Wag The Dogs Of War

by Denis Lyons

A US President accused of sexual misconduct with an underage girl. In order to distract attention, the President orders a massive aerial bombing attack on a distant foreign country without prior consent from his allies. Of course this preposterous fiction could never happen in real life, but it was exactly this scenario which played out in the film Wag the Dog.

Robert De Niro plays Connie Brean, the President’s cunning spin doctor, who persuades Dustin Hoffman’s character, Stanley Motss, a slick Hollywood tycoon, to produce a make-believe but convincing, made-for-television war against Albania in order to distract voters’ attention from the White House sex scandal during the run-up to an election.

“You wanna change this subject, you better have a war,” De Niro’s character explains to the President’s aides. “Just gotta distract ʼem”. As Connie Brean explains to Stanley Motss, war is “...show business. That's why I'm here.”

When asked if the President will declare war, De Niro’s character is technically correct when he replies, “We’re not declaring war, we’re going to war. We haven’t declared war since the Second World War. We’re going to war.”

At one point, speaking about the President, Motss asks Brean “Do you think we could line him up for the Peace Prize?…..the guy did bring peace.” Brean responds, “Yes, but there wasn't a war.”  Motss, undeterred, replies, “All the greater accomplishment.”

Released almost 30 years ago, Wag the Dog satirises a media-driven war of choice, triggered at the President’s discretion and managed by the executive branch and creative consultants. How fortunate it is that yesterday’s satire is highly unlikely to become today’s documentary.

Unlikely, but not unknown.  The title of the film Wag the Dog was quickly adopted as a shorthand political term used to describe a military or foreign-policy spectacular manufactured to divert attention from a domestic crisis or scandal. While the term is relatively new, the technique is as old as the hills, and history is littered with examples.

In 415 BC, during a fragile peace between Athens and Sparta, the brilliant but polarising Athenian general Alcibiades was being threatened with potentially career-ending prosecution by his political enemies.  To distract people from this domestic pressure, Alcibiades persuaded the Athenian Assembly to launch an expedition to Sicily, framing it as a necessary mission to defend Segesta, a distant ally.

Once underway, mission creep took over, as it so often does. What began as a show of support morphed into a full-scale campaign aimed at conquering the powerful city of Syracuse and, by extension, crippling the resources of Athens' great rival, Sparta. The campaign ended in total catastrophe. The entire Athenian fleet was annihilated in Syracuse harbour and, in the political fallout, Alcibiades was condemned to death in absentia, a verdict which encouraged him to defect to Sparta. The disaster in Sicily was a turning point in the Peloponnesian War, crippling Athens' military power and directly paving the way for its eventual defeat.

This might be called the spectacular case of the dog that did not wag.

In the film Wag the Dog, the President hopes for "a swift and painless, and victorious conclusion" to his fictitious war. This echoes a famous and fateful piece of Russian advice from Tsar Nicholas II’s Interior Minister, Vyacheslav Plehve, who, in 1904, is famously said to have remarked, "What this country needs is a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution." With the Tsar's autocratic rule under serious threat from peasant strikes, student riots, and a growing revolutionary underground, Plehve and other advisors concluded that a major patriotic distraction was essential to unite the country and bolster the regime.

Accordingly, Russia's leadership selected Japan as a suitable target, based on the mistaken calculation that Japan was an inferior power which could be crushed easily and swiftly. The plan, however, did not survive contact with the enemy. Instead of the “short, victorious war” which would dazzle the public and quell dissent, Russia suffered a series of humiliating naval and land defeats at the hands of the Japanese. Rather than distract from domestic problems, this catastrophic failure led to the 1905 revolution and helped to set the stage for the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917.

In addition to the many examples of plans for “a short, victorious war”, history also contains a stunning array of flimsy, manufactured and occasionally humorous rationalisations for going to war. Take, for example, the case of Robert Jenkins and his pickled ear.

On the 9th of April 1731, Spanish coast guards boarded the British merchant ship Rebecca off the coast of Cuba, and accused its Captain, Robert Jenkins from Llanelli, of smuggling. According to some accounts, the Spanish captain, Julio de León Fandiño, had Jenkins bound to a mast, sliced off his left ear with his sword, and reportedly told him to take it to King George II as a warning.

Despite featuring a severed ear, the incident did not exactly hit the headlines in those pre-Instagram days. However, by 1738, Anglo-Spanish tensions were rising over trade disputes and colonial boundaries in Georgia. At that point, opposition politicians in Parliament seized upon the gory story of Robert Jenkins' ear, which became a powerful symbol of Spanish cruelty and a rallying cry against Prime Minister Robert Walpole's reluctant government.

Jenkins was ordered to testify before a committee of the House of Commons when, according to some accounts, he produced his severed ear in a pickle jar as part of his presentation. No detailed record of the meeting exists, but in those days they understood, just as we do today, that inconvenient facts should not be allowed to get in the way of a good story.

Whatever the facts, the story of Robert Jenkins’ ear proved emotive enough to help whip up public outrage and, combined with broader commercial and imperial rivalries, led Britain to declare war on Spain. The war, which lasted from 1739 to 1748, became known as the War of Jenkins' Ear.

There is, of course, a much more recent example of the pickled ear type of political theatre which was used to justify a war with even more lethal and longer-lasting consequences. This was Colin Powell’s “vial of anthrax” moment during his speech, as the U.S. Secretary of State, to the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003. 

Raising a small, blue-capped vial containing a beige powdery substance, Powell said: “Less than a teaspoon of dry anthrax…about this amount… shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001.” He claimed that Iraq had declared 8,500 litres of anthrax but had not accounted for it, framing this as “evidence, not conjecture”.

Described later as “the presentation that launched a war”, its effectiveness at the time was due in no small part to Powell’s personal credibility which helped to sell a case which collapsed once no weapons of mass destruction were found.

At one point in Wag the Dog, Dustin Hoffman’s Hollywood producer is in a creative ferment, seeking inspiration for a convincingly fake justification for his fake war. Suddenly gesturing for silence from the Presidential aides, he announces slyly, “We've just found out they have the Bomb”.

Thank goodness it’s only satire.