Surge of facts

In a July 12, 2007, conference call with bloggers, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow reportedly said:

"We need a surge of facts. That's one of the things we’re going to be working on. I’m going to be doing it from the podium.... So far we have had very few visuals to confirm what Americans want to believe. We have an amazing and heroic American military... The only way to change public opinion [on Iraq] is to present a fuller, more nuanced and more accurate picture."

"We’re gonna present bad news too. You have to... But it’s a miracle anyone supports the war, based on the characterizations that have been painted."

"We're not gonna spin, but we're going to provide real hard data."

Also on July 12, 2007, Snow told Rush Limbaugh that General David Petraeus's much-anticipated September 2007 "'interim report is the beginning of a new kind of surge and it's a surge of facts, because what’s happened with a lot of the war in Iraq, as you know, Rush, is that people get pictures of dead bodies, but they don’t get any sense of what’s actually going on on the ground,' ... adding, '[W]e need a surge in facts.'"

On July 24, 2007, President George W. Bush, while speaking to troops at Charleston Air Force Base, "delivered what some have called his longest, most detailed argument yet that Al Qaeda in Iraq is linked to the central Al Qaeda organization ... [arguing] that a new unclassified report clearly indicated a connection between the Al Qaeda who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is largely believed to be composed of a strong majority of Iraqi nationals," Tom A. Peter wrote in the Christian Science Monitor.

"The facts are that Al Qaeda terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they're fighting us in Iraq and across the world and they are plotting to kill Americans here at home again," Bush said. "Those who justify withdrawing our troops from Iraq by denying the threat of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its ties to Osama bin Laden ignore the clear consequences of such a retreat," Jim Rutenberg and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times.

"Kevin Sullivan, the White House communications director, said the speech was devised as a surge of facts' meant to rebut critics who say Mr. Bush is trying to rebuild support for the war by linking the Iraq group and the one led by Mr. bin Laden," Rutenberg and Mazzetti wrote.

Rebranding the war on terror redux

On May 24, 2005, President George W. Bush said while in Greece:

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

It was President Bush who, in his June 28, 2007, speech at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, appears to have rephrased himself:

"...we're not doing a very good job with the propaganda battle around the world. We created it, and we're losing. And that's one thing we've got to spend a lot of time on..."

Resources and articles

Related SourceWatch articles

• Bloggers' Roundtable
• Operation Iraqi Freedom: Year Five
• restating
• troop surge in Iraq
• war propaganda

External articles

• Brian Faughnan, "Tony Snow: Next Operation Will be Factual Surge," The Weekly Standard, July 12, 2007.
• Dr. Steven Taylor, "More Delusional Talk About the Lack of 'Good News' out of Iraq," PoliBlog, July 12, 2007.