Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
Beacon Interview with Dan Kuehl 
Thursday, August 25, 2005 Beacon No. 61 (cont'd.): Interview with Dan Kuehl ON DETERRING AL-QA'IDA, "BRIGHT LINES," AND THE SET OF JAG. This is the second part of Beacon's interview with National Defense University's Dan Kuehl, an expert on the information aspects of U.S. power: Beacon: What combination of circumstances might cause an adversary like al-Qa'ida to become deterrable, or do Martians have to invade to get their attention? Kuehl: I think the way you deter al-Qa'ida is not by putting them in fear of death. ... I think you convince them that what they're doing isn't working. How many beheading videos have you seen in the past few months? ... They realized those videos were hurting them rather than helping them, because the vast portion of the Muslim population was reacting with disgust - "This is not who we are, this is not what we do." [The key is] if you can find ways to convince them that what they do harms their cause rather than helps them. Beacon: Is there any point in targeting messages to al-Qa'ida members or operatives or do you simply try to dry up the ideological water in which they swim? Kuehl: I don't think we're going to have much success at all in trying to target or send messages to the 5 percent hard core. They're gone. [You target the other 95 percent.] They don't have to like what we're doing and agree with pluralism and send their daughter to Berkeley next year; we just have to get them to not agree with the cause of the hard core thousands . I think the key to that is to find their own leaders to espouse that, and by that I mean Islamic religious leaders. We've already seen the number-one Islamic leader in Spain come out with a fatwa against the suicide bombers. Those guys are the thought leaders for one billion-plus. Beacon: Did you read Michael Schrage's August 21 Washington Post piece on "soft preemption?" It seems to be a package of tools that fall short of killing and property destruction: disruption of banking networks, communication grids, deportations of undesirables and so on. How do you think these activities might play in soft-power terms? Kuehl: I think it can be helpful if it's done carefully, but again there's that fine line between actions that the other observing audience can see and take as reasonable, and what isn't. The vast majority of the rest of the world looked at Afghanistan and said, "They [the Taliban] asked for it. ... That's not the way they looked at Iraq [but in Afghanistan there was] a clear example of an action that the Islamic world looked at and said "okay." Beacon: So there needs to be a "bright line" that someone steps over? Kuehl: And the Afghani Taliban stepped over that. Beacon: In the courses you teach, do you talk about passive or nearly passive, or incidental components of soft power like product brands, Hollywood movies, scientific achievement and so on? Kuehl: Back in February I was part of a small group from NDU that spent some time in Hollywood on the set of JAG. We went out there, about eight of us, and spent the better part of the week watching JAG. First of all, the technical proficiency and expertise of the people involved in making that and other programs was ... seeing it was something else, and seeing the amount of resources that had to go into it was something else. For 46 minutes and 47 seconds of programming, $3 million per episode, and the same thing for NCIS. That goes well beyond what State can do in terms of producing programming . Secondly, there was a review in the Washington Post Book World in the past 2-3 weeks of a film that has just come out or been released called Original Child Bomb, a documentary about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The guys that made this tapped into some post-World War II archives, Army and Army Air Force footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki right after World War II. The quality of the filming was good because the people doing it were filmmakers, they were movie people. It almost goes back to the issue of why was Ronald Reagan so effective? He was an information guy. He understood how to use the information medium and was brilliant at it. The guys doing JAG are TV filmmakers. No one in the government has that kind of expertise, nor should they try to. In the course of talking [with the producers] about JAG, I found it goes to about 90 countries. I fell off my chair. [People in those countries] are looking at a version for the U.S. military that I want them to see. But that's not the perspective [the producers] are coming from. [We agree that the producers are primarily looking for market appeal, not carrying a message for the U.S. government per se.] Kuehl: We need to form something like a national information council that would be similar to the National Economic Council. If you look at the elements of power - military, economic, diplomatic, and informational - almost to a person the students go, What's that [when you get to discussing "informational"]? How do you integrate these? You can identify the official office door that controls military power. You can't identify the door to economic power, it comes out of Detroit and Birmingham and other places. [We need] the latter model [for information strategy]. We sit down with [people in Hollywood and elsewhere] and say this is the situation and tell them what we're trying to do. I would hope over the course of time we'd get enough shared interest and shared benefit that we can help them and they can help us. [We touch on how valuable Radio Sawa might be.] Kuehl: If you listen to