Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
In the War on Terrorism, New Life for Propaganda by Elizabeth Becker 
In the War on Terrorism, New Life for Propaganda New York Times November 11, 2001 THE CAMPAIGN By ELIZABETH BECKER WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - Late last month, Karen P. Hughes, the White House communications director, met with her British counterpart to join forces in what may be the most ambitious wartime communications effort since World War II. The two officials agreed that there was an urgent need to combat the Taliban's daily denunciations of the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan, vitriol that was going unchallenged across the Islamic world. Soon they had set up a round-the- clock war news bureau in Pakistan and a network of war offices linking Washington, London and Islamabad that help develop a "message of the day." The highly orchestrated communications effort is a first step in a broader campaign to create a 21st- century version of the muscular propaganda war that the United States waged in the 1940's. Matching old-fashioned patriotism to the frantic pace of modern communications, the Bush administration is trying to persuade audiences here and abroad to support the war. At the same time, it is trying to control the release of information about military intelligence and operations. To reach foreign audiences, especially in the Islamic world, the State Department brought in Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive, who is using her marketing skills to try to make American values as much a brand name as McDonald's hamburgers or Ivory soap. The department's efforts are also meant to counter the propaganda of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. The foreign message crafted in Ms. Beers's new shop at Foggy Bottom dovetails with the domestic news management led by Ms. Hughes at the White House. From a nerve center set up two weeks ago in the Old Executive Office Building, the top communications directors of the administration - including veterans who ran war rooms for presidential campaigns - talk every morning to keep one step ahead of the news from the enemy. "Before the war room it was like spitting in the ocean," said Mary Matalin, chief political adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and a participant in the communications effort. "Now we can collect all the utterances, proclamations from around the world that will buttress our arguments - this week that the Taliban has hijacked a peaceful religion - and get them out, get them noticed in real time." The effort to cobble together a new global approach is a backhanded acknowledgment that Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban are formidable propaganda foes, having spent years winning the hearts and minds of much of the Muslim world. It is also an acknowledgment that propaganda is back in fashion after the Clinton administration and Congress tried to cash in on the end of the cold war by cutting back public diplomacy overseas, especially government radio broadcasts into former communist countries, to balance the budget. The other side of this communications war is the equally historical military role of limiting information that could erode public support or help the enemy, while also running psychological operations in the war zone. The Pentagon has imposed a tight lid on sensitive military news, particularly about special operations, trying to walk the fine line of saying enough to reassure the public that the war is on target but keeping the news media at bay. Veteran communicators of other wars are amazed at the limited information and limited access to the battlefield. Barry Zorthian, the chief spokesman for the American war effort in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, said this conflict is "much tighter than Vietnam." "Saigon was almost wide open compared to this," Mr. Zorthian said. "We gave out much more information, and we had no real problems with the media giving away information that would harm the troops." On the battlefield, the military has also heated up its psychological operations. Air Force planes drop propaganda leaflets that describe the United States as a friend of the Afghan people, and then drop food packets to try to drive home the point. Planes act as airborne radio stations, broadcasting warnings to civilians to stay out of the way. Even aspects of the Pentagon briefings can be part of the psychological warfare. At one briefing, officials showed night-vision video of an Army Ranger raid in Afghanistan, in part to show the Taliban and Mr. bin Laden's terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, that the United States military could land and carry out operations on the ground. In this new effort to bridge the classic tension between controlling information while promoting the message to a diverse audience, the administration is reaching back to the icons of the "greatest generation" of World War II. The Bush administration is revving up foreign-language radio broadcasts behind the amorphous enemy lines and asking Hollywood to pitch in. On Sunday, Karl Rove, a senior political adviser to President Bush, will visit Hollywood, where he is expected to receive a warm welcome from producers and directors eager to show their patriotism. Sean Daniel, a former studio executive and producer of "The Mummy," said he expected Hollywood to help. "We'll contribute in a modern way what was done in the Second World War," Mr. Daniel said. "There has to be a way for the most popular culture on earth to help spread or help focus on our commonly shared beliefs, like the fact that what we're doing is right." But the World War II propaganda effort put Hitler front and center, effectively using radio, film and even cartoons to depict the dictator as the personification of the enemy. The Bush administration, by contrast, has shied away from making Mr. bin Laden the most prominent image in its information war, airbrushing him out, at least for now. Given the pace of communications in the 21st century, that may change. Finding a New Life For the Tools of the Trade In the summer of 1994, Mr. Rove flew to Prague on a mission to save Radio Free Europe. Then a member of the board overseeing the government stations that once broadcast into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Mr. Rove was fighting both President Bill Clinton, who