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BACK TO : PSYOPS IN IRAQ 2003-6
PSYOPS in Iraqi Freedom by Prof Taylor 'THEY' SHOCKED, 'WE' SAW: PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS IN OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, 2003* Philip M. Taylor University of Leeds During the spring 2003 conflict in Iraq that has already been dubbed the Second Gulf War, the conduct of psychological operations (or PSYOPS) enjoyed an unusually high profile. As a weapon of war, what was previously termed combat propaganda or psychological warfare had in fact been deployed during every major conflict fought by western powers since 1914, usually in the form of the airborne distribution of leaflets and, subsequently, via broadcast radio and television messages. The British pioneered its use in the First World War although, by the end of the Second, the Americans had become its primary proponents, with the dropping of billions of leaflets by dedicated bomber squadrons over Germany and Japan. Even in the much shorter and more limited military operations since then that have not been wars of national survival, these paper bullets have still been considered potent weapons. Twenty nine million leaflets, for example, were dropped in the first Gulf War of 1991, Operation Desert Storm, which lasted six weeks. In the two month Kosovo conflict of 1999 (Operation Allied Force), the figure was an astonishing 103 million. In Afghanistan, from October 2001 to March 2002 (Operation Enduring Freedom), it was 80 million. In the build up to and during the three-week war in Iraq, March-April 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom - it was approaching 50 million. Often dismissed by military historians as a sideshow, having little impact on the conduct of military operations or on the outcome of conflicts, these 'munitions of the mind' have nonetheless become an increasingly central aspect of American involvement in contemporary war fighting. Other NATO countries, including Britain, Germany and Poland, are also developing their PSYOP capability - and not just for conflict. The sheer variety of military interventions since the end of the Cold War, from peacekeeping to nation-building (although it is rarely called that) has seen PSYOPS evolve into increasingly sophisticated forms of communicating with the people caught up in what are highly dangerous situations. When one practitioner announced that 'our motto is electrons, not bullets', one could be forgiven for believing that communicating with the enemy had almost become a more acceptable alternative to destroying him. A more dispassionate enquiry by the Defence Science Task Force Board in 2000 asserted that, 'in the future, bombs and missiles will still determine who militarily wins or loses a conflict at tactical level. PSYOP, though, will help determine how long a conflict lasts and the impact of a military struggle on long-term U.S. strategic interests'. White and Black PSYOPS One lesser-known aspect of the origins of communications studies as an academic social science discipline is that much of the government sponsored research in the United States during the 1950s was to determine the effectiveness of psychological warfare techniques. Scholars such as Daniel Katz, Wilbur Schramm and Daniel Lerner all benefited from this Cold War climate in which communications research flourished. From the late 1950s onwards, attention focussed more on the mass media, especially television and its impact upon audiences, and the study of psychological warfare diminished or became more of an interest to historians. Perhaps social scientists were attempting to distance themselves from an activity that erroneously had already come to be associated, in the mind of the public at least, with 'dirty tricks' and even 'brainwashing'. However, psychological warfare was in fact a form of propaganda directed largely at foreign rather than domestic audiences, usually at a clearly identified enemy or a potential enemy. In the climate of the Cold War and the threat of mutually assured destruction through nuclear confrontation, psychological warfare was thus regarded in Washington and Moscow as an alternative weapon in the global competition for hearts and minds in what was essentially an ideological struggle between the west and communism. Indeed, for almost 45 years, what had traditionally been a tactical weapon for use on battlefields or in low intensity conflicts became a weapon of wider strategic significance, used both overtly and covertly, and permeated every aspect of east-west relations from the Space Race to the Olympic Games. If the so-called 'war' against terrorism is the latest conflict against an idea or set of ideas (or even a 'clash of civilisations') we are likely to see this weapon deployed strategically once again, especially in a prolonged conflict. But, for the moment, first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, its tactical and operational deployment has been a marked feature of these new regional struggles for hearts and minds. Before