhelm used by Allied propagandists in World War I.

While the strategy of demonization is familiar to us, so too are the problems it creates once the war ends. If the cause of war is an evil leader, then his elimination should be the solution. Once that leader is dead or captured, problems faced by the victors as they attempt to reconstruct a shattered society are no easier to explain to Americans today than they were to the Allied populations in the wake of World War I.

Lasswell argued that to gain popular support for a war, it must always be portrayed as defensive. Claims about the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction or about connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden became the linchpins of our Iraq mobilization because they were central to portraying the U.S. invasion, without U.N. backing, not as an unprovoked attack, but as a defensive action necessitated by an evil enemy preparing to strike us. Just as it was impossible for Allied governments to resist exaggerating claims of atrocities by German troops in neutral Belgium, a driving force behind claims of Iraqi WMD or connections to the terrorists of September 11, 2001, was their power to drum up public support. If we focus too closely on the accuracy of prewar intelligence estimates, we miss the more disturbing point that governments are simply unable to resist "cherry-picking" those estimates for use in propaganda.

Lasswell's analysis is even more prescient when it comes to the need for developing different propaganda appeals to different segments of the populace -- what we call segmenting, or "slicing and dicing," and wrongly take to be a new technique. Portrayal of an evil leader, guilty of unspeakable atrocities, possessing aggressive intent against one's country, works with the more jingoistic and aggressive segments of the population, Lasswell wrote, those who, he concluded, find "peace in war" and are labeled today as "Nascar dads" living in the "red" states.

Yet, he argued, there need to be as many different justifications for war as there are interests in the population. So, for example, more "sophisticated" middle-class intellectuals need appeals based on international law. In a discussion that anticipates the uses of the United Nations by the Bush administration, Lasswell argued that even if an international body (he had the League of Nations in mind) opposed your country's plans for war, that could be overcome by an argument that war was required by a "higher and truer" vision of international law, which international organizations failed to uphold.

But what of the long-run consequences when a government, once the war is over, is found to have manipulated the truth? Lasswell didn't think that was a problem, as long as your country won, since "victory required no explanation." But victory is in the eye of the beholder. Can the continuing instability in Iraq, the violence, and the almost daily death and injuries inflicted on American troops be called victory? Whatever the long-term consequences, the Bush administration must feel an almost irresistible temptation to keep its time-table of turning authority over to an Iraqi government by June, declare victory, and hope that things don't fall apart until after the 2004 elections.

While the specific propaganda techniques developed in the early 20th century continue to be used, the context within which they are deployed has changed significantly. The rapid flow of information across borders makes it more difficult for governments to keep their populations long insulated from counterclaims and refutations. Both the Blair and Bush administrations were quickly called to account over the basic premises they used to justify war. Unfortunately, that did not mean that the press provided an open and critical examination of the case for war before the conflict, when it would have done the most good. While we pay much lip service to the idea of an aggressive press, in the run-up to war, journalists play a central role in propaganda campaigns by passing along the claims of their government with little criticism, or by acting as patriotic cheerleaders for war.

Depressingly, long-used propaganda techniques continue to be effective, but the price we pay is felt, in their wake, in the immediate backlash of cynicism and distrust of government. For example, one of the reasons (among many) that the Holocaust was not more widely covered in the American press, and used by the Roosevelt administration to buttress a case for war against Germany, was the suspicion that stories about the systematic extermination of Jews were just repeats of exaggerated World War I atrocity tales, and neither the press nor the public would allow themselves to be fooled again. Similarly, I think it's unlikely that the Bush administration will launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran, Syria, or other members of the Axis of Evil (a phrase with deep roots in past propaganda campaigns). The greater problem may be that, even if Iran did pose a real and imminent nuclear threat, it would be exceedingly difficult to get a now-skeptical public to believe it.

We should question not the power of 80-year-old propaganda techniques -- their power seems indisputable -- but rather the need for them. Is the price they exact on public trust in government worth it? What sort of safeguards can be put in place against their use? Those are some of the questions that need to be raised in the electoral-season debate over the war in Iraq. Clearly, fighting World War I or fascist aggression in the 1930s implied a total war and required total mobilization of the population. But invading a country like Iraq is hardly the same challenge as defeating a Nazi Germany that had conquered all of Western Europe.

When the United States is the world's pre-eminent military power, when wars are again fought by small professional volunteer armies, and domestic life is scarcely disrupted by conflict, the same blunt techniques used to mobilize for total war are simply not justifiable. Strategically, because they portray conflict as a struggle for survival between good and evil, they make impossible any careful consideration of proportional military response in asymmetric conflicts. But more important, the toll they take on American democracy is too high.

Bruce A. Williams is a professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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