US losing the campaign for hearts and minds

What do al-Qaida and the Bush administration have in common? What do George Bush and Adolf Hitler have in common?

No, the answer to both questions is not fascism. Rather, both al-Qaida and the Bush administration agree they are in a propaganda war over the TV and the Internet, even using Youtube. They also subscribe to simplistic ideas that propaganda will cause a collapse of public opinion and military defeat. Thus, both Bush and Hitler adhere to the “stab-in-the-back” idea of propaganda.

Hitler fervently believed that Germany lost World War I because its army was “stabbed in the back” by Jews and socialists and by British propaganda which caused a collapse of mass opinion.

He wrote in Mein Kampf of a “flood” of propaganda in 1918 that seduced the army into thinking “as the enemy wanted it to”. Actually, he pinched these ideas from General Erich von Ludendorff who joined General Hindenburg to be the heads of the German High Command and who both became the effective rulers of Germany during that war instead of the weak civilian government.

Ludendorff failed to break the Allies with his March 1918 offensive, in which the Australian army took a leading role against the Germans around the French village of Villers-Bretonneux.

Then in July the German army reeled from an attack by French and American divisions, and there were millions more American troops to arrive in Europe and an American economy yet to get into full gear. In other words, there was an impossible strategic vice closing on the Germans.

Ludendorff saw that defeat was looming but, rather than letting the government know, he misled it into thinking that the war could still be won. In September he and Hindenburg had effective power transferred back to the German parliament and to a new government which was formed from the socialists that the two generals despised - and advised them to sue for peace.

After the armistice, Ludendorff fled to Sweden where he wrote repeatedly of the “stab-in-the-back” of the German army and of the “unscrupulous” enemy propaganda which “hypnotised” his army “as a rabbit is by a snake”.

Thus, he had successfully palmed blame onto propaganda and onto the civilian government which he helped create rather than take responsibility for the strategic failures he created for Germany. There is a comparison with contemporary events.

The US now pursues a counterinsurgency war in Iraq to win “hearts and minds”, a phrase from the Vietnam War that has also popped from the lips of Alexander Downer. It seems that he and the Bush administration are principally worried about our minds, rather than those of the Iraqis, and with getting through political difficulties of their own making.

In April, Bush compared Iraq to Vietnam and blamed the loss of public support when the horror was brought into American lounge rooms by television. Mythology has it that the war was lost because a negative media turned public opinion after the Tet offensive of January 1968. This is another tale of an army that was “stabbed-in-the-back” just when it was supposedly winning the war.

Interestingly, al-Qaida documents rely on the same mythology for their propaganda strategy of causing a collapse in American morale. With Vietnam in mind, they make comparisons to the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan by the mujahideen - with considerable help from the Americans. As one paper, entitled The Management of Savagery, states:

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.

It is a surprisingly short document and shows no change in American propaganda strategy. The administration is still telling Muslims that Americans are good guys. That is, this is a document designed by Americans, for Americans - and not for the Muslim audiences it should be reaching.

There is still the intent to spread democracy, liberty and human rights, which are fine and good values but they are so often identified by the Bush administration with their country, as the “beacon of hope and opportunity for people across the world”, as this document states, that it gets in the way of it listening to others.

So this is not a new strategy. Before 9-11 in June 2001, according to Bob Woodward in State of Denial, Prince Bandar, the ambassador of Saudi Arabia and a close Bush family friend, tried to tell Bush, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice how the Middle East viewed America. After five hours, they still would not believe that Arabs viewed America as the bad guy who funded and armed Israel with the intent of destroying Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority. As Bandar said, whether these were the facts or not, these were the impressions of the Arabs.

Instead of facing such issues, Hughes’ recent strategy document advocates a focus on means rather than ends, probably in the belief that all it takes is better communication of the message rather than there being a problem with the message.

It’s a variation of shouting louder when you think people don’t understand.

Therefore, there is a focus on the expansion of education and exchange programs, the use of technology, modernised communications and the “diplomacy of deeds”. This last strategy is a version of the aphorism “actions speak louder than words”: that there are everyday things done by Americans to improve the lives of ordinary people elsewhere but few know it.

These actions need expansion and more publicity, states the document, for they “communicate our values and beliefs far more effectively than all of our words”.

This propaganda of deeds pervades the US army Youtube channel. However, the problem is that many Muslims already take the view that actions speak louder than words when they see Americans planes and guns acting contrary to American values and words.

Meanwhile, the military dominate American use of propaganda, as they do foreign policy, with information operations and psychological warfare at the expense of “public affairs”.

These three versions of propaganda have different objectives. The first two focus on battlefield success against the enemy while public affairs concerns credibility and truth with the media and the public. However, the US military is often subordinating this last strategy to the needs of the first two, much to the chagrin of Lieutenant-Colonel Pamela Keeton, who resigned from the army as the public affairs officer for the US Central Command to take a top civilian PR job.

For example, in 2004, CNN broadcast a report from an army officer of an impending attack on Fallujah. This was a lie because the army wanted to see the reactions of insurgents who were thought to watch the media.

Such lies bounce easily around an interconnected world and complicate the different audiences the Americans must deal with: their own citizens, Muslim opinion, and their friends.

Until its troops are removed from Iraq, the US will not benefit in the propaganda war from the sympathy of the majority of world Muslims who do not support attacks on civilians, Americans included, according to those same opinion polls. Once the Americans leave Iraq, a weakness in al-Qaida’s position in the propaganda war will be exposed.