going on to examine this, we first need to distinguish between overt (or 'white') PSYOPS and covert (or 'black') activity. Overt PSYOPS refers to messages emanating from a clearly identifiable source, which in the American military context usually means it comes from the 4th Psychological Operations Group (4POG) based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Much less is known about the covert variety, which is usually conducted by the secret intelligence services and their agencies (e.g. the CIA, DIA, SIS) and which deliberately misleads its origins. Black PSYOPS usually takes the form of broadcasting from stations that disguise their true origins and purport to be run by someone other than the true source. Radio Tikrit, which began life in January 2003 as an apparently pro Saddam station to attract audiences and then changed its tune, fell into this category. In the past, due to their covert nature, black propaganda operations are known to have deviated from official policy and to have been far more 'economical with the truth' than their white counterparts, whose success is dependent upon credibility and therefore adheres largely to factual statements or what might be termed 'credible truths'. This does not mean the whole truth is told; it simply means that white PSYOPS do not lie deliberately whereas black PSYOPS, born of a lie, tends to fall into the realm of political or military deception activities. A tale of two conflicts The media of PSYOPS have become ever more sophisticated as new communications technologies become available courtesy on the ongoing communications revolution. Leaflets, posters and radio broadcasts may seem rather old-fashioned in the age of the internet, but they remain important media especially in foreign environments that are not sophisticated in terms of their communications infrastructures. With each new conflict, new communications technologies come to be deployed for the first time, and the 2003 Gulf War was no different. It was even reported that some PSYOPS communiqués were being sent to Iraqi commanders in the form of e-mails or SMS text messages on their mobile phones. The internet was barely available in the Iraq of 2003, and it was really the Kosovo conflict of four years earlier that can justifiably be termed the first internet war: www.1. But whichever new medium is added to this arsenal of weapons of mass communication, the military objective behind overt PSYOPS on a battlefield has essentially remained the same: to persuade the enemy soldier to desert, defect or surrender, thereby reducing his number and easing the path to victory. The purpose of covert PSYOPS is to foster insurrection and/or internal disruption. It is probably too early to evaluate fully the effectiveness of the 2003 PSYOP campaign. But we do know that thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendered, deserted or 'melted away' from the battlefield as coalition forces raced to Baghdad to secure their military objectives. An estimated 8000 Iraqi soldiers from the Iraqi 51st Infantry Division surrendered and were taken prisoners of war within the first week, suggesting some degree of success, although this has to measured against the 69,000 who surrendered in 1991. In Iraqi Freedom, however, a major PSYOP theme was for Iraqi soldiers to stay at home or simply melt away from the rapidly advancing coalition forces, but it is unlikely that the success of this theme will ever be able to be measured accurately in terms of the sheer number of soldiers who complied with this message. One aspect of the comparison between the PSYOPS campaigns in Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom is striking. In 2003, while some observers were surprised at the lack of Iraqi military resistance to an 'invasion' of their homeland, others were equally puzzled as to why the Iraqi people did not rise up against the hated regime of Saddam Hussein until relatively late in the day, and then only in isolated pockets. Given that a peoples' uprising was one of the primary aims of the 2003 PSYOP campaign, the record here is somewhat mixed. The failure to provoke a widespread civilian uprising to assist 'regime change' was linked to memories of the 1991 conflict when black PSYOP stations deviated from the official policy line that the war was only about the liberation of Kuwait, and urged the Iraqi population to rise up against Saddam. When the Shias and Kurds did just that, they were left to their own devices by that first coalition and were subsequently brutally suppressed. The problem in 1991 was that 'regime change' was not an objective of Desert Storm; it was supposed to be simply about the liberation of Kuwait. The deviation of covert PSYOPS from stated coalition policy on that occasion would come back to haunt the second 'coalition of the willing' in its later battle for control of Iraqi hearts and minds to 'liberate' the Iraqi people from Saddam's regime. In other words, the success of the black campaign in 1991 severely jeopardised the white campaign of 2003, despite a reassuring handbill