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Rolls Royce Lecture 2002 at Cardiff University by Prof Taylor This transcript is taken from a recording of the lecture, one of eight lectures delivered at the Centre for Journalism Studies, Cardiff University, spring 2002. Bear in mind it was delivered orally from notes. The Changing Face of Military Propaganda Prof Philip M. Taylor, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds I am going to talk today about military propaganda. We are in the middle of quite a large propaganda war at the moment and it's very rarely a good idea for academics to engage in instantaneous historical analysis. Journalists have to do this, and in the process they become a part of the propaganda war, because it's very difficult to stand back from it. One of the difficulties I think that the media have had is understanding what is going on. They tend to frame current world events in quite conventional terms and this is where the use of the word 'war' has been a real problem, because this 'war on terror' is something new - a 'new kind of war' is what President Bush calls it. I don't like the use of the word war, as war is normally interpreted to mean armed conflict between two or more nation states and this isn't that. Afghanistan might have looked prominent but it's a war against an international terrorist network and that's new. So I prefer the word conflict. Initially it was a manhunt but it has turned into a war to overthrow a foreign government in Kabul, which again is new. This kind of conflict, strike, whatever you want to call it, transcends traditional geopolitical boundaries. So within that context there were early mistakes in journalism's framing, and its fulfilment of its role to help public understanding. The use of the word 'crusade' was a disaster and it's a disaster that it will take a long time to recover from, especially in the Islamic world. Then also the original campaign plan was code-named 'infinite justice', which has particular resonances in the Middle East. I will talk a little bit about that later. So what kind of war, for our framework of understanding, are we talking about? An analogy has been made with the war on drugs. Well, I hope this one's a bit more successful than that's been. It's a war really against an idea or a concept by a non-state actor. I think the Cold War is a far better analogy. It's a war almost of ideologies, a war of ideas, between what I call the triumph of free market liberal capitalism at the end of the Cold War and forces against that development, particularly forces which are rooted in traditional societies and traditional thoughts rather than modern or postmodern ideas. So if we take the analogy of the Cold War, how long will it last? Well, you've heard George W. Bush say we're in this for the long haul and I suspect it may last as long as the Cold War did. It may last most of our lifetimes. The military front is only one element of this conflict, and of course now that the Taliban have been overthrown, where next? People say it may be Iraq, but already I think people have forgotten that Iraq has been a war zone for at least the last three years and arguably the last 10 years. A big question that is being asked in London and Washington and elsewhere is whether public opinion in democratic societies has the stomach for casualties. We saw the fuss recently over the bombing in Afghanistan, over collateral damage, which was really a very tiny part of the story but was given prominent media coverage. So this is my framework for you to try to understand what's going on and what will be going on for perhaps the next 10, 20 years if democratic publics have got the stomach for a long fight. We have six fronts. The first three are a diplomatic front, an intelligence front, and a financial front. Now, already you can see on those three fronts none of those particular conflicts are particularly attractive in media terms. Diplomacy: difficult for TV in particular to handle. What is diplomacy on television? It's guys in suits rolling up in limousines outside buildings, going inside, shaking hands with other people sitting around a table and then that's it for television. Intelligence, which is where the main front is: you just won't know about the intelligence front until, for example, the terrorists are actually arrested in Rome over the alleged poisoning of Rome's water supply, because governments just don't talk about intelligence or special forces. The other fronts are law enforcement, the military front and the humanitarian front. Law enforcement attracts more media interest, largely about the dangers of undermining civil liberties and human rights. We have seen the fuss over the Guantanamo Bay base prisoners. The military front is going to be the sexiest, if you like, in terms of television, but not if special forces are constantly involved because it is their policy not to take the media with them. Then we have the humanitarian front, much of which was made at the start and which is only now beginning to occur on a serious basis, but which is not attracting much media interest either. So this is going to be a very different kind of conflict for the media and it's going to be a conflict which is punctuated perhaps with episodic military campaigns while the real war will be fought elsewhere, outside the public domain. I suppose the best analogy I can give you for this is that during the Gulf War of 1991 global media were obsessed with video game-like footage issued by the military of precision-guided bombs hitting exactly what they aimed at. We discovered after the war that those smart weapons were only eight per cent of the entire ordinance dropped on Iraq, but we focused on