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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 5 - 2006
Fix the Policy, 'Lose' the Message by Tom Porteus 
2006-07-07 Fix the Policy, 'Lose' the Message Tom Porteous juxtaposes an alarming survey of 100+ US foreign policy experts on the Bush administration's war on terror and national security, with a new, mysteriously funded "don't suicide bomb" PSA set to premiere in Iraq this summer. The experts call for thought and the PSA should be dumped. This summer, TV public service announcements produced in Los Angeles and designed to discourage terrorism are due to appear on Iraqi TV and possibly on TV stations elsewhere in the Arab world. The PSAs depict in graphic, slow motion detail the awful human impact of suicide bombing. The message to Iraqis and other Arabs is "don't suicide bomb." It is not quite clear who is funding the project. The two companies (one American, the other Lebanese) which co-produced the film have already made PSAs for Iraq. Last year they produced a TV spot called "Sovereignty" which was put out on Iraqi TV to encourage Iraqis to vote. That project had the backing of the US government. However the producers are coy about naming the mysterious benefactors who are funding this latest effort. "I call them an independent, non-governmental group of scholars, non political people," producer Drew Plotkin told Newsweek in June. "Some may live in Iraq, some may live abroad. For a variety of different reasons - from safety concerns to wanting the focus to remain on the issue itself - they decided to remain anonymous." But whether or not this million-plus dollar venture is the product of the US military's "psychological operations" department, it boggles the mind that anyone could think it would work. First, Iraqis must be more aware than any other nation of the devastating impact of terrorism. In Baghdad and other cities they experience terrorism on a daily basis. But this direct experience - so much more powerful than any "Matrix style" cinematic representation - has not done anything to reduce the incidence of terrorism in the country. Indeed the number of bombings in Iraq is increasing not decreasing. Second, unlike those behind this venture, Iraqis experience the horrific terrorism of their daily lives within the overall context of the violent US and British occupation of their country. However much US and British authorities may represent the growing list of atrocities carried out by occupation forces in Iraq as the work of a few low ranking "bad apples" or mentally disturbed soldiers, the Iraqis for the most part don't buy this. For them the excesses of Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and now the explosive allegations of rape and murder in Mahmudiya, are part and parcel of the everyday violence of the occupation. Third, whoever is really behind this venture, most Iraqis and other Arabs will see the campaign as a crude piece of US propaganda and this will obviously undermine its political impact. However powerful the anti-terrorism message may seem in Los Angeles, the United States is so thoroughly implicated in the conflict in Iraq that US efforts of this kind (whether or not they have Washington's direct backing) are unlikely to be taken seriously by Iraqis. Fourth, there is a simple point about accessing Iraqi viewers. The cost of living for many Iraqis has become so high that they cannot afford a TV set. And those who can are more likely to tune into international satellite stations than to Iraqi TV which is funded by the United States and seen as a mouthpiece of US propaganda. The absurdity of the scheme provides a small insight into what is wrong with the way the United States is going about fighting and selling the war on terror as a whole. Not just in Iraq, but in the Middle East in general, and in the wider Muslim world, the Bush administration has badly exacerbated the problem of Islamist extremism by a massive military overreaction, by attacking the symptoms rather than the causes of terrorism, and by the abandonment, in the name of public safety and the fight against terror, of long held standards of war making, treatment of enemy combatants and human rights. As long as the US government continues in this vein, no amount of public diplomacy or propaganda can help to sell America's image or to undermine the efforts of Islamist radicals to spread their message. The bottom line is that US policies themselves are playing into the hands of the extremists. These policies are what need changing, not the way they are presented. The good news is that the political elite in the United States may be beginning to realise what a disaster the response of the Bush administration to Islamist extremism and terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 has been. According to a survey of more than 100 leading US foreign policy experts published this month by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress, there is now a striking consensus across party lines that the United States is "not winning the war on terror" and that US government efforts were falling short in "key areas of national security, including public diplomacy, intelligence, and homeland security." The bad news is that those same foreign policy experts do not seem to be seriously focussed on what is needed to fix the problem. The Washington foreign policy establishment (and to some extent its London counterpart) appears to be convinced that as long as there is no attack on Iran and as long as the United States can draw down its forces in Iraq (but somehow manage to maintain control there) then all will be well. This indicates extraordinary complacency and underestimation of the damage that has been done to US standing in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq. On the one hand it is not yet clear that military action against Iran will be avoided or that the United States will be able to extricate itself from the Iraq crisis without further damage to its regional position. On the other hand it is now clear that if the United States really wants to root out Islamist terrorism it will have at the very least to address its own role in nourishing the root causes of that terrorism, including the suppression by regimes and governments allied to the United States of political and national rights of peoples throughout the Middle East region. Tom Porteous is a syndicated columnist and author, formerly with the BBC and the British Foreign Office. |