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SPECIAL REPORT: The 'Prop-Agenda' at War
By Miren Gutierrez*
ROME, Jun 27 (IPS) - In an interview with Arabic broadcaster al-Jazeera, President Bush's
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in 2001 that she did not want U.S. networks
to show Osama bin Laden tapes because "it was not a matter of news, it was a matter of
propaganda."
Is the U.S. government above propaganda?
Well, it is not. As former Salvadoran guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos put it in an interview
with IPS, winning wars is also about winning the minds of people.
Throughout history, propaganda has been used in warfare to do exactly that; and the
United States has also practised it extensively with its own twist, that of a democracy that
has a free press and therefore has to disguise propaganda better.
It is one of history's ironies, for example, that former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who
was re-elected as a peace candidate in 1916, soon thereafter led the United States willingly
into the First World War. That was achieved thanks to propaganda.
Contrary to what Rice's words suggest, two recent books imply that a more intensive,
perhaps more deceitful, use of propaganda was in place recently. An embedded, Internet-
age propaganda, piggybacking on brand name credibility. Real-time transmission, real-
time deceit.
It means that if you use CNN or The New York Times to selectively present segmented
realities, then the effectiveness of propaganda is tremendously increased by these
trademarks.
In their widely quoted book 'Weapons of Mass Deception', Sheldon Rampton and John
Stauber argued in 2003 that the U.S. government used the shock of the 9/11 attacks to
justify an invasion of Iraq. Bush counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke further
denounces President George Bush for using the attacks as a pretext for the war in his book
'Against All Enemies' published last March.
For propaganda expert Nancy Snow, in terms of purpose "not much has changed (since
Wilson's times). Propaganda is still used more as an antecedent to war; in other words, if
war is the paint, then propaganda is the paint primer that makes possible the total devotion
of the public to the just cause of the state in wartime."
Once the masses have chosen sides, "propaganda is used to reinforce existing attitudes
more than it is used to change attitudes," Snow, assistant professor at the College of
Communications at California State University told IPS in an e-mail interview.
"The primary change is in technology rather than method," says Randall Bytwerk, a
specialist in propaganda, and professor of communication at Calvin College in Grand
Rapids, Michigan. "It is now possible to spread much more information much faster."
A second change is that the mass of information has made it more difficult for citizens to
make sense of what is going on, he told IPS in an e-mail interview. "The result is that,
perhaps even more than in the past, we look for shorthand ways of making sense of it all."
In their book Rampton and Stauber also imply that many independent media cooperated in
the deception.
Embedded journalism showed a partial, patriotic image of the "war on terrorism" during the
invasion of Iraq in 2003. Almost 600 journalists were "embedded" with the U..S. and British
troops in the campaign against Saddam, reporting what they saw from the coalition lines.
The "war on terror" was the starting point for a standardisation of set phrases like
"weapons of mass destruction", "axis of evil", "shock and awe", and "war of liberation".
Simple, repetitious and emotional, so the propagandistic concept does not get lost in the
mist.
To forge the message, the Pentagon acknowledged hiring a Washington PR firm, the
Rendon Group. It was Rendon who provided the U.S. flags for hundreds of Kuwaitis to wave
when U.S. troops entered Kuwait City in the first Gulf War, Rampton and Stauber say.
In an article titled 'How To Sell a War' published in the magazine 'In These Times' last
August, the authors suggest that some of the images of the war in Iraq may have been
cooked by PR specialists and "perception managers".
While that could be true, Bytwerk says "such an approach is usually not necessary, and a
bad idea. It is not necessary because there is usually so much information that something
can be found to fit. It is a bad idea because, if found out, which it often is, it reduces the
overall credibility."
This war was more "about not seeing images," contends Snow. "People in the U.S. didn't see
the same war as people outside the U.S. or as did viewers of al-Jazeeraàit's all about the
disparate perceptions by the news media in the U.S./Middle East and Europe."