the high-tech war at the expense of understanding the real war. And I think this is going to be a similar type of thing from the point of view of the media. The propaganda war will play out on all of these fronts. It will usually be conducted through the global media. Then on the military front we have what are called psychological operations-the British call it information support, because they think psychological operations is a phrase which conjures up, if you have seen the movie, John Travolta asking the general's daughter, who works in psychological operations, 'What do you do?' and her answering, 'I fuck with people's minds.' It's that kind of popular association that you are dealing with-dirty tricks. I want to try to challenge a bit of that. What we've also got now is a growing recognition that what is needed in modern kinds of war is what's called information warfare or, if preferred, information operations. That includes strikes against radio and television. I was fascinated by the world-wide outcry when Radio/Television Serbia was attacked in the Kosovo conflict. I think it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of military doctrine regarding information warfare or information operations. The military think in terms of command and control and they are now talking about taking command and control of the information-full spectrum dominance. If you work with the military, as I do, you hear a lot of this jargon. What they mean by full spectrum dominance is controlling the flow of information in and out of the conflict space, whether it be by satellites or by sending e-mails or sending viruses into computers. Full spectrum also means taking out enemy television stations. In World War Two, in industrialised warfare, the targets of bombing raids were factories, submarine bases, that kind of thing. In information warfare, the targets are power plants, telecommunication systems, television stations, video stations. The British, the United States, an increasing number of other Nato countries, China and Russia are developing professional psychological operations. They all basically see it as an information activity directed at foreign audiences. It is expressly forbidden, for example, for the Americans to conduct psychological operations against their own people, which is why they are not very good at it on the Internet, because the Internet is sort of everywhere. If you're not allowed to conduct this against US citizens, you have to stop US citizens coming across it on the Internet. So that's an interesting block on their activity. Why do this? Well, in the official definition it's quite clear: to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behaviour favourable to the originators' objectives. That's what makes it propaganda, because most academics define propaganda as practitioners do, by reference to the intention. Take as an example Commando Solo. Commando Solo is a flying radio and television platform operated by the 193rd Pennsylvania National Guard. The United States has six of them which operate under special operations command, so therefore it's very difficult to find information about them. Psy-ops people are part of special forces. Here's an example of the very first leaflet that was dropped over Afghanistan, advertising the frequencies that Commando Solo was going to be broadcasting on. Once you have taken control of the Afghanistan information space, i.e. by taking out the radio stations, you then fill that vacuum with your messages. I don't know if you find these messages innocuous or naive: 'Remember, we are here to help you to be free from this terrorism.' The second leaflet that was dropped translates as 'The partnership of nations is here to help you,' although the partnership seems to be pretty limited to British and US forces in the early stages. I see 50 Greek soldiers have just been dispatched to Kabul this week so I suppose it is a genuine partnership now. It's obvious what this stuff is trying to do. The early leaflets that were dropped are not informed by local cultural local traditions to the same degree as the later ones, which obviously had local input. They are largely the Americans imposing their view of what is going on in Afghanistan on the Afghan people. There is a sort of golden rule with psychological operations that you don't lie. It doesn't mean you have to tell the truth, but if you get caught telling a lie your credibility goes and nobody ever believes anything you ever say again. There was a leaflet they dropped over Kosovo which did lie. It said, 'The Apaches are coming,' and the Apaches were never dispatched. In Taliban areas they dropped leaflets saying we are going to drop the bomb pictured on the top left, called a daisy cutter, a powerful conventional non-nuclear weapon. There is a $25 million reward, which is lot of money in Afghanistan-you would be surprised that people would try to collect it. There is one with the number plate of one of Omar's cars taken from satellite (he got away on a motorbike). There were 29 million leaflets dropped over the Iraqis in the Gulf War. In the Kosovo conflict, which lasted about as long, there were 103 million leaflets dropped over Serbia and Kosovo. I still haven't got the figures on this current campaign, but this scale of leafletting reflects the kind of quality of digital equipment they have got to do this kind of message. About a month into the campaign, the leaflets begin to change a bit. One features chess, a very popular game in Afghanistan. Leaflets start attempting to divide the Taliban and the international foreign fighters working for al-Qaeda away from the Afghan people, because they're beginning to understand-and I hope our military friends