If only we could get the propaganda right …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:59 AM on December 19, 2006.

Forgive me if I mentioned this story before, but a few years ago I caught a discussion about "public diplomacy" by a senior official in the United States Information Agency. Among his recommendations for improving the reporting of Al Jazeera was that we should "stop shooting them."

While I wouldn't argue with that, the comment has come to symbolize for me the limitations of U.S. propaganda efforts since the inception of the War on Terra. Despite a series of "Public Diplomacy Tsars" ranging from Madison Avenue hotshot Charlotte Beers to long-time Bush "wife" Karen Hughes, we've been behind in the information war from the get-go.

This story, from the LA Times, shows that our opponents don't need a highly sophisticated message in order to make an impact:

The men with laptops sat around an unadorned conference table, chatting amicably about their plans and operations.

The scene on the newly launched Al Zawraa satellite television channel could have been footage from the boardroom of any company, if it weren't for the ski masks the men wore and the subject of the meeting: future mortar attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq.

The renegade, pro-insurgent Al Zawraa channel, with a 24-hour diet of propaganda against U.S. forces and the Iraqi government, has become something of a sensation throughout the country. It has drawn condemnation from U.S. officials, Iraqi politicians and Friday prayer leaders.

Most hours of the day it plays footage of U.S. soldiers in Iraq being shot and blown up in insurgent attacks, often with religious chants or Saddam Hussein-era nationalist anthems in the background. There are segments warning Iraq's Sunni Arabs to be wary of Shiite Muslims, and occasional English-language commentary and subtitles clearly meant to demoralize U.S. troops.

"Your new enlisting qualifications are kind of comical," an announcer says in slightly accented American English, over an image of a U.S. soldier in a field hospital, a bandage on his newly amputated arm. "I mean, what are you doing? Thirty-nine years old? That's the new age of recruiting? Are you recruiting nannies? I guess if we are patient, we might witness crippled people enlisting for the Marines."

The station attempts to present an alternative to images of the war appearing in U.S. and other Iraqi media. It shows footage of Americans abusing Iraqis and Baghdad government officials collaborating with the "occupier." [snip]

It's not clear how big an Iraqi audience Al Zawraa captures. But its very presence demonstrates the insurgency's abilities. Despite 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and intense diplomatic pressure on Iraq's neighbors, the station is able to circumvent U.S. and Iraqi forces and stage round-the-clock broadcasts, complete with news bulletins, graphics and commentary.

Al Zawraa started out several months ago as an aboveground hard-line Sunni channel, but it was shut down by the Iraqi government Nov. 5, the day Hussein received the death penalty. Iraqi police raided the station's headquarters after broadcasts criticized the verdict.

That last graph is a great example of the Laww of Unintended Consequences: shut down a hard-line Sunni station and you get an underground network with a message that's twice as distasteful.

Anyway, this all speaks to the idea that the U.S. needs to improve its public diplomacy in order to prevail in the "long war" against violent extremists -- or whatever we're calling it -- which has long been a given among the U.S. strategic class.

But the belief is based to a certain degree on American exceptionalism; the thinking is that American policies towards the Middle East are benign and constructive by definition, so if we could only better communicate their rationales everyone -- or at least most reasonable people -- would jump on board.

But the hard truth is that propaganda is only as effective as its narrative is credible. And, sadly, whatever the substance of the various arguments may or may not be, the storyline that our military adventurism in the Middle East is inherently neo-colonial and our occupation of Iraq is as illegitimate as it is brutal is simply more compelling than anything we've got to counter it. If we want to tell a different story, credibly, then we've got to adopt a different mix of policies. Unless we do so, the government's public diplomacy will remain an exercise in throwing good tax dollars after bad.

PS: It surely hasn't helped that we hired a rabidly pro-Israel bunch of Evangelical Christian fundamentalists to produce Arabic-language programming for broadcast to the Iraqi people.

Tagged as: iraq, propaganda

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.