Radio Sawa, its music helps emphasize togetherness. [Sawa's] Norm Pattiz understands that if the Arab youth is listening to Sawa, they're not listening to someone else. ... On Super Bowl Sunday, Americans are the world's most voracious consumers of propaganda. And what beer is advertised more on Super Bowl Sunday, more than other beers by a factor of four or five to one? Budweiser! Because Bud is keeping everybody else from advertising. If you're not watching Miller Genuine Draft or Corona, if all you're seeing is Bud, that's a good thing to do. posted by Paul D. Kretkowski at 8:30 AM 0 comments Wednesday, August 24, 2005 Beacon No. 61: Interview with Dan Kuehl A NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY EXPERT TALKS ABOUT CHANGING WHAT PEOPLE THINK. For the past 12 years, Dan Kuehl has been a professor of systems management at the National Defense University, a collection of colleges and institutions that help train mid-career military officers to think strategically about various aspects of U.S. power. Kuehl teaches elective courses on the use of information as a component of U.S. power, and particularly how to use information content and technology to influence how people think and act. We spoke for most of an hour Tuesday and what follows are my notes on our conversation, which touched on the nature of ideological threats to the West, the limits of public diplomacy, and the power of Hollywood. While my notes were extensive, this piece as a whole should be considered as giving the sense of the speakers' conversation rather than quoting them. I've split my account into two parts: Today's excerpt is generally about framing the problems in U.S. public diplomacy, while tomorrow's will focus on some ways of solving them. Beacon: Why should the West or even the U.S., specifically, find itself in long-term, widespread ideological trouble at this moment when democracy and capitalism are ascendant? What's gone wrong? Dan Kuehl: Democracy and capitalism are at heart political and economic concepts. The struggle we're engaged in is not economic at all, and is political at all only in the sense that politics relates to deeper social issues. The war of ideas we're engaged in is not democracy vs. socialism or totalitarianism, except in the sense that Islamo-fascism is a form of totalitarianism - but it's grounded in cultural-religious issues. A ruling group is intent on imposing its view of the world and society, etc., on a group of others. In this case the others share the religious viewpoint of the group that are making decisions about who to hate, who to kill, and so on. The great struggle is how do we reach this mass of a billion-plus Muslims that are out there all over the world from Africa to East Asia to the Middle East, and now Europe and the U.S. and elsewhere? How do we keep them from the one or two steps that separate them from the people who fly planes into buildings? My issue is that we keep talking about themes and messages, and it comes across as, "If we just tell it better, louder, with more passion, they'll get it." No, they won't. That's the great failure so far. There are similarities to the Cold War, a generations-long clash of social viewpoints where you can't get to a point and say, "Oh, we've won." The differences are that much of the population of the adversary during the Cold War was on our side. That's Radio Free Europe, broadcasting to tens of millions of people that wanted to hear that message. That's not the case here. This isn't a case where we're trying to reach into denied areas where people are thirsting to hear us; that's not the case. Fundamentally Radio Sawa and al-Hurra [TV] are great ideas . Over the course of the past 20-30 years - this is personal opinion - people have come to view the U.S. primarily through the lens of Palestine, Israel and the U.S., and it's a disaster. Somehow it has evolved so that the Islamic population of the world is fundamentally unhappy with the U.S. Beacon: Then how do you de-link perceptions of the U.S. from Israel and Palestine? Kuehl: You can't do it rhetorically. I'm sure you've come across the term "propaganda of the deed." [The perception is that] the United States have given, are giving, and will give the Israeli government carte blanche. I don't think that's accurate, but it's the perception that's out there. Chip away at that perception, then separate that from our involvement or engagement with the Indonesians, for example, with the tsunami. [The tsunami response] gave us a great opportunity to show our true colors. If you want to know what we're like, here it is - you just saw it in action. Every single one of our embassies, every one of our regional combatant commands ought to have on the books a skeleton plan for if "X" happens, here's how we start responding to it, and here's how we start doing the information piece of the response. Having that thought out ahead of time really saves you lots of time and effort when you have to do it. Another point is finding the voices of Islamic moderation, and then finding ways to - and this is going to be art - finding ways to assist them without being too overt about it. [We briefly discuss Egypt's restrictions on funding of Egyptian NGOs by foreign organizations, which is crippling many groups that involved in transparency, governance, etc.] Kuehl: The Egypt example is one of those we have cited over and over again. They made a big deal of the assistance the Japanese gave for rebuilding an opera house or something. I mean, it was a pittance. And we spend more [money helping Egypt] and no one knows about it. How we're going to take advantage informationally