produced by the British PSYOPS team that 'this time we won't abandon you'. An integrated campaign This chapter will examine the 2003 tactical and operational PSYOP campaign, but it will also attempt to discuss some wider implications at the strategic level. This was because we witnessed, for the first time, the application of new military doctrines relating to Effects Based Operations and Rapid Deployment Operations - termed 'shock and awe' in popular parlance. It is the 'awe' element which interests us here because it suggests a co-ordinated use of force or military power alongside a highly visible use of that force through the global media in order to achieve the desired effect, namely to achieve rapid regime change with the minimum loss of casualties - on both sides. There was plenty of evidence of this from the lips of American political leaders, especially President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, who frequently gave speeches to the world's media containing direct messages for the Iraqi people. In his first wartime news conference of the war, for example, Rumsfeld made a direct appeal to the Iraqi troops: 'Do not follow orders to destroy dams or flood villages. Do not follow orders to destroy your country's oil. ... See those orders for what they are - the last desperate gasp of a dying regime.' [See ehibits for leaflets conveying this message directly to Iraqi troops] Later in the first week, he repeated the exercise: 'I urge the Iraqi people being threatened in the cities to try to remember the faces and the names of the death squad enforcers. Their time will come, and we will need your help and your testimony.' And towards the end of the war, Bush was making PSYOPS videos for direct transmission (in Arabic) with the message: 'The nightmare that Saddam Hussein has brought to your nation will soon be over. You are a good and gifted people - the heirs of a great civilisation that contributes to all humanity. You deserve better than tyranny and corruption and torture chambers. You deserve to live as free people. And I assure every citizen of Iraq: your nation will soon be free.' Between these two statements, there were numerous examples of an unprecedented degree of co-ordination of strategic and tactical PSYOPS from Washington right down to the tactical theatre of operations, prompting the conclusion that Operation Iraqi Freedom was one gigantic psychological operation or, more precisely in military doctrine, an Information War. Information Warfare In terms of its communication elements, Operation Iraqi Freedom also borrowed heavily from much of the recent thinking about new and emerging military doctrines, especially that of Information Warfare (IW) which in turn has evolved into Information Operations (IO). This doctrine embraces the notion of information as a central weapon in the waging of contemporary warfare. The Pentagon's somewhat bland definition is 'actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one's own information and information systems'. Although this appears to focus on communications technologies, human factors also play a significant role. The doctrine can essentially be broken down into two interlocking components, namely Computer Network Operations (CNO) and Perception Management, the new euphemism for propaganda. The former tends towards the technical side of military electronic systems and satellites that have come increasingly to dominate the eyes and ears of waging modern warfare as a result of the Revolution in Military Affairs. So, whereas in the past, the waging of industrialised warfare involved, for example, the often indiscriminate bombing of factories, shipyards and their surrounding urban areas, information warfare prioritises precision-guided attacks against command and control capabilities, including power stations, radio masts, telephone exchanges, television transmitters and any other leadership targets which might produce a dramatic effect. This included the attempted 'decapitation strike' against the Iraqi leadership on the opening night of the war, but its more dramatic manifestation came on the second night when television cameras broadcast devastating - but surgically precise - coalition bombing of the city of Baghdad. By taking command and control of the flow of information in the conflict area, the idea was to deafen, dumb and blind in one eye the enemy's command and control capabilities while leaving the other eye open for him and the wider world to see that his cause is futile. 