Percy:  The 2002-2003 Iraq War Propaganda Campaign is an excellent case-study for introducing our primary mapping tool, the Tessera.   

Red:  Why's that?

Percy:  It was a short, sharp and obvious event -- and a defining one for our generation.  But let's first determine if it indeed was propaganda.  I assume you recall the basics of the Iraq campaign?

Red:  Absolutely.  I watched it unfold from the Middle East.

Percy:  So let's quickly run through the criteria, which are on your Tablet. First, was it a binary story that unfolded live. One directed at change in a law or management of Superstructure?

Red:  Yep.  The good of the U.S. versus the evil of Saddam, a White House story designed to get Congressional approval for launching a war.

Percy:  Second, does the concept of the Iraq War require a complete sentence for meaning?

Red:   No.  Other than perhaps a clarification that it is the second Iraq War.  Though I suppose the first one is called the Gulf War....

Percy:  Third, can the Iraq War story can be deconstructed into smaller components for testing with the GT Engine?

Red:  That's a tautology.  All stories can be deconstructed.

Percy:  True.  But bear in mind that you can use concepts other than stories with the GT Engine, so always ask the question.  Good practice.  Fourth, is the Concept paired with an Object in reality -- and more precise than it?

Red:  Yeah, the campaign is paired with the country of Iraq.   And is more precise.  Was all about whether Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction. 

Percy:  And fifth, does the Concept of the Iraq War describes the causality of changes in the Object.  That starts with the campaign Goal, which uses past and future changes for justification.

Red:  Well...the campaign sought to oust Saddam Hussein because of his use of chemical weapons against Iran and later his own Kurdish population, and the White House linked him to 9/11, leading to the future fear of a WMD attack on America's Middle East allies -- and perhaps American itself. 

Percy:  I'd say the Iraq War Campaign qualifies as propaganda. 

Red:  Obviously.

Percy:  And from it we can build the next set of tools, for mapping the Abstract Space inside a state Dome.  There are four in total, the Tessera and its three components: the Propaganda Frame, Matrix & Depth-of-Field.  First the Frame, inspired by the Dramatistic Pentad of Kenneth Burke, the American literacy critic who claimed all drama could be deconstructed into a set of five integrated components.  I consider propaganda a dramatic art, and likewise it can be deconstructed into five components.  You can read a Wikipedia summary of the Pentad on your Tablet.  Here is my modification of Burke's Pentad on the Big Screen. 

Red:  Premise.  Spectacles.  Goals/Means.  Actors.  Setting.  So you deconstruct every propaganda narrative into these components?

Percy:  Yep.  They are the grammar, so to speak, of propaganda campaigns.  Let's now apply the Frame to the Iraq War, and learn a little more about those components.  Highlight: Iraq War Frame Components.

Red:  So how did you come up with Propaganda Frame?

Percy:  Interestingly enough, I was talking about my propaganda dialectic with a Professor of Urban Planning who used Burke's Dramatistic Pentad in his PhD thesis.  And suggested it could be applicable.  This gave me a framework for my instinctive decoding developed from direct experience in propaganda systems.  And it opened the gateway to the rest of the tools -- starting with the Propaganda Matrix, which combines the Frame with a Quadrant to create an initial set of coordinates on the Screen.  Here's the first two steps to building the Matrix on the Big Screen.  Note how the Quadrant's cap -- the Portal -- is gone.  Or rather we've unrolled it across the light blue dot to reveal the deconstructed Frame components.

Red:  They are different than the five you had up on the Screen.

Percy:  Yeah.  The Premise is implicit within the other components, so it's not there.   We always divide the Actors into Instigator and Target, and put them on the ends which, as you will see, allows us to link other Tesserae when we start mapping the networks connected to the campaign.  For the Spectacles, you usually only need the Establishing: it's an actual event that can be traced and connected.  And I split up the Goal and Means.  Again, this is flexible.  But so far these six components work well. 

Red:  And the red X's?

Percy:  They indicate that each component is linked to the campaign.  Which is self-evident for the propaganda level, since we extracted them from the campaign.  It's the Matrix's baseline.  Every one you construct will start like this.

Red:   O.K.  I think I get that.  And the next line, it's the same components, but along the Governing Interface.  And the same connectivity?  All six?

Percy:  We move down the Quadrant to determine the level of the campaign.  Or what it seeks to change.  The Iraq War campaign coincided with the 2002 U.S. Elections.  As you know, such midterm elections come between presidential votes and select all of the House and one-third of the Senate.  So the campaign sought to influence these clockwork changes in America's governing interface.  U.S. propaganda swirls around the biennial vote.   I call them Level III campaigns, which are mostly noise -- unless they have a deeper objective within the other two Quadrant components, which are on the Big Screen.

Red:  The orange Superstructure level lights up. 

Percy:  That's because the campaign sought a new law, which was passed by Congress.  So all components connect to Public Law 107-243.  I call propaganda that seeks to create, change or protect a law a Level II Campaign.  We can get a lot of traction with them, for they always light up a network of interests.   And we are most interested in those laws directly connected to wealth accumulation via commodity trade

Red:  Which we can see in green level, the trade infrastructure.  Iraq's oil export facilities.  But only half connect.  If that's an objective, why aren't we connecting all the components?

Percy:  If the propaganda campaign stated that America's objective was control of Iraq's oil, then we would connect everything.  But the Frame was constructed around WMD.  So we look for direct links to trade within the Frame components. The Goal, Means and Target all connect.  Propaganda directed at control of trade infrastructure is a Level I Campaign.  These  are usually the most powerful campaigns of all. 

Red:  So the Iraq War combined all three levels? 

