[Media-watch] Knightley on psyops

[david Miller]

http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/story/0,7494,927946,00.html
Comment 
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The battle for our hearts and minds

Everything is going wrong on the coalition's propaganda front

Phillip Knightley
Wednesday April 2, 2003
The Guardian 

Iraq is winning the propaganda war against the coalition. The British
government admits it. David Blunkett, the home secretary, says we are
regarded as the villains. The government's spin specialist Alastair Campbell
has called for a media shake-up, and in Kuwait the coalition's Psychological
Operations Tactical Group for Special Ground Forces Command (Psyops) is
working on an emergency plan to regain the propaganda initiative.

Everything has gone wrong on the propaganda front. The widespread coverage
of the deaths of British servicemen at the hands of their US allies, the
shooting by US troops of Iraqi women and children, horrific TV footage from
al-Jazeera of Iraqi civilians killed in bombing raids on Baghdad, the
contradictory statements from the military briefers, and the failure of
Iraqis to turn out to welcome their "liberators".

>From Bush and Rumsfeld to Blair and Straw, the message had been that Iraqi
soldiers would surrender en masse and that once ordinary Iraqis realised
Britain and the US had come to "liberate" them, they would rise against
Saddam and his thugs and throw them out. This did not happen. It became
clear that Iraq was going to fight back and that although millions of Iraqis
might hate Saddam, other millions admired him as the one Arab leader
prepared to stand up to the Americans.

As media comment turned from "Support out boys" and "It'll all be over in a
few days" to "Defiance grows", "Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge
of death" and "I see soldiers shoot children", Campbell ordered the Ministry
of Defence to "get the big picture out there". The Labour party chairman,
John Reid, had sharp words with the BBC, Campbell rang the BBC news
department to complain, the Pentagon asked the BBC and American media groups
to withdraw their correspondents from Baghdad, and under pressure from the
Pentagon, the US broadcaster NBC sacked celebrated journalist Peter Arnett
for saying on Iraqi TV that the coalition's initial war plan had failed.

But the most devastating assessment of the coalition's propaganda failure
came in a recent Russian-intercepted secret Psyops report. It analyses the
effectiveness of the coalition's campaign to win the hearts and minds of
Iraqis. Using Iraqi TV broadcasts, intercepted radio communications,
interrogations of Iraqi prisoners of war and summaries of British and US
media coverage, Psyops concluded that Iraqis were more stable and confident
than they were in the last days before the war. The report said that the
coalition had little time to change this attitude before what Psyops people
call "a resistance ideology" developed, making an eventual coalition victory
even more difficult.

The report proposed: bringing all Iraqi PoWs into impressively large groups
and offering the world's media a photo opportunity; making more use of Iraqi
opposition groups; and persuading Iraqis in "liberated" areas to speak out
against Saddam Hussein.

The trouble with this approach is that the media has become suspicious of
stories handed to it on a plate. Even if some western correspondents might
fall for such an operation, Arab and neutral reporters would expose it.

But the report at least shows that the coalition is trying to learn from its
mistakes. Its main failure was not to understand the Iraqi point of view. As
Iraqis see it, since the first world war we have: broken our word;
manipulated their borders; imposed on them leaders they did not want;
kidnapped ones they did; fixed their elections; bombed and terrorised them;
and, after promising them freedom, planned to turn their country into a
province of India populated by immigrant Punjabi farmers. Now here we are
again, deciding what is best for them, clothing our political aims in words
like "liberty". 

Why do we go along with it? After all, out there in Britain is a new,
informed section of the population: young computer-literate people who are
scornful of spin and the traditional media. They glean from the web growing
evidence that the US made their plans for Iraq more than a year ago, and
that what has happened in recent months has been a grotesque pretence. So
why have anti-war cries started to fade?

In a martial nation like Britain it is difficult to go against the "Get
Behind our Boys" syndrome, the feeling that once a war has started, protest
should be put aside for the duration. Perhaps things would be different if
we were being shown the same ghastly face of battle as the Arab world, whose
viewers have, for example, seen an Iraqi child who had half her head blown
off by a coalition bomb.

To TV executives who argue that British viewers do not want to see such
images, we should say: how do you explain that since the war started,
al-Jazeera says it has gained 4 million subscribers in Europe? If Tony Blair
really wanted to win Iraqi hearts and minds, he could begin by telling them
the painful truth: "In order to liberate some of you, we're going to have to
kill a lot of you. It's just a matter of getting the balance right."

· Phillip Knightley is the author of The First Casualty (Prion)

phillipgk at aol.com 


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