Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
Hearts and minds are being lost by Alice Thomson 
Hearts and minds are being lost By Alice Thomson (Filed: 12/03/2004) It's amazing how quickly the released Guantanamo Five have become celebrities. We already know everything about their first few hours back on British soil - how much they enjoyed their meal of beans on toast, and how their mothers have stopped crying for the first time in two years. Even the publicist Max Clifford has rushed back from supporting the Devon pensioners to capitalise on their fame. The publishing world is falling over itself to tell their stories: to learn how they became involved in a terrible war when all they had been doing was attending a wedding, looking for a bride or enjoying a backpacking trip; to hear how they were incarcerated in orange jump suits in cages in Cuba. The villains of the story will almost certainly be the wicked Americans, for locking them up for two years without a trial and the British Government for failing to secure their release for so long. How did the American and British governments lose the battle of hearts and minds? How can Terry Waite get away with saying that the Americans are as bad as his Beirut kidnappers? Any attempt by either government to protect its citizens from further terrorist attacks or to try to foil potential suicide bombers is now seen as Draconian. After September 11, the British and American people mourned together. The Queen played the Star-Spangled Banner at the Changing of the Guard. The American ambassador received 750,000 letters of condolence from the British public. A poll in The Daily Telegraph suggested that only three per cent of the public believed that America and its allies should refrain from military retaliation. Only four per cent thought Britain should distance itself from America. There was huge sympathy for the plucky Yanks. George W Bush didn't immediately set off round the world, guns smouldering, seeking revenge. He employed Charlotte Beers, who had promoted Head and Shoulders and Uncle Ben's Rice, to sell the allies' case around the world. Her role was to show the White House as tough but caring; to make it clear that this wasn't a war of East vs West: it was about making the world a safer place for everyone. During the invasion of Afghanistan, it looked as though they were winning the propaganda war. The allies made it clear that not only were they trying to stop al-Qa'eda from terrorising the world, but they were also helping to dislodge a despicable regime. The Taliban blew up 1,500-year-old Buddhas, chopped off children's hands, forced women into burqas and hanged men whose beards were too short. But gradually the allies gave up on the war of the hearts. Mrs Beers resigned, citing ill-health. Tony Blair became so convinced of his moral high ground that he failed to realise that he had left his country behind in his crusade. The British public became more anti-American and anti-war. The war in Iraq was the tipping point. Harold Pinter's poem summed it up for many: Here they go again, the Yanks in their armoured parade. The West had forgotten why it had started its war against terrorism. The American and British governments had stopped trying to explain the motives behind their plans. The Prime Minister should have won round hearts by explaining the human rights abuses the Iraqis had suffered under Saddam Hussein. He made one botched attempt to talk about Saddam gassing Kurds and ethnically cleansing the Marsh Arabs, before trying to terrorise the public with tales of weapons of mass destruction. The Hutton inquiry took the country even further away from the real reasons Britain first joined the war against terrorism, and into a fight between the Government and the BBC. The capture of Saddam made little difference to the public. They had had enough of what they now considered to be a phoney war. Senior politicians and security chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic have belatedly been doing their best to turn this tide. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of M15, has privately warned that it is only a matter of time before al-Qa'eda commits another atrocity. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, says he is convinced the terrorists will strike again. This week, the Americans disclosed to The Daily Telegraph why they thought the remaining British prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were too dangerous to release. But the public don't believe any of them - not because they are stiff-upper-lipped Brits, but because nothing has happened yet to change their minds. For three years, the British have been bombarded with stories about gas attacks on the Tube, smallpox scares, dirty bombs, anthrax and cyanide plots, none of which have materialised. It's the boy crying wolf. Few believe either the American or the British governments any more. By the time Mr Blair gave his speech in Sedgefield last week, warning that we are in "mortal danger", most people took no notice. Simon Jenkins, writing in The Spectator, accused him of scaremongering. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, privately admitted last week that the Government was in a no-win situation. He is vilified for demanding new powers to detain would-be suicide bombers, but the moment an attack happens, he knows he will take the blame for failing to be sufficiently prepared. The Australians accepted that the world had changed after the bomb in Bali. The British should have realised it had shifted after the bombs went off in Turkey. Yesterday's horrendous attack in Spain should be another reminder, whichever terrorist group committed the atrocity, of how precarious our world has become. After seeing the carnage, we need to remember that we are all on the same side in the war against terror. Mr Bush and Mr Blair need to open a second front, not against Iran or Syria, but to win back the territory that they have lost in their own countries. |