bear this in mind-that inside Afghanistan there is tremendous suspicion of foreigners, whoever they are, Russians or Americans, including the al-Qaeda's international terrorists. This is an attempt to say, we are a partnership of nations here to help you, to give you your country back. The Tora Bora leaflet again was quite interesting. It features an A130 gunship, which has a 105-millimetre gun on the side of it, a tank gun on the side of the plane. It's quite terrifying. Another leaflet repeats what they tried during the Kosovo campaign about Milosevic and his family. They dropped leaflets saying he's stealing all your money. Here they've found an old photograph of bin Laden in a suit and beard. It looks like it's been faked to me, which might suggest a departure from the old rule about telling the truth (or rather telling 'your truth'). What that is trying to do is identify him as a hypocrite, which is what of course he accuses the West of, by saying, you know this western man is not all what he says he is. In terms of psychological operations what we are really talking about is tactical information warfare. We have now, as yesterday's papers reveal, an Office of Strategic Influence being formed in the Department of Defense. Now the Office of Strategic Influence is a euphemism for an official propaganda department. One of the reasons that they are gearing up for strategic information warfare is to counter many of the things being said about the US and to try and help to explain to many of the US public why they hate us so much. Now what's been very interesting is that, despite the shocking nature of those World Trade Center pictures, we haven't really seen a great deal of them since September. You would think that if they are going to justify a military intervention in Afghanistan or in Iraq or wherever it goes next, they would constantly use those dramatic images as part of the 'just war'. Well, interestingly, this is both the strength and the weakness of democratic propaganda systems-quite rightly, because as journalists you will always be considering matters of taste and decency. It was felt that these pictures, particularly in the United States, especially of the people jumping to their deaths, which were shown over and over again in the initial days, were not particularly a good thing, from a broadcasting point of view. It was causing, if you like, a drop in morale. People do, though, forget, even though those pictures were so seminal. This is in a sense the key point I want to make about propaganda in democracies. The first thing is that it's not true that democracies don't conduct propaganda, even though they say they don't. Secondly, what is true is that they are usually on the defensive because of sensitivities to the public. The genuinely felt roots of grievance in the Middle East were barely recognised by the United States throughout the Clinton administrations, because they had started to downgrade their efforts to project positive images of the United States abroad. For example, in 1999 the United States Information Agency was absorbed into the State Department; they had downgraded the number of broadcasts in Arabic from the Voice of America to the Middle East. I think history will probably judge that the post-Cold War obsession of the US military with systems, computers, technology, communications technology and the downgrading of human intelligence, or spies, will be one of the reasons for the September 11 attacks. It's certainly one of the reasons for not understanding why they hate us so much. There's real grievance at American attempts to McDominate-that's a poster in English from Pakistan where they have to post guards now on the McDonalds, because McDonalds is equated with US government imperialism. An interesting factor is al-Jazeera. There's quite a lot of misunderstanding in the West about the importance of al-Jazeera, sometimes called (because this is a classic example of how we impose our values on the way we see others) the CNN of the Middle East. Staff at al-Jazeera in Qatar actually don't like that because most of them are BBC trained and they think the BBC is better than CNN. When pressure was put on the American networks not to rebroadcast the bin Laden tapes, which al-Jazeera first broadcast, on the grounds that they might have encoded messages contained in them to wake up sleeping terrorists all around the world, and al-Jazeera was criticised, there was a failure to understand that al-Jazeera is a new type of television station in the Middle East. For five years it has not been under state control and has been doing public service type broadcasting, where it debates all sides of the argument, whether you like it or not. That's unusual in Middle Eastern broadcasting terms. So like when governments criticised John Simpson, John Simpson of Kabul now, John Simpson in Belgrade, it means they are doing a good job. I think al-Jazeera did a good job of reporting all sides. The belief that the US is losing the propaganda war is now common knowledge. I don't think it is yet -public opinion polls around the world still indicate strong support. The debate over collateral damage was inevitable and it does fuel opposition but it didn't fuel the opposition that you would have expected if the moral high ground had not already been captured by the events of September 11. Sure, there were protests in Palestine and in Pakistan and other places shortly after the bombing began, but even in Algeria protests have dwindled over the last few months. So I think this can be exaggerated. What al-Jazeera was doing was capturing the media agenda because of the time difference. Well, the Americans were caught on the back foot and they do have a problem