US losing the campaign for hearts and minds

If the Americans suffer one tenth of the casualties the Russians suffered in Afghanistan and Chechnya, they will flee and never look back. That is because the current structure of the American and Western armies is not the same as their structure during the colonial era. They have reached a stage of effeminacy that makes them unable to sustain battles for a long period of time, a weakness they compensate for with a deceptive media halo.

It is much easier for al-Qaida to charge Americans with effeminacy and degeneracy - as the Nazis did to their cost - and so glorify their own potency rather than consider more complex explanations.

Both Bush and al-Qaida ignore the strategic difficulties for the Americans in Vietnam that were pointed out in US intelligence reports before 1968, just as the National Intelligence Council told Bush before the Iraq war that the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime was likely to trigger Islamic fundamentalism and a guerrilla war against US troops.

In the 1960s as now, strategic difficulties came home to roost. War simulations in 1965 suggested public support would diminish as deaths mounted in a protracted war. Just as people became disillusioned by exposure of claims about WMD and a peaceful Iraq, so Americans became disillusioned after Tet with the military assurances of the previous five years that things were fine. Even then, it is not always remembered that it was another five years before the US left Vietnam.

In World War I, the British found propaganda against their enemies was not effective until the last 18 months of the war, when there were clear war aims. There is no plan for the Iraq war and hence no such aims. Instead, we get phrases such as “long war”, which have as much motivational value as telling people in a desert “just one more sand hill”.

There is a mismatch between what the administration says and what people see on their TV screens. They are set in a disillusioned interpretive framework that the administration helped to create.

Furthermore, credibility is a vital ingredient in persuasion and Bush has little of it. Whatever he says, even if it is right, it will not generally be believed. American propaganda is hamstrung by Bush until another president arrives in 2009 and by other self-inflicted problems.

The insurgents have an easier task. Each time they blow up an American vehicle and put the video on the Internet, they score an immediate propaganda effect, with the majority of the world’s Muslims supporting such attacks because they want the US out of Muslim lands and believe the USA wishes to destroy Islam - according to Pew and World Public Opinion polls.

Moreover, at some stage the Americans must leave and, no matter what they do or say, the insurgents will always claim a propaganda victory because of the disaster Iraq has become for the Americans.

The Bush administration is incompetent with propaganda as with so much else. In April, a director of the Government Audit Office told a congressional sub-committee his agency warned in 2003 that the government lacked a “public diplomacy strategy”; that Bush established a committee in 2006 to formulate it; but that “strategy is still under development”.

Nothing was done in four years by Karen Hughes, the responsible under secretary and a public relations mate of Bush since the 1990s. Like her predecessor in the job, she is noted for not listening to friendly Arab regimes which tell her why America is not liked. Instead, she insisted on telling them Americans are good guys.

Hughes finally released the strategy on June 7, most likely because of congressional embarrassment.