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Image and reality by Prof Taylor (on Abu Ghraib) in Al Ahram 
20 - 26 May 2004 Issue No. 691 Image and reality The appalling photographs and video clips of Iraqi prisoners tortured and abused at the hands of US troops in Abu Ghraib prison irrevocably tarnish the images of America's military, writes Philip Taylor* Analysts of propaganda will always tell you that, to be effective, image and reality must go hand in hand. The photographs of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib prison reveal another axiom: that when images reflect a perception of a reality you do not recognise or confront, you hand a propaganda victory to your opponents. OK, so Rumsfeld apologised for what he called "a few bad apples", but Bush scored yet another propaganda own-goal by ending his apology interview on Al-Hurrah with the words "good job", confirming it as a US state run propaganda mouthpiece to at least the small number of people who were watching it. Why is it that what many people once regarded as the most sophisticated communications nation on earth keeps on proving itself to be its own worst enemy in the propaganda front of the "war" on terror? Again, most propaganda experts are agreed that the so-called "struggle for hearts and minds" is perhaps the most important battle-space in this conflict. Yet Voice of America broadcasts in English are being reduced and, despite the reinvigorated debate about public diplomacy and "soft power", the State Department's budget for global "strategic influence" activities is tiny compared to that of the Pentagon. But then again, Rumsfeld has claimed that he does not know what "soft power" means. He need only ask Joseph Nye, who coined the phrase, at the Harvard School of Government. It is the exercise of communication which makes you attractive to others, and thereby to make them want to be like you. The Abu Ghraib photographs are therefore not only a disaster for US public diplomacy efforts, they are also a disaster for Bush Doctrine itself. It reveals what even a few "bad apples" can do to your credibility as a "force for good in the world"; it makes Americans look un-American, even in the eyes of a shocked American public, never mind in the Arab and Muslim world where the photographs reinforce notions of a "crusade" or a clash of civilisations, and fuel further resentment and hatred. Like the Stars and Stripes draped over Saddam's toppled statue, these images will come back to haunt the American occupation of Iraq again and again. There was another propaganda own goal -- never mind that the American flag was taken down quite quickly by an image- savvy officer. The damage had already been done. Another was the Guantanamo Bay pictures -- and these were released by the Department of Defense itself! It might perhaps be too easy to explain these -- and numerous other -- public relations disasters as being simply the result of Americans seeing others through a mirror image of themselves. But there is a fundamental flaw in the American view of "perception management" on an international stage -- and a clue to this is in that now widely used phrase. It emanates from a Harvard MBA type of mentality that if you get the marketing right, anything will sell. One of the case studies on that MBA programme was -- I don't know if it still is -- Charlotte Beers, formerly of Madison Avenue (she once led J Walter Thompson Worldwide and Ogilvy & Mather), and until last year under secretary of state for public affairs and public diplomacy. Colin Powell is famously on record as saying "Well, guess what? She got me to buy Uncle Ben's rice, and so there's nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something." Well Uncle Sam isn't Uncle Ben and you can't sell something to people who have no water to boil it with. But now they do have oil on which to pour yet another troublesome example that Uncle Sam might not be who Uncle Sam says he is. Uncle Sam is looking more and more like the Ugly American. Of course we need to remember that the Bush administration was elected by the tightest ever margin in presidential history. And the numerous public opinion surveys conducted by organisations like the Pew Center do indicate that the alarming rise of worldwide anti-Americanism is directed largely at the Bush administration rather than at the American people of their "way of life". But again, the Abu Ghraib photographs are likely to deal a great blow to that perception. When asked on American TV what she felt about the female soldier depicted in the photographs and whether she truly represented the American soldier, her sister replied: "yes, she does". Family loyalties notwithstanding, this was a damning admission not just a bad apple, but a complete orchard. I have had many dealings with American officers over the years, and I have -- with only one exception -- found them to be highly professional, thoughtful, open- minded and, yes, decent people. They are proud to serve their country which they genuinely believe to represent values that are universalist and attractive to others, the "American dream" of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the land of opportunity. They are the most American of Americans, willing to lay down their lives if necessary on behalf of those values -- even in Muslim countries like Bosnia and Kosovo. Abu Ghraib has already led to criticisms of serious command failures, and of failures in training at the sub-officer level. But the soldiers who were photographed in these "trophy" pictures are of a different breed of Americans. They are the Jerry Springer elements of American society, and they are not pretty. They were not pretty before these photographs, and they are even uglier now. I wonder whether they realise just how much ammunition they have provided to their enemies' claims about US hypocrisy. So if "regime change" in Iraq wasn't about WMD, then it must have been -- we were told -- about bringing democracy to the region and deposing a tyrant who paid scant attention to the human rights of the Iraqi people? Seeing is believing, whether it's on the Jerry Springer show or in this week's newspapers. When Rumsfeld described the perpetrators as "un-American", it may have been in his mind one of his "known knowns" but to anti-Americans it reinforced their own "known knowns" about the neo-conservative "plot" to colonise Iraq, to "plunder" the region's oil and to shore up Israel. American contempt for Arabs flows naturally from this type of thinking, as do revenge acts like the beheading of Nick Berg. Never mind that The Daily Mirror 's notorious photographs of British prisoner abuse turned out to be false, and that the paper's anti-war editor, Piers Morgan, was sacked. The damage had again already been done, and