because-this is my point-these people do understand how to exploit the weaknesses of democracies, not by just flying civilian aircraft into civilian buildings but also by showing quite a high degree of sophistication in terms of media manipulation. The presidential directive 68, which is supposed to say that public diplomacy, i.e. pro-American soft propaganda, is very important to US foreign policy, is clearly failing. Why? My speculation at this point-and this is where I may prove to be a fool rushing in-is probably because in the past the traditional targets of public diplomacy are people like you or me, they are elites, movers and shakers. There have been big student exchange programmes in the hope that one day the leaders of societies will think well of us, because we have helped to educate them or whatever. I think what has gone wrong is that those elites, particularly in the area of the world that we are mainly talking about, namely the horn of Africa through to Malaysia, haven't passed that on. We know what kind of people you really are, you're democratic, you respect individuals rights. OK, you divorce too much, you whore around too much and you drink too much, but we know that you are basically peace-loving people. That message was not getting down to the street level and that's where we saw most of the anger. So how do you deal with this? Well, this is a big problem, because I know who committed the attacks on September 11: 19 guys who are all dead. The whole debate about the evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement, even now that we have been through all the Taliban buildings in Afghanistan and we have the last bin Laden tape, is inconclusive because they are still gathering intelligence. We just won't know about it and of course part of the problem with releasing the information that seems to have convinced most political leaders who have seen it, is that it's probably been gathered from human intelligence and if you release that information into the public domain people are going to die. So that's a big problem. Others thing that aren't widely understood in the Middle East include the western intervention on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait. These are just not in the discussion area. It's not widely understood that bin Laden is a recent convert to the cause of the Palestinians, and it's not widely understood that the family wealth was gained from building those very military bases in Saudi Arabia which he wants to get rid of. If you do try to counter one of those themes by saying, well it was the Saudis that invited the American troops into the Holy Land of Mecca to protect it against Saddam Hussein, then the reaction comes back, but those corrupt sheikhs are people we don't have any time for, anyway. So in international, i.e. foreign, propaganda there is a need to utilise the World Trade Center footage at every opportunity. We've since seen Alastair Campbell brought in. He's set up coalition information centres, particularly in Islamabad, to counter the time zone problem, and actually as soon as those coalition information centres were set up a lot of the anti-American themes began to abate in Middle Eastern media coverage. They are now talking about deploying weapons of mass communication, not weapons of mass destruction, which is starting. We'll watch this strategic influence section with some interest because these are the people who are going to be trying to manipulate you in the future. The problem with propaganda is that it is no good unless you can deliver what you promise. For example, dropping leaflets with the daisy cutter on it is no good, it's not going to have any impact as an instrument of communication unless you actually drop one and the next day your message is, we told you so. Same with US foreign policy. It's all very well for the US to emphasise that it is a force for good in the world but there are many people who believe that its policy towards Israel, for example, demonstrates the opposite. I once sat around a table with some American psychological operations officers and they were debating the relationship of what they do to the truth and one of them said, 'Well, we tell the truth.' I just winced and he looked at me, because he knew me from old, and said, 'OK, we tell our truth,' and I said, 'That's better.' It's not getting too much coverage, but there are 90 countries so far and mounting in this coalition at the moment. In the United States you would think there weren't any other countries in the coalition. In this country, you would think we were the major partner. There will be contributions from different countries on those six different fronts I talked about. They won't all be military contributions. The elites who control the state media have not been suggesting to their state controlled journalists that they should not tell lies, they have been letting them do it. Another theme I was really surprised at the failure of the US government to exploit was that there was a creche in the World Trade Center. It was 9.15 in the morning, so there were a lot of kids killed in that attack. That was just not exploited, and that's our weakness-we don't do things like that in our propaganda. I think we should, but will it work? Well, not at the moment it won't if we look at the picture in today's Telegraph of a kid throwing stones at a tank in Israel. These kids were 12-years-old and are going to carry on throwing stones or carry on joining al-Qaeda's training camps or whatever. If you get your friends like the Saudis or the Kuwaitis-they might be very unpalatable friends to many people in this room, they are to me-if you get your non-democratic friends to clamp down on the media that