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<TITLE>Knightley on psyops</TITLE>
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<FONT COLOR="#333366"><FONT SIZE="4"><FONT FACE="Geneva"><U>http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/story/0,7494,927946,00.html<BR>
</U></FONT></FONT></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><FONT FACE="Geneva">Comment <BR>
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</FONT></FONT><FONT SIZE="6"><FONT FACE="Arial"><B>The battle for our hearts and minds</B></FONT></FONT><FONT SIZE="5"><FONT FACE="Times New Roman"> <BR>
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</FONT><FONT FACE="Arial">Everything is going wrong on the coalition's propaganda front</FONT><FONT FACE="Times New Roman"> <BR>
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</FONT></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><FONT FACE="Geneva"><B>Phillip Knightley<BR>
</B></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Geneva"><H3>Wednesday April 2, 2003<BR>
</H3><FONT COLOR="#333366"><FONT SIZE="4"><B><U>The Guardian</U></B></FONT></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"> <BR>
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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. <BR>
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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". <BR>
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>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. <BR>
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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. <BR>
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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. <BR>
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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. <BR>
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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. <BR>
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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". <BR>
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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? <BR>
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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. <BR>
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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." <BR>
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<B>·</B> Phillip Knightley is the author of The First Casualty (Prion) <BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#333366"><U>phillipgk@aol.com</U></FONT> <BR>
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