'The goal of information warfare is to win without ever firing a shot', said one Central Command spokesman rather optimistically, although he then modified this by adding: 'If action does begin, information warfare is used to make the conflict as short as possible'. Much of this thinking originally derived from the first Gulf War of 1991, when the American led coalition was able to disrupt much of Iraq's electronic defences on the opening nights of the war. On the Perception Management side, the coalition's ability to present a desired view of the conflict to the wider world through the mass media - the so-called 'video game war' - was felt to have provided a template for management of the media. This desired view was of a clean, near bloodless war fought with high-tech weaponry causing minimal civilian damage. But 'media war' was only one part of the thinking. Another essential ingredient was Psychological Operations, defined by the US as 'planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organisations, groups and individuals'. PSYOPS were deployed to great effect in the Gulf War of 1991, as evidenced by the huge numbers of Iraqi deserters, defectors or surrenders, earning for it it a renewed reputation as a 'combat force multiplier' through the dissemination of millions of leaflets and the broadcast of hours of programming from ground and airborne transmitters - all of which were felt to have shaped the information space on the battlefield in the Kuwaiti theatre of operations. The success of this campaign was tempered somewhat by the experience of Kosovo in 1999 when, despite a massive PSYOP campaign, this failed to crack the morale of the Yugoslav army or indeed of the Serb people. It was an ominous foresight of some of the things to come in the Gulf War of 2003. Tactical PSYOPS in Iraq The psychological preparation of the battlefield began months before the actual fighting. The first leaflets were dropped on 28 November 2002, with one simply stating that 'Coalition Air Power Can Strike at Will. Any Time. Any Place'. Of course, the coalition had enjoyed air superiority over Iraq since 1991, demonstrated during the air strikes of 1998 during Operation Desert Fox, especially in the no fly zones imposed on northern and southern Iraq. But there were clearly some worries about anti-aircraft fire, and two other leaflets depicted in cartoon form the consequences of what would happen if coalition aircraft were fired upon or if military fibre optic cables were repaired ('repairing them places your lives at risk'). The first reminder that this was to be a war against the Saddam regime rather than the Iraqi people came on the obverse of the latter: 'military fibre optic cable are tools used by Saddam and his regime to suppress the Iraqi people'. The same three leaflets were dropped in their millions again on 2 December. Two weeks later, a new leaflet product was dropped depicting a cartoon image of a radio tower with the words 'Information Radio' and the frequencies on which these coalition transmissions could be heard. This was a clue that 'Commando Solo' had or was about to be deployed. This is a converted Hercules EC 130E aircraft operated by the 193rd Special Operations Wing of the Pennsylvanian National Guard that had been deployed on previous operations in the Gulf (then known as 'Volant Solo'), Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan. One of the heaviest - and therefore most vulnerable - aircraft in the American air force, and capable of broadcasting radio and television messages on multi-frequencies, the United States possesses six in all. It is not yet known how many of these were deployed to the region, but it must have been at least two given that by the end of March 2003, it was broadcasting 24 hours a day - another indication of confidence in air superiority. The first target audience for 'Information Radio', which began transmissions on 12 December, was the Iraqi army. One of the earliest broadcasts went as follows: 'Soldiers of Iraq. Since the beginning of time, there has been no profession more honorable than that of a soldier. Soldiers are decorated with awards and medals that show their achievements and mark their skills. The uniform of a soldier is an article that demands respect, and loyalty. Soldiers are the defenders of their people, and the protectors of women and children. A soldier is willing to sacrifice himself for his country and their way of life. Soldiers sacrifice their own personal freedoms to protect others. Saddam has tarnished this legacy. Saddam spews forth political rhetoric along with a false sense of national pride to deceive these men to serve his own unlawful purposes. Saddam does not wish the soldiers of Iraq to have the honor and dignity that their profession warrants. Saddam seeks only to exploit these brave men. Saddam uses the soldiers of Iraq not as protectors of the peace, but rather as his own personal bodyguards. Do not let Saddam tarnish the reputation of soldiers any longer. Saddam uses the military to persecute those who don't agree with his unjust agenda. Make the decision.' Before long, the Iraqi civilian population was added to the target audience list. In the previous Gulf War, Saddam had been branded 'a new Hitler' by coalition propaganda. This time, he was likened to Stalin: 'the world has paid a higher price for not stopping men like Stalin when they had the chance. Many millions of people have lost their lives needlessly under these oppressive regimes and in wars started by these leaders. The loss of life and the needless suffering could have been minimized had action been taken