considered Radio Free Europe a relic of the cold war, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers who wanted to close it down. "Karl Rove saw for himself how powerful that radio had been, bringing in the news about those communist countries to their own people in their own language, and it made it crystal clear to him that it had to be saved," said Kevin Klose, who was the head of Radio Free Europe then and is now president of National Public Radio. Radio Free Europe was saved, but only after cutting $125 million from its $200 million budget. Not surprisingly, Mr. Rove, now the central political adviser to President Bush in today's communications campaign, is trying to put foreign language broadcasts back at the center of the war effort. "It's time to bring back the idea of an Edward R. Murrow in Arabic, modernized of course, using satellites and shortwave, and Karl Rove understands all this perfectly," Mr. Klose said. Foreign-language broadcasts are just one of the old ideas being dusted off and given a new life in an effort to recreate the kind of propaganda campaigns that were waged against the Axis powers in World War II and against communism in the cold war. Like the old Office of War Information in World War II, the administration has sought to harmonize the daily message about the progress of the war through the creation of the White House war room. Representatives of various agencies work together there, including officials from the Pentagon, Health and Human Services and the new Office of Homeland Security. In addition to enlisting the help of Hollywood, another old idea being recast is enlarging the message overseas through American diplomacy. This was once the domain of the United States Information Agency, but that agency was reduced and folded into the State Department in the Clinton administration. Charlotte Beers became under secretary of state last month to help sell the American war to the Islamic world. She quickly put Christopher Ross, a former ambassador fluent in Arabic, on the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera to counter a videotaped message from Mr. bin Laden, and has put Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Egyptian television to defend the American bombing campaign and Egypt's role in the war on terrorism. Vice President Cheney gave an interview on Friday to the British tabloid newspaper The Sun in that same effort to get the message past the elite. This week Ms. Beers sent a "catalog of lies" through the State Department to Pakistani newspapers to dispute Taliban allegations, including the claim that the United States was purposefully targeting civilians. And Ms. Beers has begun addressing groups of foreign journalists in Washington, many from Muslim nations. Those sessions are closed to American journalists. "We can't give out our propaganda to our own people," said Price Floyd, deputy director of media outreach at the State Department. This new concerted information campaign, with messages put together jointly by American and British government communications directors in the war offices, called coalition information centers, in Washington, London and Islamabad, is trying to counter enemy propaganda about civilian casualties and the progress of the war. Among some people who have played a spokesman's role before, there are doubts about whether journalists here and abroad will accept these new messages. "I'd tone this down," said Frank Mankiewicz, a former Democratic spokesman now with the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton. "This is not the Second World War, it's something different. It's trying to fit one kind of struggle into another form and it's not working. It's too obvious." There are also doubts about how well the United States message is being received in the Islamic world. One challenge has been reaching across the cultural divide. As part of its psychological operations, the military has been dropping leaflets over Afghanistan and broadcasting radio programs from aircraft meant to encourage the defections of Taliban soldiers by showing the cruelty and tyranny of the regime. Originally, some leaflets were designed with a more direct message - telling Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters to surrender or risk certain death. But culture experts working on the military's psychological operations team balked, saying an Afghan soldier would read a demand to surrender as an invitation to become a coward and lose his honor. The wording was changed. Keeping Tight Control On Information and Expectations Even before the bombing began on Oct. 7, news organizations had begun pushing for access to information and troops. But in the days and weeks since, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, while officially endorsing the Persian Gulf war guidelines for news media coverage of combat, has enforced policies ensuring that journalists have little or no access to independent information about military strategies, successes and failures. Pentagon correspondents say their usual sources have taken Secretary Rumsfeld's warnings about leaks to heart and are reticent where they had once been forthcoming in giving guidance to reporters. In addition, after-action access to the troops engaged in bombing or other combat missions has been almost nonexistent. While there are hundreds of reporters in countries like Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states, Uzbekistan and the northern areas of Afghanistan - all places where United States troops have been deployed - the Central Command has yet to allow reporters to have any contact with the troops most involved. It is not just information that the Pentagon leadership is keeping under tight control. It is also expectations. At a briefing on Thursday, Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, the commander in chief of the Central Command, was asked, "At the end of a month, now, what can we show that says, `Hey, we're winning?' " General Franks rejected the premise, choosing instead to outline his objectives in the broadest terms: "Our job has to do with terrorist organizations, networks and global reach, and it has to do with the command and control of the Taliban." The desire to keep information and expectations at a minimum stems directly from the experience of the Vietnam War, longtime military reporters and military historians say. The Johnson administration "oversold