By Sanjay Suri
LONDON, Mar 20 2003 (IPS)

Round One of the propaganda war on Iraq to Saddam Hussein, says Tim Crook, Britain’s leading expert on propaganda.

"The first strikes have been seen in the West as an attempt to take out Saddam Hussein," Crook, a professor who researches propaganda at Goldsmith College in London told IPS in an interview Thursday.

"But this could have been a decoy set up by the Iraqi counter-intelligence to draw a pre-emptive strike before the start of the war."

The Iraqi strikes that follow appear then only as retaliatory measures, Crook says. "Also, Saddam has not been taken out, and the strikes appear therefore to have failed anyway."

By landing some missiles into Kuwait in the first 24 hours, "the Iraqis have also managed to present the West with pictures of terrified correspondents scrambling for gas masks," he says.

The propaganda game has gone particularly badly for the British, Crook says. "The director of information at 10 Downing Street was woken up with calls about an air strike," he says.

"The British military command seems to have been taken by surprise, and that is not great for their image."

Meanwhile, children all over Britain have been protesting at civic centres against the war. "The propaganda battle is being lost to children," he says. "This seems a disastrous and humiliating way to begin a propaganda war."

"Britain was in a lamentable position before this war began," Crook says. "Their position now is very lamentable."

Al Jazeera has reported that U.S. forces made an unsuccessful attempt to jam Iraqi television. "But Iraqi television was able to put out an apparently live broadcast by Saddam Hussein," he says.

Claims that Iraqi radio has been taken over also appeared to be unconfirmed.

The U.S. and British forces are also hurting themselves by some poorly constructed language, Crook says. "They are talking about the ‘decapitation’ of Saddam Hussein. That is brutal and disgusting. This is not language that would appeal to the rational mind."

It is also odd that these forces have been using language such as "overcoming Iraq with shock and awe," Crook said. "If you are announcing that to your enemy, then you are defeating the very purpose of shocking and aweing. And given the pathetic nature of Iraqi defences, this language creates an uncomfortable feeling. It raises the question, who is the underdog here?" And that raises the question who one’s sympathies go to.

As the full-scale attack on Iraq appeared to unfold Thursday evening, the announcement by U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the assault would be "of a force and scope and scale that is beyond what has been seen before" also projected the same idea of disproportionate force bearing down on Iraqis.

Effective action is one thing, but such announcements do not project the U.S.-led alliance in a light that would fetch them sympathy or admiration.

"The American propaganda so far has succeeded only in making Saddam look heroic," Crook says.

These blunders do not look good for the alliance, he says. And such propaganda failures are "extremely offensive to the families of soldiers and service people," he says. "This will do nothing for their feelings, and one of the uses of propaganda is to make the home population feel better."

Propaganda is an incredibly important factor in war because it is the "munitions of the mind," he says. And while any side may score brief victories, the other side can always come back in this invisible war over the war. The U.S. has "incredible resources for playing this game" though that is no guarantee that they cannot be beaten at the game.

In war briefings great care is usually taken to tell mostly the truth because "the best propaganda is the truth," he says. "As much as 98 per cent may be true and only the tiny rest deliberately false."

Without a strong body of truth on whose back the lie can ride, the propaganda game can be lost very quickly, he says. U.S. Defence Secretary will be bound to tell mostly the truth in his briefings; the trick will be to spot the truth not told, or that little twist somewhere.

"Spotting that will depend largely on a journalist’s previous experience, the nature of his or her separate sources, and the journalist’s ideological slant," Crook says.

At the same time propaganda launched by a totalitarian regime that is patently false cannot last very long either, Crook says. "If you think you can spot it, then the propaganda operation is really bad. People always find other ways of getting to the truth."

In Britain and the U.S. there will be little need to control the media as it is in a totalitarian state because of a "high degree of self-censorship already achieved in the mainstream media arising from the emotional and ideological commitments of the journalists," Crook says.

The Ministry of Defence in London has announced it will reveal full facts about the war to the media, but with the proviso that it may take them a little time to be able to ascertain and tell the truth. Crook says "delay is a vital tool of disinformation."

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