sooner. History has shown that appeasement of brutal domineering regimes only brings greater tragedy. Saddam too has a lust for power, and the world will stand up and put an end to the terror he imposes on others, before he destroys Iraq and crushes the hopes of its proud people'. It is worth noting that the appeasement argument was also being used as a pre-war propaganda theme (albeit a somewhat spurious one) in the wider world, especially in Britain and the US, in the run up to hostilities. As Iraqi television was placing enormous emphasis on the divisions within the international community over the weapons inspectors being given more time, over whether a follow up UN resolution to 1441 was required, and on the anti-war marches taking place throughout the world, Command Solo began to broadcast a mixture of factual programming relaying Presidential speeches in full with further appeals reminding the Iraqi people about the evils of Saddam's regime. 'The world community [sic] & asks for your support' in removing Saddam from power not least because 'every night, children go to sleep hungry in Iraq' while Saddam lives in lavish palaces, drives around in expensive cars and builds expensive monuments for his personal glorification. When the 'shock and awe' bombing of Baghdad began on the night of 20-21 March 2003, Radio Baghdad appeared to have been jammed as words from Commando Solo announced over its frequencies that 'the facilities of the Iraqi regime have started to be hit ... This is the day we have been waiting for ... The attack on Iraq has begun'. But Baghdad radio was back on the air several hours later and, surprisingly given the nature of IW thinking, Iraqi television continued to transmit for several weeks into the war. Why greater effort was not made to take out the indigenous media must, for the moment, remain open to speculation, especially since these were primary targets during the previous conflict. Perhaps it was because the coalition wished the Iraqi leadership and people to witness the 'awesome' precision of the coalition's bombing. But when two market places in Baghdad were damaged during the first week of the war, the wisdom of allowing them to carry on broadcasting was brought into question. The Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed al-Sahhaf, who appeared daily before the world's media (and who became known as 'Comical Ali' when he refused to stare defeat in the face) proclaimed a barbaric bombing campaign directed at innocent women and children. It took a week for the coalition to undertake its BDA (Bomb Damage Assessment) before suggesting that the markets had been damaged by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire coming back to ground. By allowing Iraqi television to continue, including periodic but highly controversial appearances of Saddam himself, the coalition had effectively put itself in the business of Broadcasting Damage Assessment. Meanwhile, American ground forces were racing towards Baghdad in a lightening strike. Leaflets were dropped telling Iraqi soldiers not to use their weapons of mass destruction and, as the army approached the Rumaila oil fields, telling the oil workers not to self-destruct Iraq's future wealth. According to Major General Renuart, Director of Operations at Central Command based in Dohar, when the southern oil fields were secured virtually intact, the troops found that many well heads were wired for explosion but that the workers had told them: 'We read your leaflets. We heard your broadcasts. We understand that keeping the oil infrastructure was important for our future'. Interestingly, the northern and western fronts received comparatively little media coverage because those campaigns were fought largely by Special Operations forces whose policy is not to take journalists along with them. Some reporters, such as the BBC's John Simpson, were in northern Iraq attempting to cover the progress of the Kurdish forces as they seized the oil fields in that part of the country, but the coverage was patchy by comparison to the southern campaign where hundreds of reporters were 'embedded' with the troops. Commando Solo is purely a broadcast platform; it does not drop leaflets. That is done by other aircraft and by the M129 leaflet bomb which explodes at around 4,000 feet and scatters the leaflets to the ground. One of the most important elements of the PSYOP campaign was to instruct Iraqi soldiers on how to surrender. Almost 70,000 surrendered in 1991 and similar figures were expected this time. According to some reports, however, the decision of the overall commander, General Franks, to start the ground offensive a day earlier than planned, disrupted the surrender plan. Some leaflets had been dropped before the war showing surface to surface missile crews how to surrender by walking away from their equipment, leaving their rifles behind; 'abandon your weapons systems. Whether manned or unmanned, these weapons will be destroyed.' Others carried the appeal: 'Do not risk your life. And the lives of your comrades! Leave now and GO HOME. Watch your children learn, grow and prosper'. [again see exhibits for examples of these products]. However, according to Lieutenant Colonel George Smith, because of the decision to start early, it was only on that day that leaflets were printed giving specific instructions on how to capitulate - by turning the turrets of their tanks and artillery around, placing their vehicles in a square, staying at least 1,000 feet away from their weapons and to hoist white flags. 