Speaking Of Propaganda

Here's Dave Meyer at OpenLeft getting it pretty much - from my point of view - completely wrong:

I'm not exactly surprised that the administration's military propaganda program has received so little attention. The establishment has never demonstrated any understanding of the war in Iraq, of why it's such an incoherent, doomed venture. The propaganda program revealed last Monday is not a sideshow. It's an essential component of the only remaining strategic rationale for the continuation of the war -- preventing damage to America's image.

In the last year of her life, Hannah Arendt offered a retrospective on Vietnam; Home to Roost is printed in the Responsibility and Judgment collection published back in 2003. Her prescient insight was that the entire "not very honorable and not very rational enterprise was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth.'" Eventually, the war was maintained solely "to avoid admitting defeat and to keep the image...intact."

Well, yes, that's partly true. But it stops a little too soon, because it doesn't ask why it matters that we had the image as the mightiest power on earth. Because that answer matters more than a bit; and the simple answer is that as Handel talks about Sun Tzu in Masters of Modern Warfare:

Among the force multipliers recommended by Sun Tzu are maneuver; reliance on intelligence; the extensive use of deception and diversionary measures to achieve surprise; the 'indirect approach'; and the use of psychological measures to undermine the enemies will to fight.

We were, in the 1960's and 1970's, in a conflict which was very real. Winning that conflict - as we did - could have involved the direct application of force, which in the case of two nuclear-armed superpowers would have been catastrophic, and so there were a series of indirect, smaller conflicts of which Vietnam was one.

Now I've talked about Vietnam more than once, and will talk about it again soon. But let's accept for a moment that that's what Vietnam was actually about, and put aside the legitimate moral qualms about pushing back the Soviets over the bodies of dead Vietnamese for later discussion.

But let's not - as Meyers does - casually dismiss the issue of 'image' as something that's really about the self-image of a bunch of leaders (although it is, as well), but as one of the tools in any conflict or negotiation.

The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era.

That's just so historically inaccurate that I don't know what to say except 'bullshit'. We officially started shaping image in World War I, but Lincoln was active in doing it doing the Civil War, and John Adams did a little bit of it himself.

With Iraq, it was central from the beginning. Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful "Suck. On. This." Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our "strength."

Well, that could be seen as a good thing. Here's noted pro-war commentator Armed Liberal in March 2003, just before the invasion:

The reality is that Clinton's team was highly focused on terrorism...but on terrorism as crime, as opposed to as an instrument of war. We focused on identifying the actual perpetrators, and attempting to arrest them or cause their arrest.

This is pretty much the typical liberal response to 9/11. Send in SWAT, pull 'em out in cuffs, and let's sit back and watch the fun on Court TV.

I've been ambivalent about whether this is a good strategy conceptually, and looking at the history...in which we're batting about .600 in arresting and trying Islamist terrorists...I have come to the realization that the fact is that it hasn't worked. The level and intensity of terrorist actions increased, all the way through 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan.

And a part of what I have realized is that as long as states - particularly wealthy states - are willing to explicitly house terrorists and their infrastructure, or implicitly turn a blind eye to their recruitment and funding, we can't use the kind of 'police' tactics that worked against Baader-Meinhof or the Red Army Faction. The Soviet Union and it's proxies offered limited support to these terrorist gangs, but they didn't have a national population to recruit from and bases and infrastructure that only a state can provide.

So unless we shock the states supporting terrorism into stopping, the problem will get worse. Note that it will probably get somewhat worse if we do...but that's weather, and I'm worried about climate.

There are a number of engines fueling the Islamist movement, one of which is the belief by its members that they can win, and by their state sponsors that supporting them is a good idea.

Now I'll point out that the latter hasn't worked out so well so far, for a variety of reasons - one of which is, in fact, the fact that we are so deeply divided internally about this war. Now the antiwar left can shrug and suggest that saying this is a variant of the 'Green Lantern' theory (there hasn't been a Green Lantern movie yet, so I'm not 100% sure how this metaphor works) but they need to own up to the notion that it's real (it may be that they were right - I'm not presuming that as a condition of my argument, because if they are right or wrong about the war, it's still true that public opposition to the war isn't without impact).

So let's not discount public-relations campaigns; and let's accept the fact that shaping the views of our opponents may be more important and effective than killing them.

All rights reserved. This article can be found on the Internet at:

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/speaking_of_propaganda.php

Persons wishing to contact the author of this article for reprints etc. should put a request in the Comments section, or send an email to "joe", over here @windsofchange.net.