of what we're doing, this should be part of the plan. ... We're talking about [creating] a template you can export out and use for some other operations. Beacon: Has anyone tried to catalog what all the different terms for influencing thoughts and actions are, from psychological operations to soft power? Kuehl: This struggle of how you define things and what you call things is still going on. It started with something called "information warfare," then we redefined that and turned it into "information operations," and now we're redefining that. There's a joint doctrine published in 1988 and the process of revising that is still going on. ... They don't write doctrine at [the State Department], but they do have a clear-cut perspective that speaks to one, understanding, two, engaging, and three, informing and influencing. We have to understand them before we can start to get at the way they think. [Kuehl briefly discusses a presentation he did along with a German colleague. The colleague was asked what the U.S. government should do about understanding other cultures.] Kuehl: She answered, number one, resurrect government-sponsored effort to train linguists. I wouldn't be surprised if Condi Rice got her funding initially from government programs to fund Soviet studies, linguistic studies, which should make her particularly attuned to doing the same thing with Arabic and other languages. The number of people who can go on Al-Jazeera live and debate other guests is low. [We jointly guess it is between six and 20.] Training linguists is the slow part - but the second thing is finding linguists. The companies that do business over there, big-time business, have [translators] on their staffs and payroll . [I raise the problem of vetting people who are foreign nationals or related to same.] Kuehl: If you put your mind to it you can do a security vetting on someone a lot faster than you can train them in Arabic. TOMORROW: Deterring al-Qa'ida posted by Paul D. Kretkowski at 11:05 AM 0 comments Tuesday, August 23, 2005 "Soft Preemption" MICHAEL SCHRAGE OFFERS A STRATEGY AND TACTICS THAT LIE BETWEEN SOFT AND HARD POWER. In Sunday's Post, MIT's Michael Schrage introduces and discusses "soft preemption," a half-step between the passivity of soft power and the violence of military action. Noting the need for "meaningful choices between impotence and violence," Schrage's "Pulling Punches" wraps "nonlethal, minimally destructive" tactics like increased scrutiny of visas and banking systems, economic sanctions, and disruption of satellite broadcasts that incite violence, together to form the beginnings of an intermediate doctrine: There are undeniably provocative aspects to the soft preemption doctrine, as there are to any self-defense approach. If Venezuela disrupted BBC, Telemundo or CNN satellite broadcasts throughout Latin America to prevent "incitement" of a coup against President Hugo Chavez, for example, that would surely escalate regional tensions. If China launched denial-of-service Internet attacks against American institutions that fund supporters of "Free Tibet" or encourage Taiwanese nationalists, the international community would confront a real challenge. But the ability to preempt softly doesn't inherently invite malicious global mischief any more than the ability to launch a cruise missile guarantees its firing. Responsible nations would have every reason to think twice about soft preemptions in self-defense; irresponsible ones could have bigger problems than soft preemption to deal with if they're not careful. Anybody who engages in soft preemption must be prepared to escalate to the harder stuff if necessary. The United States would do the world a service if it declared that, as technology permits a broader array of less violent, less destructive interventions to undermine the abilities of non-state actors and their state sponsors to strike, it will exercise those soft options to deter and disrupt any attacks. Collateral damage to such interventions is preferable to the collateral damage of bombs and bullets gone astray. Soft preemption is soft power with a vengeance, and a public policy option that deserves a good hard look. posted by Paul D. Kretkowski at 1:36 PM 0 comments Monday, August 22, 2005 Beacon No. 60: More Soft Power with Tom and Jerry ANIMAL CHARACTERS, NO DIALOGUE AND SLAPSTICK GET YOU ON TV EVERYWHERE. In May I quoted the Wall Street Journal as saying that Tom and Jerry cartoons could be seen on TV in otherwise insulated North Korea. That was remarkable enough, but it turns out that the animated cat and mouse had other fans as well. In the September Atlantic, David Samuels submits an extremely long takeout on the late Yasir Arafat. He paints a Palestinian leader completely devoted to the cause of a Palestinian state, but willing to tolerate corruption that kept the Palestinian people from enjoying the fruits of foreign aid and their own industry. In the middle of Samuels' piece there's this nugget on some of Chairman Arafat's idiosyncrasies: The Palestinian leader was fond of time-saving measures, and could cite the exact number of hours that shaving once every five days, as he did, could add to a man's life. He spent his spare hours watching cartoons on television. His favorites were Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, and Tom and Jerry. The cat and mouse again! How could American cartoons like these - some of which are old enough to collect Social Security - maintain their popularity around the world and transcend cultures as they do? Animal characters are easily understood and, being inhuman, are politically neutral. Cats and