When on April 9, 2003 the statue of Saddam was finally brought down in Baghdad's Firdos
Square, U.S. media commentators rushed to assign iconic connotations to the toppling,
ranking it alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall or the protesters opposing tanks at
Tiananmen Square.
"Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital", Rampton and Stauber quoted The New York
Times as saying. The main papers and television channels in the U.S. showed the same
scene, proffered similar comments.
But a BBC photo sequence of the statue's fall displayed a sparse crowd of approximately
200 people, they observe; a Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos Square showed that it was
nearly empty, sealed off by U.S. tanks.
Their article also cites various examples of slapdash reporting, including The New York
Times' Judith Miller's, which came under scrutiny since it was revealed that now out-of-
favour Iraqi leader Ahmad Chalabi was one of her primary sources.
The New York Times admitted in a May 26 editorial that after reviewing their Iraq coverage
"we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should
have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable
now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged."
The awkward articles depended at least in part on information from Iraqi informants,
defectors and exiles set on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose integrity has come under
public debate in recent weeks, the paper said.
There are many types of propaganda, and people related to it. There are "spin doctors" who
seek to ensure that others interpret an event from a particular point of view. The U.S.
Department of Defence Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms speaks of "perception
managers" in charge of "psychological operations", a concept originated by the U. S.
military that combines "truth projection", security, and deception, designed to "convey or
deny selected information to foreign audiences" and their leaders to "influence their
emotions and objective reasoning" ultimately resulting in actions favourable to the
originator's objectives.
"We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is
always propaganda, and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness,
the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace," said Walter Lippmann, former advisor to
President Wilson.
Lippmann, a journalist and a renowned expert on modern mass communications theory,
believed that perception often is more important that reality. Many followed suit.
There are also differences between the propaganda deployed in totalitarian regimes, where
the sole source of information is the state, and in democracies, where the media and other
sources, including non-governmental organisations, can counterbalance the government
propagandistic efforts.
But Bytwerk, author of several books on Nazi and Marxist propaganda, says that "even
Joseph Goebbels lied rarely. He preferred to mislead by selection or by ignoring
unfavourable information rather than by outright fabrication. I think fabrication can
sometimes be justified to deceive the enemy, but not to deceive one's own public."
With satellite and cable television, and the Internet, both one's own public and foreign
audiences have access to almost the same information, language being sometimes the sole
barrier.
Bytwerk says also one must distinguish between "incomplete" and "inaccurate".
"That is, it is surely a bad idea for even independent media to publish information that
would reveal military plans or provide useful information for the 'enemy'. Incompleteness is
probably a good thing at times (of war)," he says.
"On the other hand, inaccurate information is usually bad for everyone concerned," he
adds. "The hard thing, even for journalists, is to digest the huge amount of complicated
information in a way that is both accurate and fair. Independent journalists often have their
own biases."
What has been the case here? Incompleteness or inaccuracy?
The government rationale behind the invasion was: Saddam had backed the 9/11 attacks;
he was also hiding weapons of mass destruction; the Iraqi people would eventually see the
United States as their rescuer.
Now the bipartisan commission investigating the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks reported "no
credible evidence" that al-Qaeda and Iraq cooperated in attacks against the United States.
Banned biological, chemical and nuclear weapons are yet to be found.
Questioned by the commission, Clarke said that Bush was so anxious with launching a war
on Iraq that they missed the growing terrorist threat from al-Qaeda.
But in an April 2003 opinion survey by the Pew Research Centre for People and the Press,
63 percent of people interviewed said they believed the war in Iraq would help the war on
terrorism.
"You may wonder why it is that a majority of Americans still link Saddam to 9/11," says
Snow. "The reason for such a belief is because the American people were repeatedly told by
the President and his inner circle that Saddam's evil alone was enough to be linked to 9/11
and that given time, he would have used his weapons against us. With propaganda, you
don't need facts per se, just the best facts put forward. If these facts make sense to people,
then they don't need proof like one might need in a courtroom."