'We weren't able to get the message out. If they got the message, it was probably right before ground forces were upon them.' The early surrender of an Iraqi division that would hopefully encourage others to do the same was not replicated. Instead, Iraqi soldiers deserted their uniforms and returned home, leaving Ba'athist fanatics and Republican Guardsmen to do the fighting, including suicide bombings and other extremist acts. An unnamed Special Operations officer was also quoted as saying: 'The end result was the Fedayeen was effective because the unconventional warfare effort did not have time to identify them and neutralize them.' He added that the Fedayeen's attacks signalled to Iraqis in the early days that their government might fight and survive: 'that small illusion of hope greatly impacted the psy-op campaign,' he said. As the Americans moved north, the British besieged the city of Basra and took the port of Umm Qsar. Neither rose up as expected. One local who was interviewed said that 'the Iraqi citizen does not accept dishonour, therefore we do not accept any invasion on our land by any force no matter how powerful.' Clearly the strategic propaganda theme about the war being one of liberation of the Iraqi people was proving unconvincing in the region, especially as Arab TV stations and other media were labelling the attack as an invasion and gave prominence to images of civilian damage. PSYOPS leaflets warned locals not to 'help the Iraqi military and regime leadership to escape & If you observe defectors report it to the Coalition forces'. As coalition forces surrounded towns, this gave rise to an increased emphasis on face-to-face communications, and a good deal was made in the media of the differences between the British forces who replaced their helmets with less intimidating berets and the full metal jacketed approach of the Americans (who had suffered casualties caused by an early suicide bombing outside Nassiriyah and were thus more sensitive to force protection issues with the local populace). At Central Command, a spokesman pointed out: 'We do continue our efforts in communicating with the Iraqi population, as well as military forces, delivering leaflets by hand and by air, and our broadcasts over the airways. At this point, we've distributed more than a million leaflets yesterday alone, and have reached more than 43 million leaflets overall. And our broadcast messages are adjusting to account for the changes in circumstances as we find them. The good news is we are quickly moving beyond the one-way communications of broadcasts and interacting directly with the population every day.' Much of this was being done by mobile PSYOPS teams in Humvees mounted with loudspeakers, encouraging 20 Fedayeen fighters in Nasiriyah to surrender, amongst other small victories. Black PSYOPS stations had also been busy trying to foster insurrection with little or no success. In addition to Radio Tikrit, interested groups were monitoring stations with such titles as the 'Voice of Iraqi Liberation'. As further Iraqi towns and cities fell comparatively quickly from the end of the second week onwards, Washington was clearly becoming alarmed at the levels of Arab anti-Americanism on such stations as Al-Jazeera, and announced the setting up of its own satellite television station: the Middle Eastern Television Network (METN). As coalition forces surrounded Baghdad with its 5 million people, the critical point of the war was approaching. However, the Saddam regime collapsed with surprising speed and the city fell to American forces without the long-feared 'downtown warfare' previously predicted by some pundits. By 10 April, METN became 'Towards Freedom TV' (Hahwa al-Hurrieh) whose first broadcast - relayed by Commando Solo onto the former Iraqi TV terrestrial frequencies - included messages to the Baghdad population from President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, recorded two days earlier at the Hillsborough Castle summit in Northern Ireland. This was the first time Commando Solo's television transmission capabilities were utilised fully; it had previously been largely a flying radio station. Its programming attempted to reassure Iraqis that coalition forces were 'friends and liberators,not your your conquerors'. Back on the ground, much media attention was being given to the looting that was taking place. In the streets of Baghdad, PSYOPS teams distributed leaflets urging Iraqi citizens to stay at home: 'Please avoid leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before the call to morning prayers. During this time, terrorist