mice, dogs and roosters, rabbits and ducks can be seen the world over, competing over scarce resources. A lack of dialogue also helps since it cuts translation costs and avoids potential censorship. Slapstick is the universal language of comedy. There's some primate instinct people retain that makes it impossible not to giggle when someone trips on their dress, slips on a banana peel or gets a pie in the face. No one dies. This gets discussed explicitly by the characters - and actually becomes a plot element - in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the 1988 movie that is a brilliant exception to the no-dialogue rule. There's almost never permanent trauma in cartoons, only joy or just desserts. Characters don't evolve. They can be counted on as either bright, plucky underdogs or overbearing, short-sighted buffoons. Put another way: You just can't believe the coyote is going to run over the edge of the cliff again - but you wind up laughing anyway. And finally, the good guys always win. I'm sure someone in academia has developed a longer list of factors than this. Anyone who wants to create universally understood characters and memorable situations could do worse than to look at cartoon art through these lenses, and keep in mind that Tom and Jerry is something that Jerusalem, Pyongyang and Washington all agree on. posted by Paul D. Kretkowski at 4:56 PM 0 comments Friday, August 19, 2005 Beacon No. 59: Immunize Our Tourists, Señor IN WHICH THE U.S. SHOOTS ITSELF IN THE FOOT BY WRECKING DOMINICA'S COAST GUARD. Juan Forero's "Bush's Aid Cuts on Court Issue Roil Neighbors" in this morning's Times describes the side deals the U.S. is making with other nations to keep its citizens out of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The Bush administration has long objected to the ICC, which was set up "to be the first permanent tribunal for prosecuting crimes like genocide," having jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers since they are so frequently stationed overseas and called to combat or peacekeeping duties in places where black and white can turn out, in hindsight, to have been gray. I can understand how the administration sees the U.S., with its unparalleled reach, breadth of interests and worldwide dispersal of citizens, as "uniquely vulnerable" to what would amount to nuisance suits by the world's other 200-odd countries every time an American soldier made a bad, ill-informed or simply unlucky decision that caused death or injury. And in fact, Forero writes, protections for U.S. forces are built into the ICC: There are also safeguards that would give the United States' own military and civilian courts jurisdiction over Americans. What this means is that under the ICC, U.S. citizens already enjoy "extraterritoriality," a privilege that raised hackles centuries ago when Britain demanded it in both India and in its North American colonies - and that helped spark rebellions in both those areas. But the U.S. has gone a step further, demanding that other nations codify their inferior status in separate agreements, pledging that they won't ship U.S. citizens to the Hague for prosecution. Regardless of whether these agreements are reciprocal - so that the U.S. would also pledge to not turn over citizens of, say, Mali to the ICC if requested to do so - the U.S. is punishing countries that don't sign agreements by cutting off economic aid: American budgetary records show that Uruguay, whose new left-leaning government has vocally declined to sign an immunity agreement, has lost $1.5 million since 2003. Costa Rica has lost about $500,000, and unstable Bolivia has lost $1.5 million. In addition, the United States International Military Education and Training program, which pays for Latin American military officers to study in the United States, has cut its rolls by 770 officers a year, from an average class of 3,000, military officials said. Most nations that have lost money are cash-strapped, like Dominica, a Caribbean island which lost $400,000 and was unable to operate its only Coast Guard boat for two years. That meant no drug patrols or searches for fishermen lost at sea, said Crispin Gregoire, Dominica's ambassador to the United Nations. "We were reeling from the impact of lost aid, and our economy was not in the greatest shape," he said. "The government decided to yield and we ended up signing." Peru, a close Bush administration ally, has lost about $4 million "You feel the cuts, yes," said Congressman Luis Ibérico, president of the committee that oversees military spending and the antidrug campaign. "These are small amounts, but nevertheless, they're necessary to support our military personnel." Painful as the cuts are, many countries say they will not budge before American pressure. "We will not change our principles for any amount of money," said Michael I. King, the Barbados ambassador to the Organization of American States. "We're not going to belly up for $300,000 in training funds." Worse, from a soft-power standpoint, the U.S. law exempts NATO allies and other wealthy countries from penalties if they don't sign - a welcome recognition that the world's Japans and Australias and Germanys would just laugh at such short-sighted bullying. And finally, the new agreements don't just protect soldiers and policy-makers. No, according to Forero's article U.S. tourists are also exempt from being turned over to the Hague for committing genocide. Thank goodness; who knows what mischief U.S. tourists currently engage between the time their cruise ships dock and when they finally scamper out of the last dockside trinket shop and up the gangway. |