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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 6 - 2007
The mistakes we continue to make by Michael Spiros 
Daily Times, Friday, February 09, 2007 VIEW: The mistakes we continue to make - Michael Spiros The war in Iraq can no longer be prosecuted on the basis of hubris, of inexperience, and of false 'finishing what we started' statements. The US military strategy is failing, and more troops will not suddenly change the balance, nor be sustainable over the long term The current war in Iraq has been the centrepiece of American foreign policy for most of the past four years. One might then expect the Bush administration to focus on nothing else, ensuring that every action, decision, and public debate concerning the war was carefully thought-out and analysed prior to implementation. Unfortunately I personally witnessed much that suggested the United States actions were not fully thought through. Now, as an independent observer, I see the US continuing to make those same mistakes. This war can no longer be prosecuted on the basis of hubris, of inexperience, and of false 'finishing what we started' statements. The US military strategy is failing, and more troops will not suddenly change the balance, nor be sustainable over the long term. If anything, the strong troop escalation being ordered by President George Bush will only further inflame the anti-American sentiment in those Iraqi people the US claims to be fighting for. And while the American people hear many impassioned pleas from Iraqi and American leaders that we have invested too much blood and treasure to walk away now, that is exactly the wrong reason to stay. America is losing this war. We are strangers in a political culture and tradition that does not easily forgive mistakes, even innocent mistakes committed by strangers with no basic understanding of those cultures and traditions. Our political and cultural strategy in Iraq has been flawed from the beginning. We assigned civilian personnel to Iraq based on their political ideology instead of their regional and linguistic expertise. We listened to the Iraqi elites while ignoring grassroots civil society organisations. We dismantled local nascent Iraqi attempts at democracy because they did not conform to our national timetables. We blamed and subsequently alienated an entire sector of the population without even realising we were doing so, first through the controversial de-Ba'athification process, and later through very public culturally insensitive and inflaming rhetoric. We censored, terrified, and at times physically threatened to destroy an emerging Iraqi press system, while at the same time touting the virtues of freedom of speech. According to the advocacy NGO Reporters Without Borders, at least ten Iraqi journalists have been killed as a direct result of US military action, while countless others have been detained or threatened while performing their journalistic duties. For seven months I sat in the Baghdad Convention Centre listening to the Coalition spokesmen repeatedly articulate how the Coalition's main objective was to bring freedom and democracy to a people that had only known oppression and suffering for 35 years. Yet in the very next breath they would prove those words hollow and false as they continuously blamed all of Iraq's problems on the Sunni minority. Unfortunately this repeated script soon became Iraq's version of the infamous Vietnam era '5 o'clock Follies' to the Baghdad Press Corps. To the Iraqi people it became evidence of how little the Coalition truly cared. We repeatedly proved our hypocrisy by censoring Iraqi press which did not print what we liked. Using the catchall charge of 'inciting violence', we censored and ultimately shut down news outlets publishing material critical of the occupation. There is good evidence to suggest the major Mahdi Army insurrection of spring 2004 began after we shut down the newspaper of their leader Muqtada al-Sadr. The Mahdi Army militia currently presents one of the greatest threats to Coalition and Iraqi forces. I was involved with this action, and I now realise we were wrong in not speaking out in favour of press freedom. Unfortunately our actions taught the Iraqi leadership that freedom of the press is fine as long as it remains convenient. The current Iraqi government continues this practice today, suspending and banning news outlets critical of the leadership and its actions. The Washington Post columnist David Ignatius recently pointed to the new Army field manual of counterinsurgency as a model for a new military strategy. In summarising our military's 'unsuccessful practices', Ignatius identified the No. 1 mistake: "Overemphasise killing and capturing the enemy rather than securing and engaging the populace." Engaging the populace should have been obvious from the start, yet during my 15 months of service I never participated in any actions designed to build relationships with the populace. My actions were wholly aimed at engaging the international press and the Baghdad elite, who while important to our overall mission, could never help win the now clichéd but critical 'hearts and minds'. The major functions of any public diplomacy strategy should focus primarily on the general population, yet we continuously ignored and ultimately failed at this central task. We must re-examine our major military and political goals and objectives, and put in place the right military and diplomatic personnel with the correct language and cultural skill sets, or any new strategies we develop will always fail. One first step must be to recruit more Arabic speakers and Middle East experts, especially native Arabic speaking Arab-Americans. Maintaining only six Arabic speakers out of 1,000 personnel at the US embassy in Baghdad is simply unacceptable. If we truly want to help the Iraqi people, we must first know how to help them. We must discover what they want, not what their political elites and our Administration claim the Iraqi people want. Without this basic knowledge, more American lives will be lost, and our worst fears will come to pass as the current Iraq Civil War expands to destabilise the region. It is not too late to correct our mistakes. But we must acknowledge them and learn from them. Only then can we truly hope to succeed. Michael Spiros served in Iraq as a public affairs officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority and the US Embassy from September 2003 through December 2004. He wrote this article exclusively for Daily Times |