Over the course of the Iraq War, while the military remained engulfed in battle, the rest of the world - America included - continued to be absorbed in the media. They turned to media outlets such as television and newspapers to give them information about the War in Iraq that had started in 2003. American media is not state owned, thus one can assume that they don't exhibit the use of subtle propaganda or act as a vehicle for such cases. Propaganda by definition is: "ideas or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, a government, etc. The main purpose of this paper is to show how subtle propaganda affected American media in relation to the War in Iraq and served to change the opinions of the population.
In order to justify the war, the president gave several explanations. To stress that Iraq threatened the peace and prosperity of the US, he claimed that Saddam Hussein harbored Weapons of Mass Destruction and that America had to act accordingly. Another claim from him came in the form of a declaration to a free Iraq, liberating it from the "evil dictator". Despite these claims, numerous insinuations, directed towards Bush and his administration suggested that the primary objective in the invasion of Iraq had to do with securing the nation's abundance of petroleum reserves. Terry Anderson states in his book: "One reality in Iraq that everyone can agree on was that the nation had enormous proven oil reserves. Before the war, the United States bought nearly one quarter of its imported oil from the Persian Gulf, including about $10 billion annually from Saddam. Another quote from the book suggests that the Iraqis seemed fully aware of America's true motives: "Only 5 percent of Iraqis surveyed thought that the United States invaded "to assist the Iraqi people," only 1 percent believed it was to establish democracy, while about half thought it was "to rob Iraq's oil.
