Is honesty the best policy in "information warfare"?
William Arkin makes the provocative argument in a speech he recently delivered in Denmark that there's a problem with relying on truth when it comes to the GWOT's (global war on terrorism) battle for public opinion in the Muslim world: How the U.S. Military Shapes Public Opinion on the War in Iraq 03/16/06. He told his audience:
Everyone says that the war against terrorism will not be won through military power alone, but let me describe for a moment what is wrong with following the old psychological influence approach based on truth.
During the Cold War, in the pre-Internet and pre-global commerce world, the information model was simple. If the United States could just show a Soviet Communist a supermarket in America, they would be amazed at the riches of our society, overwhelmed with what the free market could produce, convinced of the superiority of capitalism over communism.
This was dramatically the case in Germany, where Germans in the DDR (East Germany) could regularly see on television the prosperity of the consumer society in West Germany. Even more importantly, they could hear uncensored news from West German TV and radio.
But Arkin suggests that this approach doesn't have the same effect in Muslim societies where Islamic fundamentalism has a strong appeal.
He writes:
What [Islamic extremists and terrorists] see are the contradictions inside societies over wealth and an encroaching and voracious West, with Islamic society and religion under assault. Abundance is as much seen as proof of the decadence of America and the West as it is seen as any aspiration for the masses.
Even when the statistics about Arab society are used by reasonable folk to make the argument for "moderates" in the Arab world to turn away from extremism - that less than one book a year is translated into Arabic per million people, compared to over 1000 per million in developed nations, that Arab spending on research and development or education lags behind the rest of the world, that there are only 18 computers per 1000 citizens compared to a global average of 78.3 - even when these facts are put forth, it is both a kind of insult and a threat.
Probably to more Muslims than we would like to admit, modern Western society itself represents secularism and globalism with a threat of the eventual dilution and disappearance of Islamic religion and society.
It's facinating for me to see that, even for those who try to demonize Islam and all Muslim, that it's very difficult for American pundits and foreign policy analysts to really believe that religion as such plays a very major role in the minds of the Islamic fundamentalists. All this nonsense about, "They hate us for our freedoms" is not only an excuse to avoid looking at the role concrete American policies play in generating opposition to the US among Muslims; it's also a way to turn the complicated religious motivations in play into a comic-book caricature.
And I think that's part of what Arkin is getting at here.
One of the reasons I like to read Arkin is that he's irritating in the right way. Irritating to me, I mean. He has some of that quality of which Jesuit priests and theologians are the masters, of saying things that you know don't sound quite right somehow, but they still make you see sides of the issue that you hadn't been aware of before. Like this:
Take for instance, the story that came out in December that the United States was planting stories in the Iraqi press and paying journalists to write positive stories. The faithful got mad at the media for revealing it. The skeptics expressed outrage at the program itself. The reasonable asked how it was that United States could build democracy in Iraq, spending millions to train journalists in Western media ethics, while at the same time paying off journalists to plant these stories.
Each group reacted, as it normally does, according to the script. But we forgot to consider the targets.
The Iraqis, they just shrugged. These things goes on all the time, they were quoted as saying.
He gives us a glance at the dark, authoritarian outlook through which Rummy sees the world, apart from his seemingly growing dementia (I'm not being snarky, the guy really sounds like a dingy old guy sometimes):
To Rumsfeld, the medium is the message. Since truth is unquestionable and war is the only answer, what the actual message is isn't relevant or even considered. Rumsfeld doesn't have to ask the more difficult questions: He doesn't have to ponder why so many of our friends hate the United States, let alone so many in the Arab and Islamic worlds. He doesn't have to ask what it is that those who hate the United States and the West want.
In Rumsfeld's world, al Jazeera and other news media that are hostile to the United States or the West are an element of the enemy.
It is not hard to see how this mindset can also conclude that the Western media - say for instance when it questions or reveals the methods of the war against terrorism - are collaborators as well. (my emphasis)
Leaving aside for the moment the question of how the concept of "truth" processes in Rummy's brain, Arkin is right. For guys like Rummy and Deadeye Dick, the "Liberal Media" are just as much the enemy as Al Qaida, maybe even more so.
Arkin is describing something here about not only Rummy's approach to the media, but one that seems to have wide support in the officer corps. It's one of the great "lessons of Vietnam", even though it's a false lesson. The fact that this concept is a key element of even mainstream military thinking in the US is something I don't think many in our Potemkin "press corps" really grasp:
Getting the message across here isn't just then about doing better. His suggestion is that the media is somehow intentionally not telling the truth or providing a fair picture. Rumsfeld doesn't particularly make the distinction between al Jazeera and western media. He says that the will of the American people is the center of gravity for the war on terror.
It's understandable why he's worried. Barely 30 percent of the American population supports the current effort in Iraq.
So it is not blow back from foreign propaganda and information warfare directed at the Islamic world that is the greatest danger at home; it is the government's perception that it needs to fight an information war against its own media and that it needs to propagandize and manipulate its own populace.
This is also the context in which Bush's current verbal jihad against the Evil Liberal Media needs to be understood. The Bush-Rummy-Cheney mentality sees a free press as essentially an evil thing. FOX News is their idea of how a "free press" should work - completely fake "left-right" debates, the "reporters" and talk-show hosts blatantly pimping the Republican Party line of the day.
And check this out:
In the post-cartoon world, there is not just an atmosphere of intolerance and mistrust that is alarming. There is a fundamental misstatement that the news media is part of the problem. Al Jazeera is the problem. Jyllands-Posten is the problem. The Washington Post is the problem. The suggestion is that the news media and the enemy can be one and the same. Here unfortunately, the U.S. government and the extremists themselves seem to agree. That is the greatest threat to our society and our future. (my emphasis)
Yow! Is this one of the country's most respected military analysts saying that Rummy's and the Bush administration's attitude toward the press is "the greatest threat to our society and our future"?