will in fact do an awful lot of harm to the process of democratisation that al-Jazeera, for example, represents. An interesting statistic is that anti-US terrorist incidents, over the last 10 years or so, actually go up when the United States deploy their military in a substantial way. In 1991, the year of the Gulf War; in 1999, Kosovo; and now interestingly since September 11, we've had a lot of attempted terrorists attacks, like the one reported in Rome today or the shoe bomber. It will be interesting to see now that the US is taking terrorism really seriously whether this kind of pattern is repeated, I suspect not because this time they are committed to the war on those different fronts and they have captured terrorists before they have struck. There will be another strike. Why? Well, let's have a look at perceptions now. The al-Qaeda network did not attack the World Trade Center, that was the CIA in conjunction with Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, who told 4,000 Jews not to turn up for work that day. This was all a pretext so that the Americans could attack Afghanistan and seize control of the pipelines which transfer across that territory. That is a widely held perception. You seriously want us to believe that Mohammed Atta's passport-Atta was the pilot in the lead plane on tower one-was found in the rubble when the black boxes of both planes did not survive? And the suitcase that didn't make the plane, with all that incriminating evidence-you seriously want us to believe that that is genuine? These guys are holy martyrs, they wouldn't be seen dead in a strip joint. Another interesting story is that the transcripts of the cell phone calls made by the doomed passengers have been scoured and not one reference to the hijackers as being Arabs has been found-this is given prominent publicity. If the Pentagon are found out doing anything like this, then their credibility would go down the tubes again. I want to talk about this a little bit now. I am going to try and get you into the military mind. Now information has always been important to the military and that's how they have always tried to take command and control of any kind of battlefield or battle space. What we are talking about with information warfare is essentially four strands: the denial of information to the enemy and the protection of your own; deception has always been there; and then you exploit and attack vulnerabilities; and at the top of this new way of thinking about doctrine, which is suddenly emerging. Nato doctrine in still in draft form, British doctrine is secret, American doctrine is on the web. These are the four areas that they talk about. Now the one that interests us from the propaganda point of view is called perception management. I hate it, but that's what they are calling it, that's the euphemism for propaganda. I don't think they understand it within this context. People like the Office of Strategic Influence see it as all sort of linked, consisting of strands: public diplomacy, which is basically information, usually truthful, not the whole truth but the truthful version of events transmitted by, for example, the BBC World Service, Voice of America; private diplomacy, which is elites talking to elites; psychological operations, which you have seen a little bit of; media relations, what we in Europe call public information (another euphemism) and in the United States they call public affairs; education, cultural exchanges; and countering the kind of themes that we have seen, that's what perception management and the Office of Strategic Influence is going to be up to. The problem for the Office of Strategic Influence is at least recognised, that this is going to be a war of ideas, a battle for hearts and minds, and if you are going to have a government waging a war, especially a new kind of war, and you recognise that information command and control across the full spectrum are important, then you have got to have a strategy. It's a long term strategy because it's too late for those 12-year-olds who were throwing stones at the tanks in Israel, and your propaganda in the democratic context that I have been talking about needs to be conducted hand in hand with policy. Where is Afghanistan in our papers? It's dropping off the front page, it's down to about page 12 now in the World in Brief section, I suspect. So can our democratic media sustain long term interest in war or are we just going to see very little media coverage because the war is fought in the intelligence world and punctuated with the odd military campaign that the media coverage concentrates on? If the war vanishes off our media, which it is bound to do if it is fought in the secret intelligence areas, will people forget that there is a war on? I am not sure I understand the military motives for Afghanistan and if it is a manhunt, and I mean that in plural, they are after al-Qaeda fighters, they do need to remember Somalia. How good do you think the media coverage has been when you compare it to the Gulf War? There is not that much coverage but this is not like the Gulf War, which was high profile media history, a 24-hour, real-time war. So I think the question is, are the media part of the problem or part of the solution? Now, what's the solution here? Is the solution to become, to borrow Martin Bell's phrase, a journalism of attachment, because we are at war and when democracies go to war, usually democratic media support them, including in Vietnam? Or are we right to allow our elected politicians to make decisions for our public servants, i.e. our military to conduct military operations in secret with very little accountability? These are the questions I'm concerned with at the moment. |