Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 48: Fabricating the war story – Iran ploy patched into plausibility

The battlefield determines who prevails. Yet long before that verdict is rendered, another contest unfolds: over how the war itself is to be understood. From a plurality of competing explanations, a single narrative, or at least a dominant theme, gradually crystallizes and comes to define the conflict.

How wars acquire their story

At the outset of many wars, governments advance a range of justificatory claims, from strategic interests to security threats and humanitarian concerns. Through narrative consolidation, these competing accounts are gradually subsumed into a single dominant story that comes to constitute the war’s moral identity.

The process and its effects were described long ago by the American journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann. In Public Opinion (1922), he argued that citizens rarely encounter political reality directly. Instead, they apprehend the world through simplified “pictures in their heads,” fashioned by elite discourse and mediated through the press. In this sense, speeches by political leaders do more than announce policy: They begin to shape the narratives through which conflicts are rendered intelligible.

The mechanics of this construction were later laid bare with unusual candor by Edward Bernays, a pioneer of modern public relations. He argued that democratic societies depend upon what he termed the “engineering of consent”: the deliberate formation of public opinion through the orchestration of carefully crafted persuasive narratives.

More recently, critics such as the linguist Noam Chomsky have examined how such narratives circulate through institutional media systems that systematically privilege and amplify elite perspectives while marginalizing alternative voices.

Different thinkers have variously described the mechanism in different ways. Yet the underlying insight remains the same: Wars seldom arise from a single story, but they are often explained – and sustained – by one. Once established, a war’s narrative can become as consequential as the conflict itself.

Stitching the war message together

War narratives typically evolve through a structured sequence. They propagate from inchoate beginnings through a discursive cascade, as successive actors repeat and adapt the message; they crystallize and come to cohere through narrative consolidation, as competing accounts are gradually subsumed into a dominant interpretation; and they acquire force through rhetorical intensification, as the resulting narrative eventually assumes the appearance of not merely plausibility, but inevitability.

As the war message cascades from the decision center to the periphery, successive statements are iteratively refined and brought into mutual alignment around a common narrative core, which is progressively strengthened through accretion.