greatly the degree of success" of the war before the Tet offensive in 1968, said Don Oberdorfer, a former diplomatic and military correspondent for The Washington Post. The unrealistic expectations turned the Tet battles - arguably a United States military victory - into a massive public relations defeat. "A whole generation of military officers grew up believing that the press was the problem, if not the enemy," Mr. Oberdorfer said. And with public support of the Afghan action and trust of the Bush administration high, news organizations have little leverage. As the Army's senior historian, William Hammond, said, "History tells us that in a very popular war the government doesn't have to justify a whole lot." Nonetheless, on Oct. 18, Mr. Rumsfeld said he "had no problem" with the nine- year-old "Principles of Coverage" Vice President Cheney agreed to when he was defense secretary. Among other things, the principles state that the military, as quickly as practicable, provide reporters with independent access to combat operations - under the stricture that reporting would never compromise missions or endanger troops or intelligence-gathering operations. But leading journalists say Mr. Rumsfeld's acceptance of the guidelines is in name only. Reporters have been allowed aboard three aircraft carriers and, briefly, on one Marine vessel in the Arabian Sea. But, said Sandy Johnson, the Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press: "Pilots won't tell us where they've been, what they dropped, what their target was. Nothing has changed." Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, who helped draft the 1992 guidelines, said last week that they "have been accepted but aren't being lived up to." Mr. Hoyt added, "American forces are engaged in combat overseas, and we are basically shut out." Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said on Friday that the guidelines had been communicated to commanders in the field as "broad policy guidance," adding, "We leave it to them at the local level to know best how to implement that." Thus far, news organizations' only response has been increasingly frustrated questioning of the policy in weekly meetings with Victoria Clarke, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman. No unified challenge has been made by top editors, broadcast news presidents or publishers. Some news executives, in fact, are as worried about public opinion as they are about the government's lid on information. Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, recently issued a memorandum saying that reports about civilian casualties in the bombing campaign must be balanced with mention of the Sept. 11 attacks. An International Audience Grows Increasingly Skeptical Perhaps the clearest sign of rising German and European skepticism toward the United States' declared war on terrorism is the warning to readers that the Frankfurter Rundschau, a leading liberal newspaper, has run every day since the bombing began. "Substantial amounts of information about current military actions and their consequences is subject to censorship by parties to the conflict," the warning says. "In many cases, an independent confirmation of such information is not possible for this newspaper." Germany is one of the United States's strongest supporters in the battle against terrorism. But as in other European countries, the initial outpouring of grief and solidarity is giving way to pointed questions about American strategy and dissatisfaction with many of the answers. If the United States has a public relations problem among its allies, it boils down to this: many Europeans feel they have precious little information they can trust. They rely on conflicting and equally unverifiable claims from Pentagon briefings and Taliban news conferences, and are increasingly unwilling to believe either side. "We are experiencing the same problem that we had in the gulf war - no pictures," said Ulrich Deppendorf, Berlin bureau chief for Germany's ARD television network. "We have to rely on what the U.S. government claims, or on what the Taliban via Al Jazeera claims, or on information from the Pakistani news agency." The United States has paid little attention so far to shoring up its message in Europe. The government initially rebuffed offers of military help, but that view has changed sharply in the last week. The British made the case that European involvement might bolster political support and the United States sought and received pledges of military aid from Italy, Germany and Turkey. But Europeans, especially Germans, have been baffled by the way Americans have made their requests or explained their objectives. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany pushed Parliament to agree to make 3,900 soldiers available for missions in or around Afghanistan - potentially the first use of German troops outside Europe since World War II. Germans were then flummoxed when Mr. Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that the United States had never specifically asked for German troops but rather the country's "broad support." European popular support for the United States's campaign has waned noticeably in the last few weeks, while newspapers have given quite prominent play to pictures of bombing damage and accounts of civilian casualties. British support for military action has declined to about two-thirds from three- quarters, while French support has dropped to about half, from two-thirds shortly after Sept. 11. "The public sees continuous bombing of buildings and they see pictures from Al Jazeera of small villages that have been destroyed, and that has made things immensely difficult," said Helmut Lippelt, a Green Party legislator who supports continued military action. But Mr. Lippelt said the United States had hurt its own cause by being too murky about its plans. "The big danger in all this is the impression that bombs will keep up endlessly and that we will be dealing with a 10-year quagmire," he said. "One has to be clear about what this is about, and be clear that one understands those worries." European news media get most of their information directly from Washington, and it is Washington that is frustrating them. "Our greatest pressure is that we have no images," said Auberi Edler, a foreign news editor at France 2. "The only interesting images we get are from Al Jazeera. It's bad for everybody." European journalists