According to Snow, the U.S. government succeeded in "driving the agenda" and "milking the
story" (maximising media coverage of a particular issue by the careful use of briefings,
leaking pieces of a jigsaw to different outlets, journalists gradually piece together the story
and their sense of discovery drives the story up the news agenda).
"That's also very commonly practice," she says. "When a country goes off to war, so goes its
media with it. The news media were caught up in the rally round the flag syndrome. They
were forced to choose a side, and given the choices, whose side did they logically choose
but the U.S.?"
For Snow, the funny thing is that "the American public succumbed more to the stupid
propaganda tricks than did the rest of the world. I think we are a gullible public. We wanted
to believe the best about ourselves and it seemed beyond our capacityàto imagine that we
would go to war with a country without a solid reason."
"At the beginning of the conflict, there was a less critical examination of the facts because
we were a nation still overcoming the 9/11 syndrome and seeking vengeance," she says.
"You did not have a vigorous public demanding the truth. If anything, I think we tend to
point the finger too quickly at the news media when the rest of us should have been
putting pressure on the media and the government to provide us with a well-grounded
rationale for war with Iraq other than that Saddam is evil and must go. The public accepted
Bush's simplistic rationale and so the media skipped along to the same tune.."
While the U.S. government campaign had an impact on the U.S. public, the "perception
management" was a failure at influencing foreign audiences.
According to Bytwerk, "it is far easier to make propaganda at home than abroad. One has
more credibility at home, and much more in common with the audience. Although Nazi
propaganda was not completely believed by Germans, they believed what their government
said far more than the
British believed German propaganda, for example. All things being equal, most people want
to believe they live in a good country."
In spite of the worldwide sympathy caused by the 9/11 attacks, "given the U..S. influence in
the world, a fair percentage of the world's population will be suspicious no matter what the
U.S. does, whether for good or bad reasons," he says. "For example, many people are quite
willing to believe that the U.S. government itself knew of or planned the Sep. 11 attacks."
Events also conspired to create a PR catastrophe.
Iraqis started rallying to oppose the U.S. military presence; the Shias joined the Sunni
Muslims in fighting against the U.S. occupation (when news reports made us believe that
the Shia majority in Iraq, crushed by Saddam's regime, would welcome the U.S. troops);
then Chalabi, previously tagged by some "analysts" as the "George Washington of Iraq", fell
into disgrace when it was reported that he had leaked information to the Iranians. Finally,
pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, showing U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, created a
global outrage.
Both the Bush administration and al-Qaeda typecast the struggle for the mindset as a fight
between good and evil. And it looked like U.S. opponents learnt a few communication
tricks, including the well-timed release of Saddam and bin Laden tapes.
Last April four Italians were captured in Iraq. The Arabic television channel al-Arabiya
showed three of the hostages (one of them, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, had already been
executed) apparently in good health. In the footage, the kidnappers promised to liberate
them if the Italians joined in a demonstration against the presence of foreign troops in Iraq
and against Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi's stand on Iraq.
"The kidnappers' message seeks not to influence Iraq but Italy," said ruling party Forza
Italia's leader in the Senate, Renato Schifani. Through "terror" and "barbaric behaviour" the
captors "are trying to manipulate the next (European) elections" and "divide the country."
On the eve of Bush's visit to Rome and the European parliament elections, thousands of
people gathered in Rome headed by the kidnapped soldiers' relatives to protest against the
war.
Snow thinks they are "not necessarily using propaganda techniques more successfully, but
rather they are waking up to the reality that if you want to challenge the status quo, then
you need to study and apply similar techniques of mass persuasion."
Some of the most effective propaganda campaigns are the prop-docs like 'Fahrenheit 9/
11', she says. "Michael Moore and other filmmakers have figured out that in order to try to
beat them, you need to use the same game board playing pieces. All of the rightwing critics
of Moore's latest film say that he plays loose and fast with the facts, as if government
leaders don't do the same when it's convenient to them."
*Miren Gutierrez is IPS Editor-in-Chief.
(END/2004)
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