that piece of news went under-reported in Iraq. In fact, what we are seeing is an increasingly polarised environment in which two competing world-views struggle for moral supremacy along lines reminiscent of the Cold War. The difference now is that in this new struggle for "hearts and minds" there are so many more info- players with so many more axes to grind. Gone are the days when the "propaganda war" was essentially about what the government in Washington claimed about the government in Moscow and vice versa. Moscow was so afraid of the competing message which was so much more attractive than the one it had to offer -- that it spent a fortune on jamming Western radio stations and on censoring its news media. It worked for over 40 years, at least until new communications technologies like fax machines and satellite television arrived in the 1980s to penetrate the Iron Curtain and pull down the Berlin Wall. Thereafter, the Americans seemed to forget about the reality of the Cold War and their image abroad -- at least until 9/11. But the astonishing turnaround in world sympathy for the US on that day -- remember Le Monde 's headline on 10/11 that "We are all Americans now" -- to today's level of anti-Americanism is the real tragedy of the Bush administration's perception management failures. The agonising over why "they" hate "us" so much produced a new recognition that power should not be left to speak for itself and that increased attention to Branding America was required. But Radio Sawa or Al-Hurrah or Hi magazine are borne from a Cold War of Ideas type of thinking that is perhaps inappropriate to the Information Age. Today's global info-sphere cannot be "managed" in the same way as it could before the age of mobile telephones, laptop computers and the Internet. The global media is no longer American, and alternative voices like Al-Jazeera provide alternative worldviews to people who perceive the world now through their own eyes rather than through some Western filter. It is within that global information space that the struggle for hearts can be won or lost. Brand America must co-exist rather than compete with Brand Islam, and that is the problem with a marketing approach to propaganda. It identifies rivals as competitors and target audiences as customers rather than the required approach of allies and potential friends. But whether this recognition is possible within the post 9/11 American psyche is doubtful. This is because the Bush administration sees itself as being "at war" with global terrorism, and has fundamentally re-aligned its foreign policy to wage that "war". Outside of the USA, the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war, regime change and even the "war" on a concept such as terrorism is either not fully understood or, if it is, it is disliked intensely. What else could you expect of such a reversal of historical norms in international relations that have governed inter-state relations since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? Besides, we keep hearing the rhetoric of war and the words (like the images, cannot be retracted) "crusade", "infinite justice", "you are either with us or against us", prisoner photographs from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib as they are preserved, twisted and perpetuated on the Internet long after the retraction has been forgotten. But that is inevitable against an enemy that fully understands "the oxygen of publicity" and for whom information is an asymmetrical weapon in the war against America and the other Western democracies which, because they are democracies, invariably shoot themselves in the foot. Within a marketing mentality, the response is to "spin" the mistake rather than apologise for it immediately to pre- empt further criticism. It is difficult to envisage a government "at war" holding its hands up and saying, "OK, we're sorry, we made a mistake." So we get the spin about whatever happened in Abu Ghraib under the Americans is nothing compared to what happened in Saddam's regime, as though that sort of moral dissimilarity resonates with an infuriated Middle Eastern target audience. And therein lays another problem, because the spin is more often intended for domestic US audiences without thought for how it might impact on audiences elsewhere. This is an election year after all. And we get pointless Western media speculation and political games-playing about when politicians learned of the abuse; as if their level of knowledge at any given time shifts the blame away from the few rotten apples onto the shoulders of senior officers and politicians. Democracy at work. A fine example for Arabs and Muslims to emulate. But these people will be punished by due process of law; that surely shows the merits of democracy? As does the closure of Al- Sadyr 's newspaper or the constant attacks on Al-Jazeera. The West stands accused of hypocrisy, arrogance, duplicity and racism. That is how it is perceived from the other side of the lens. For Western perception management to be effective, it needs to see itself through the eyes of others before it can begin to address dispelling misconceptions. The United States since 9/11 may perceive itself to be "at war" in a conflict where there is no "neutral ground" but in fact there is a great deal of neutral ground between extremism on both sides. Most analysts of propaganda are agreed that the hardest job of all is to persuade the already converted to think differently. But not to recognise or even accept that there may be millions of people who are neither for the terrorists nor anti-American merely creates a situation which drives people into the extremist camps and forces people to take sides. This does not excuse what happened in Abu Ghraib. But it does help to explain it. The images tarnish the reputation of the American military which is having to fight a "war" on behalf of a doctrine that can never be sold to the unconverted, no matter how slick the marketing. Perhaps this realisation was really behind Charlotte Beers' resignation last year. Perhaps a more experienced diplomat like Madeline Albright [this should read Margaret Tutweiler], who replaced Beers, came to realise just how difficult the job of Branding America had become since 9/ 11 and why she also resigned last month. If American values are to be marketed in an attractive manner so that they are desired by others, photographs depicting the values of a few "bad apples" need to be interpreted within the context of the orchard that is the United States. But this is a thankless task when the orchard is being fertilised by something so new and, for many people, so frightening as the Bush Doctrine. * The writer is professor of international communications at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. |