The invasion and occupation of Iraq has spawned a cottage industry of books ranging from tomes with 20-20 hindsight to rhetorical rants calling on the free world to take out anyone who looks askance at the Bush administration.

While Canada, perhaps due to this country’s own ambiguity during the crisis, has not matched the torrent of titles appearing south of the border, there are a number of home-grown analyses soon to hit Canadian bookshelves. Among those is Paul Rutherford’s pleasantly accessible exploration of how the invasion of Iraq was marketed as a product much like hairspray or a new convertible, and how the target audience – news viewers —– became vicarious consumers of another nation’s tragedy.

Based on an analysis of both print and electronic media, as well as interviews with a series of Toronto-area individuals, Weapons produces some startling observations about the nature of media, and how our relationship to the world is often defined through the lens of a small band of Pentagon-approved reporters.

The book begins with an overview of how one of the 20th century’s most lasting legacies – the public relations industry and mass marketing of products and ideas – played such a key role in attempts to build support for the U.S. invasion. He proceeds to tear the veil off much-hyped stories, such as Jessica Lynch’s rescue and the toppling of the Hussein statue, and reveal the true propaganda targets of the phrase “shock and awe.”

Rutherford’s concern here is not so much the Bush policy (he would have supported the war if it had had the UN seal of approval) as how that policy was prepared, tested, presented, received, withdrawn, and then retested and redeployed. It is this process, he asserts, that raises larger questions about the state of democracy, and whether we have truly entered what he calls the propaganda state.

Rutherford’s analysis occasionally bogs down in polling statistics, but this does not detract from his disconcerting message that bombs over Baghdad were sold to us like beer.