have also become suspicious that the American news media have been co-opted by the government, or at least swept up by patriotism. "The journalists and the media directors suffer, in my opinion, from a `post Vietnam patriotic syndrome,' " wrote Freimut Duve, a German who heads the office on free speech at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna. Mr. Duve argued that it was a mistake for the United States to declare a war on "terrorism," and that a clear focus on Osama bin Laden would have made the endgame easier to understand. Hungry for News, Blanketed in Leaflets When one nation is bombing another, it is difficult to convince the bombed of the virtue of the bombers. In Afghanistan, this has been America's challenge. Planes have been dropping leaflets as well as explosives. One flier offers justification: "On September 11th, the United States was the target of terrorist attacks, leaving no choice but to seek justice for these horrible crimes." Another provides an advisory: "We have no wish to hurt you, the innocent people of Afghanistan. Stay away from military installations, government buildings, terrorist camps, roads, factories or bridges. If you are near these places, then you must move away from them. Seek a safe place, and stay well away from anything that might be a target." Another is soul-searching: "Do you enjoy being ruled by the Taliban? Are you proud to live a life of fear? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations a terrorist training site?" It is hard to assess the effect of the leafletting. From the testimony of recent refugees, most Afghans are more focused on their own fight for survival than the war against terrorism. As bombs hit the cities, people flee to the villages. As bombs hit the villages, people flee to refugee camps along the borders, arriving destitute, frightened and hungry. People are eager for news but information is scarce. Television has been banned by the Taliban; there are no newspapers to speak of. Radio has been people's primary link to the world. The Taliban's Radio Shariat was quickly silenced by the air raids. The United States would like to provide its own substitute. Last week, Congress voted to create Radio Free Afghanistan, a station that would beam Afghan versions of entertainment and American versions of the news. In the meantime, a special aircraft occasionally broadcasts from the sky. Many Afghans are accustomed to listening to the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America, which offer news in the local languages. While the reporting is generally considered unbiased, editorials may not be regarded as similarly so. Recent Voice of America editorials have had much the same tone as the leaflets. On Wednesday, the Voice of America warned hungry Afghans that food had been stolen from United Nations warehouses and that the Taliban may have poisoned it. "It is hard to believe that anyone - even those as evil as the Taliban leaders - would ever poison food intended for starving people," the editorial said. "But then, who believed before Sept. 11 that anyone would hijack civilian airliners and deliberately crash them into buildings to kill thousands of innocent people?" In Pakistan, the battle for the headlines largely seems to have been won by Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador in Islamabad. Virtually every weekday, he has hosted a news conference from the embassy's veranda, making allegations about American "atrocities" to a huge audience of foreign journalists desperate for news from Afghanistan. A few days ago, the government of Pakistan, America's frontline ally against the Taliban, told Mullah Zaeef that his barrage of vitriol was outside the norms of diplomatic conduct. He was asked to curb his hospitality to the press. The allies announced their own effort to counter the Taliban spin, opening the war office in Islamabad in an effort to immediately respond to accusations. Islamabad is 10 hours ahead of Washington. By the time the Pentagon has issued its rebuttals, the newspapers in many countries have already gone to press. A Place for bin Laden In Propaganda History Turning civilian passenger planes into missiles will not be the only benchmark set by Mr. bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization. In the annals of propaganda, Mr. bin Laden will be remembered, too, for the audacity he showed by leaping onto the television screens of the world only hours after American bombs started falling on Afghanistan. This was a man wanted by the most powerful nation on earth. And there Mr. bin Laden was, suddenly, on videotape, sitting calmly before a rocky outcrop, his only weapon a Kalashnikov rifle. He delivered a statement about Allah having struck America in its highest places, wished the killer pilots godspeed to paradise and vowed that this was just the start of an apocalypse. "You have to choose your side," he told the world's one billion Muslims, and leaned back contentedly for a sip of water. From that instant the propaganda war was joined, and it is far from clear in the Muslim world that Mr. bin Laden is losing it. Although American television networks have been persuaded not to run Mr. bin Laden's tapes unedited, the Islamic audience he cares about can still see and hear him. For this audience, there is Al Jazeera, the CNN of the Arab world, chosen as the recipient of his tapes. The text of his latest tape, in which he attacked moderate Arab leaders and the United Nations, was on the front page in newspapers across the Muslim world, and on scores of Arab Internet sites. Beyond that, the message has been broadcast, and rebroadcast, from the pulpits of myriad mosques. Racks in the bookstores of cities across the Islamic world are filled with books about Mr. bin Laden, and with magazines that carry his photograph on their covers. The evidence from the Muslim world is that Mr. bin Laden's hatred for America and his call for a holy war has a vast, receptive audience. Opinion polls show it, and anecdotal evidence confirms it. In Pakistan, America's reluctant partner in the war on terrorism, it is hard to find anybody who does not condemn the Sept. 11 attacks. But in slum sections of Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar, people with almost nothing line up to buy bin Laden T-shirts. This article was reported and written by Edmund L. Andrews, Felicity Barringer, Barry Bearak and John F. Burns, with Ms. Becker. |