forces associated with the former regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as various criminal elements, are known to move through the area and engage in hostile acts'. Other messages included instructions on how to approach military checkpoints (slowly and without appearing to be carrying a weapon) and appeals to medical and other civic personnel to return to work. In the same week, coalition forces also began producing a newspaper, The Times, for southern Iraq. A British organised white PSYOP station, 'Two Rivers Radio' (Radio Nahrain) was also set up around this time servicing the region around Basra. Thus began the transition from Combat PSYOPS to what is termed Consolidation PSYOPS, although the cessation of hostilities requires more of a Civil Affairs - or public relations - function. It is no coincidence that the American special forces command which deals with PSYOPS is also responsible for Civil Affairs, and it was this element of the 'hearts and minds' campaign in-country that now came to the fore as the humanitarian mission to rebuild Iraq became an essential strand of the propaganda war. Leaflets were produced urging the looting that took place to stop and the now infamous pack of cards was issued identifying the names and faces of America's 'Most Wanted' list of 55 members of the regime. The ace of spades was Saddam himself and, although his personal destiny remained a mystery, his statues were pulled down and his murals defaced. Regime change had been achieved, law and order were gradually restored and the first steps were made towards convincing the Arab world and Iraqi people that this had indeed been a war of liberation from tyranny and not an exercise in neo-colonialism. This did not stop the American forces from losing almost half as many men as had been killed in the war-fighting phase in the two months following President Bush's formal announcement of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. In a sense, the propaganda war that really mattered was only just beginning. The strategic information war The very fact that such consolidation propaganda efforts were required was an indication of the degree of hostility that existed towards the 'Anglo-American invasion' not just within Iraq or the Arab world, but globally. The war may have commanded high levels of support in the United States but, throughout Europe, opposition levels were 70% or higher. Even in Britain, support levels rose from 37% to only 56% once the troops went into action - quite a jump, but far lower than any previous British military involvement since the 1956 Suez crisis. Even by the end of the war it stood at a mere 60%. The media in any given country, not surprisingly, reflected broadly the position of their governments, except in Spain and Italy where the media were highly critical of their government's support for the war effort. The British media therefore reflected a deeply divided country. The failure to secure a follow-up UN resolution to 1441, the non-use of weapons of mass destruction by the Iraqi forces and indeed the difficulty of finding them even after military victory had been achieved, a 'war for oil', an exercise in American imperialism - all such allegations were deeply felt around the world, and received considerable publicity in the world's media, and suggest a serious failure by Washington of strategic Perception Management outside of the United States itself. As one White House official put it: 'many of the Middle Eastern people have been fed a steady diet of anti-American propaganda' which helped to explain why 'why not everyone shares our assessment' of why the war was necessary. There may, of course, have been other reasons, not least disquiet about the Bush Doctrine and its principles of pre-emptive war and regime change against an identified 'axis of evil' that might one day supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups such as al Quaeda. A week into the conflict, on March 28th, Rumsfeld told a press conference: 'The outcome of this conflict is not in doubt. The regime will be removed. But for our coalition of free people, we believe it is important not just to win, but to win justly. The power of our coalition derives not simply from the vast overwhelming force at our disposal, but from the manner in which we employ that force. The Iraqi people will see how we employ our force and know that we are coming not to occupy their country, not to oppress them, but to liberate their country.' Note the emphasis on 'coalition' in order to head-off charges that this was, as many opponents maintained, a war of 'American imperialism'. The 'coalition of the willing' in fact consisted of four military contributors (USA, UK, Australia and Poland) and a collection of states providing less visible support. So when television images were aired of an American flag being raised in Umm Qsar or over the head of a toppled statue of Saddam in Baghdad, they reinforced anti-American sentiment. Hence Washington's irritation with Arab satellite television stations such as Al Jazeera which