Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT (NOW 'THE LONG WAR') Year 7 - 2008
Going to War with the Ideas We Have by C Hayden 
Going to War with the Ideas We Have (Blog) By admin by Craig Hayden The recent Washington Post report on $300 million in new Pentagon contracts for strategic communication in Iraq highlights some of the pressing concerns in the contemporary debate over public diplomacy. In particular, posts by Matt Armstrong and Marc Lynch identify the crucial issues at stake with these new contracts. The consequences they elaborate are troublesome. Essentially, the Department of Defense has moved forward into what arguably should have been the domain of the Department of State, to organize a communication campaign to influence Iraqis that involves the placement of content in media programming that does not identify the source (U.S. contractors). Strategic communication thus has shifted from a strategic emphasis on engagement with foreign publics and enabling media-based democratic institutions to a tactical campaign of influence in the theater of military operation. For Matt, this episode reflects the steady migration of public diplomacy policies and resources from the State Department to Defense, and in many ways punctuates the utter failure of the State Department to offer a coherent strategy and allocation of resources to public diplomacy. Matt is a student of history, and recognizes the pivotal role played by actors other than the DoD in mobilizing the resources of Cold War public diplomacy. It is one more shining example of the significant failure of the U.S. Government to come to grips with the present need and commit the resources necessary to engage in the Second Great War of Ideas that began in earnest nearly a decade ago. I'm still not entirely sure what sort of State Department Matt dreams of for the current struggle, but I sense that it would involve such a significant re-allocation of the State Department's resources, that would reflect a serious re-imagination of wh! at the State Department can and should do in a globalized, media saturated world. Instead, we have a resource-rich Pentagon, reluctantly assuming the mantle of strategic communication because there really are no alternative institutional constituents. Even the misconceived National Strategic Communication Center dreamed up by Senator Brownback is still only a proposal. The Pentagon faces operational constraints that must be addressed with at least a tactical approach to communication with foreign audiences, and thus has proceeded in a vacuum of public diplomacy authority. Matt's argument gets even more incisive when he points to the production of knowledge about public diplomacy. Simply put, the Pentagon has cultivated internal institutional competencies that dwarf the rest of the government. (To be fair, I should exclude the intelligence community here). The DoD trains experts, shares experience, and attempts to push understanding of the broader issues of ! strategic communication. The fact that this is the only U.S. government body to build sustained, knowledge forming communities about the salient issues of strategic communication is not only depressing. It reflects a real lacuna in the commitment of the U.S. government to the principled vision of public diplomacy that had animated Cold War institutions like the USIA and outlets like the VOA. I'm not saying that the State Department is doing nothing. James Glassman has expressed some good ideas, and there are promising transparent initiatives like the regional media hubs that are worth developing. But as this summer's public diplomacy Advisory Commission report observes, public diplomacy is clearly not a central priority. Leadership can change this, of course. Marc Lynch offers an even more distressing argument. He correctly recognizes the implications of the global media context for these Iraqi media placements. Ubiquitous networks ! of information and media content would make it difficult to mask the source of programming. Put another way, it's hard to be secret in a networked global society and it makes the attempt to circumvent transparency even more antithetical to the supposed value objectives of public diplomacy. When the payments are exposed, as they inevitably are in today's global media environment (for example, with page one stories in the Washington Post), they then discredit not only the specific messages but also every other pro-U.S. message which will quite reasonably then be dismissed as "paid for by the United States." An alternative here, of course, could be to accept the credibility hit and simply acknowledge the source. This would be purposively transparent, and while likely to draw critics, would at least be an open engagement in the local "contest of ideas." Arab audiences are already suspicious of U.S. involvement in conspiratorial m! anipulation. Why add fuel to this fire? To operate behind a façade of credibility through concealed media placements is antithetical to the "warts and all" spirit of public diplomacy. Of course, this is what Matt was getting at in lamenting the Pentagon as the reluctant actor picking up the mantle of public diplomacy. It's not supposed to be their job. However, some might argue that I am conflating two concepts here - strategic communication and public diplomacy, and that we should not regard these Pentagon contracts as violating some standard of how to conduct public diplomacy. Fair enough. But what does it say about our over-arching "strategic communications" profile, a floating signifier that I guess encompasses public diplomacy? What does it mean when high-profile strategic communication is more prominently represented by a commitment to information operations? I'm not saying that public diplomacy is a concept that should unerringly cleave to an unrealistic depiction of respectful dialogue and engagement. Its a! dvocacy component is about the moving of attitudes; about utilizing the effective instruments of persuasion. But as Matt suggested, there is no institutional counterweight to the Pentagon's level of commitment to strategic communication, and that's a problem that remains to be rectified. We should not be surprised that public diplomacy is still haunted by suspicions of propaganda. At the same time, the U.S. should be aware that the contemporary global media environment requires a strategic realignment of priorities and resources above and beyond the Pentagon. Public diplomacy, and indeed policy-making debates about public diplomacy, has a global audience! In the interim, the tactical maneuvers of media operations stand in for our most visible public diplomacy ventures. Oddly enough, this might sound like support for an entity like the one Brownback proposed. I'm not sold on that idea, but I do think that an organization should be vested with the authority, in! dependence, and resources required to manage (and execute) the commitments of public diplomacy. A dispersed constellation of agencies, departments, and governmental constituents doesn't seem to be getting the job done. And of course, the mandate and policy tools remain an important concern - parameters that would sustain the perception of public diplomacy as a tool of purposive, respectful engagement, not of base manipulation, advertising, or the communication arm of an existential war. But this is admittedly a wish-list, and I think we'll need a new administration to truly gauge the possibilities for transforming U.S. public diplomacy. |