Percy:  Multi-level propaganda.  Which is why it's such a great case study.  Once we've set up the Matrix, we turn the Screen ninety degrees and plot coordinates on the Quadrant back in time.  Which gives us the campaign's Depth-of-Field.  Here we start from the bottom up.  The first two levels are up on the Big Screen.  Set the time parameters by identifying previous changes in the Infrastructure Anchor.  Ownership, type of commodity, direction of trade lane, capital investment, etc.  My rule of thumb for the initial depth is half a decision-cycle, or about a dozen years.  Based on what you find, it can be adjusted to a full decision-cycle of 25 years. 

Red:  So the most recent was late 1996, when Iraq’s oil export terminals re-opened under the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program.  Before that was their closure due to US-enforced international sanctions after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. 

Percy:  As marked on the green D Horizontal.  Next move to the Superstructure, and follow it back in time to identify changes in U.S. statutes on Iraq within this time period.  The first two are self-evident: they are listed as justification within the campaign’s decision point — the Congressional bill approving war.  One is September 2001’s Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40), which launched the Global War on Terror -- a kind of propaganda meta-frame we will definitely return to.  The other is the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338), approved by President Clinton in October 1998.  The third is September 1990’s authorization of the first Iraq War (Public Law 102-1.)  
Red:  So we mark these on the orange C Horizontal, then peer into the Theater?

Percy:  Yep.  Here are those two levels on the Big Screen.   Note the changes in government and legislature.  In America this is very easy: the state’s biennial elections cycle creates a predictable production schedule pegged to the first Tuesday in November in even-numbered years.  Then look for propaganda campaigns connected to Iraq.   We find two.  In 1998 Republican “neoconservatives” launched a campaign pressuring the Clinton White House to punish Iraq for violating sanctions.  And the 1990 campaign by the White House of George H.W. Bush to secure Congressional approval of the first Iraq War.   Mark these on the light blue A Horizontal.   We have established the Iraq War’s Depth-of-Field.  Make sense?

Red:  I think so.  But do you keep this all in your head?

Percy:  Yeah.  You must.  At least in live monitoring and operations.  But externalizing the process is excellent practice.  Now it's time to build our three-dimensional tool -- the Tessera -- off the back of the Screen.  Open up the Depth-of-Field coordinates so each has its own axis, and look for intersections between a Frame component and previous changes within America’s Abstract Space related to Iraq.   Start at the bottom again.  Here is the Infrastructure Plane of the Iraq War Tessera on the Big Screen. 

Red:  So the Target Saddam Hussein connected on both Infrastructure changes: the halting and partial resumption of Iraq oil exports.  As did the U.S. Military, which makes sense -- they enforced the sanctions.  But the goal did not. 

Percy:  Back then, the U.S. did not state as policy the removal of Saddam from power.  And we only work with what we find in the written record.  Next, the Superstructure Plane of the Iraq War Tessera on the Big Screen. 

Red:  The Global War on Terror law included all the components, which makes sense since it was pegged to White House response to 9/11.  But the Iraq Liberation Act is interesting.  It came four years earlier, doesn't include the Instigator or the Establishing Spectacle -- yet has the same objective. 

Percy:  There's an anomaly worth noting.  Now to the Governing Plane of the Iraq War Tessera, up on the Big Screen. 

Red:  No connections at all?   Wasn't Iraq part of any election campaign?

Percy:  Iraq did not appear to factor directly in the party campaigns for the 1992, 1994 and 1996 elections.  In the 1998 mid-term elections nothing changed:  the GOP still controlled the House and the Democrats the Senate.  And let's keep to our formula that we only note objective changes.  Yet, we will see something interesting when we put the final piece of the Tessera, the Propaganda Plane, up on the Big Screen. 

Red:   The Iraq Liberation Act's propaganda campaign is connected to the 1998 elections?

Percy:  Judging by the timing, looks like it.  Congress passed the bill in autumn 1998 and President Clinton signed it into law the week before the November election. 

Red:  And it was instigated by...by the Bush White House?  How's that possible?  Clinton was in the White House.

Percy:  The ILA was instigated by the same group of neo-conservatives and GOP operatives that brought us the Iraq War.  First and foremost Bush's future VP Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.  A lot was going on with propaganda and Middle East policy in 1998.   And on this I speak from experience.  I was covering Iraq during this period.

Red:  Well this is visually impressive, though not intuitive -- at least for this Inside Mind.  So what do we do with the Tessera?

Percy:  With this initial set of coordinates plotted, we get creative.  Compare and contrast.  Look for anything that stands out: patterns, anomalies, contradictions.  I call these Inflection Points.  From them we form a thesis, and layer in more details as we try to answer it.  For example, did planning for the Iraq War start before the Establishing Spectacle of 9/11?  The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 is a red flag, and raises a fundamental question:  why was the neo-conservative wing of the GOP intent on invading Iraq and deposing Saddam?

Red:  C'mon.  Tons of commentary has been written about that.

Percy:  Exactly.  But we must ignore it, and keep to our grammar-free dialectical inquiry.  And that starts with the trade lanes.   Can we build a thesis out of changes in the commodity trade connected to Iraq?

Red:  You mean oil?

Percy:  Of course.  We will return to this period as part of our 4D mapping of global petroleum in relation to events in today's Great Game.  It should reinforce that the Iraq War, underneath a propaganda fairy tale about eradicating WMD, was all about the changing dynamics of the world's most valuable commodity.  And it still has dramatic echoes on today's Screen, never mind the relations of the Anglo-American Empire with its allies and rivals.   

Red:   I'd say.  A watershed moment in recent American history. 

Percy:  Yeah, I'd say so too.  So, Red, now that we have met the Tessera, are you ready to take our dialogue live? 

Red:  Yeah.  Why not? 

Percy:  Great.  Let's jump into the other component of this site, the HyperScreen of the Present, and build our mapping tools.