focussed on the Iraqi and wider Arab perspective, including images of military and civilian casualties that were not aired in the United States. But the fact remained that Iraqi towns and cities had been targeted with largely precision-guided weaponry, which hit their targets with accuracy unprecedented in military history, and, compared to previous conflicts, the war was won with comparative ease and relatively low civilian casualties. That said, this did not prevent the global media from reporting when things did go wrong. Collateral damage, pictures of injured children in hospitals, looting, friendly fire accidents - all secured prominence in media outlets which had opposed the 'unjust war' from the outset, and detracted from the fact that, as Rumsfeld said, the American and British forces had tried to conduct the war in a manner which was supposed to reflect well on their 'humanitarian' intervention to liberate Iraq from the Saddam regime. This was supposed to have been plain for all to see from the television images taken by the embedded journalists who, on their return, testified to how little military censorship they had experienced in producing probably the most vivid images of front-line combat ever seen. But such reports merely added to the 'fog of war' because the demands of the 24/7 news cycle required journalists to feed their news guzzling organisations with an endless stream of 'on-the-spot' news 'as it happened', often leaving the wider picture very much out of focus. Less of a fog and more like a snowstorm of information, the images would appear to have merely confirmed pre-existing attitudes of watching audiences about the rights and wrongs of the conflict. Conclusions These, by necessity, must be preliminary. Even so, the snowstorm of information about the war in Iraq does enable modern scholars to utilise their analytical training in a manner that would be the envy of their forebears. Fools rush in where scholars fear to tread may be an apposite corrective to this attitude, but we witness historical events courtesy of the mass media coverage of conflicts like Operation Iraqi Freedom. It may well be that time will dismiss the reports from the embedded journalists as regurgitating the military line, but there were plenty of unembedded reporters providing their own ant's eye view of the war. And despite a media emphasis on the southern front, their preoccupation with bad news and over-concentration on human interest stories at the expense of issues (on 'Private Jessica' or 'Chemical Ali' or 'Comical Ali' or Ali Abbas, the 12 year old Iraqi boy who lost both his arms and 15 relatives ), none of these aspects of the war coverage should have come as any surprise to media scholars. What is clear is that this conflict was as much a psychological operation as it was a demonstration of military might. The battle for hearts and minds was not just confined to the Iraqi people but it was also directed at world opinion. Time will indeed tell if both the tactical and strategic campaigns had the desired effect. We do know that the Iraqi people did not rise up against Saddam on any significant scale, although the tactical PSYOP campaign would appear to have been successful is persuading many Iraqi soldiers not to fight. After the fighting was over, however, resentment and impatience was evident in the attitude of many Iraqis towards the American 'occupiers'. Strategic levels of scepticism about the war's justification increased - even in the United States itself - as the so-called 'smoking gun' of weapons of mass destruction failed to fire. 'So where are they, Mr Blair?' demanded The Independent a week after the fighting was all but over. As for doctrinal developments, we have seen how the American government of George W. Bush no longer distinguishes between a press conference and a military PSYOP campaign. That indeed may be sea change in the development of Information Operations thinking, because the war was seen in Washington as being as much a struggle for moral high ground in the global information space as it was to secure command and control of the battlefield. Nor was it confined to the pre-war and wartime environments. The real psychological struggle began after the fighting was over - on issues such as the 'justness' of the war, on its legality, on its necessity in the first place, on the slow pace of Iraqi reconstruction. But many of these issues missed the point that, for the power elite in Washington, the 2003 war in Iraq was not really a 'war' in its own right. It was the second battle of the 'war' against terrorism (with Afghanistan being the first). The hunt for Saddam Hussein may have subsumed this issue temporarily and raised all sorts of doubts about the wisdom of pre-emptive strikes against other nation states, rogue or otherwise. But these issues are bound to resurface, and they will continue to shock and awe. Note: the references for all quotations are in the published version. |
EXHIBITS A_rare_special_operations_leaflet.jpg  Avoiding_religious_sites.jpg do_not_use_WMD_IZD-019.jpg |
