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Tuesday, October 09, 2007

The Patriotic Correctness of propaganda strategic communication

The Autumn 2007 number of Parameters also includes an article by military writer Richard Halloran on Strategic Communication. He opens with a famous story from Harry Summers, one of the chief architects of the stab-in-the-back theory of the Vietnam War:

The late Colonel Harry Summers liked to tell a tale familiar to many who served in Vietnam. In April 1975, after the war was over, the colonel was in a delegation dispatched to Hanoi. In the airport, he got into a conversation with a North Vietnamese colonel named Tu who spoke some English and, as soldiers do, they began to talk shop. After a while, Colonel Summers said: "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield." Colonel Tu thought about that for a minute, then replied: "That may be so. But it is also irrelevant."

As a reality-check, we need to remember that in 1968 when Ernest Medina and William Calley led their troops into the Vietnamese hamlet known to the Americans as My Lai 4 and murdered dozens of civilians of all ages in cold blood, they officially reported that they had killed a bunch of Vietcong. Some of the intelligence officers back at base were mildly worried that they found so few reported weapons in comparison to the kills they had reported, but that was not unusual.

When you measure "battle victories" by body counts of people killed in air strikes or direct attacks on villages and just count every body on the ground as a dead enemy, you have to question whether the common claim that the military "never lost a battle" in Vietnam is meaningful at all. Although the My Lai massacre was an extreme case, deliberate killing of civilians was far more widespread than it should have been due to breakdowns in command discipline, which even Harry Summers would have had difficulty blaming on the proverbial protesting hippies back home. But even when civilian deaths in villages were "collateral damage" of legitimate military actions, it didn't benefit the American and South Vietnamese cause. If you were to mark every military action in which a civilian was killed as "collateral damage" as a negative, and marked down every instance of a civilian being deliberately killed as a loss, the balance of battles "won" versus those "lost" in Vietnam would look considerably different.

When Blackwater gunned down a bunch of Iraqi civilians on September 16, they initially reported it as attackers killed and another battle won.

Whatever the details are finally confirmed to be, this is the same procedure that the Army, the Marines and the Air Force seem to be following in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anytime there's a battle and they count the bodies afterward, it's reported as dead insurgents. Excuse me, these days it's dead Al Qa'ida terrorists. And any day now, it's going to start being "suspected Iranian Al Quds operatives". If you can believe Blackwater's excuses for their careless shooting and even outright murders, then you can also believe that are glorious military and infallible generals have never, ever, "lost a battle" in Iraq, too.

You can see the same pretty much every day at the Air Force's happy-face News Web site. For instance, in their report on the air war for October 4, they report:

In Iraq, an Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon used a GBU-38 to strike an explosive laden house in Baghdad. The strike was reported as successful and the target was destroyed. ...

In Baqubah, F-16s conducted shows of force to deter suspicious individuals from violent activities in the vicinity of a suspected enemy vehicle.

The GBU-38 is a 500-lb. bomb. After 4 1/2 years of unending success, the Air Force is still dropping 500- and 2000-lb. bombs in populated areas of Iraqi cities, including Baghdad. If any police department in any city in America dropped a 500-lb. bomb on an allegedly "explosive laden house", it would be front-page news all across the country. And the official investigation that would ensue, plus all the deaths and injuries of innocent civilians it caused, and all the bonehead blunders that may have led up to that occurrence, would also be widely publicized and discussed and debated for weeks.

This is happening every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the Air Force happy-face Web page doesn't report details of every single action. I'm guessing the reason they report as much as they do is the determination of our infallible Air Force generals to make sure they get credit for their invaluable assistance to current counterinsurgency operations. But the report for Oct. 4 says the Air Force flew "49 close-air-support missions". Four dozen in one day. We don't know how many of them involved dropping bombs in populated urban neighborhoods. And since there is virtually no independent reporting on the air war in either Iraq or Afghanistan, we'll never know how many of these brilliant contributions of "close-air support" killed 2, 10, 20, civilian noncombatants, all of whose siblings and cousins then feel honor-bound to kill Americans in retaliation.

Halloran then projects the same whining stab-in-the-back alibi onto the Iraq War:

If that conversation were to be held in today’s vocabulary, it would go something like this. Colonel Summers: "You know, you never defeated us in a kinetic engagement on the battlefield." Colonel Tu: "That may be so. It is also irrelevant because we won the battle of strategic communication - and therefore the war."

On a contemporary note, a US officer returning from Iraq said privately: "We plan kinetic campaigns and maybe consider adding a public affairs annex. Our adversaries plan information campaigns that exploit kinetic events, especially spectacular attacks and martyrdom operations. We aren't even on the playing field, but al Qaeda seeks to dominate it because they know their war will be won by ideas."

When officers and military theorists make arguments like this, they aren't advocating calling a massive truce in Iraq to debate the merits of various schools of Islamic theology or the history of colonialism with the Sunni militias.

More often than not, particularly in relation to the Iraq War (and once the public and Congress really start to focus on how far gone Afghanistan is, it will be expanded to that war, as well), this argument means that our invincible armed forces and our incomparable officer corps and our glorious divine commanders like Saviour-General Petraeus did everything fine and won every battle. But we lost the "information war" because the gutless civilians and cowardly Congressional Democrats and dirty filthy hippies were so perverse and unpatriotic that they refused to take the happy-face military press releases and the endless declarations of endless success from Saviour-General Petraeus and his predecessors and those honest Republican Party and FOX News spokespeople as being the whole story about the Iraq War. (I like to attempt a Faulknerian sentence every now and then.)

Halloran's article is a little behind the times. He treats the war in Iraq as being an obvious part of the GWOT (global war against terrorism, or is it "glorious" war against terrorism now?). But he seems to regard Osama bin Laden as the commander of the Iraqi Sunni and Shi'a militias. He obviously isn't up to the moment with the news that Ahmadinejad Hitler is commanding all they bad guys in Iraq.

Along with the requisite out-of-context quotations from Communist military theorists, Halloran presents the high-brown version of the stab-in-the-back myth of the Iraq War this way:

Vitally important, strategic communication means persuading the nation’s citizens to support the policies of their leaders so that a national will is forged to accomplish national objectives. In this context, strategic communication is an essential element of national leadership. As a former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Edward C. "Shy" Meyer, once said, "Armies don’t fight wars, nations fight wars."

Translated into the Rush-Limbaugh level grunting in which most Republicans seem to communicate these days, that means, "The dang hippies and treasonous Democrats who love The Terrorists didn't support Bush and our Saviour-General Petraeus faithfully enough and that why The Terrorists won." (Check out one of the Republican tracts one day in the bookstore that tries to explain how free-love hippies and liberal Democrats supposedly supported Islamic fundamentalists whose social and political ideas make Cotton Mather look like an uninhibited libertine and raving atheist.)

By the way, if you're wondering if "strategic communication" is some kind of new term for something else, you're right. Halloran writes:

In any case, the word "propaganda" has been tainted and compromised beyond repair as it has become a synonym for untruth or deception. "Strategic communication" is a worthwhile replacement.

Bald-faced lying to the public is bad, you see, if we call it "propaganda". Propaganda is what the Other Side does. But bald-faced lying to the public is good and Patriotically Correct if we call it "strategic communication".

And military leaders are perplexed that they seem to have less credibility with the public than they think they deserve! A deep, dark mystery. Why, why, why might they have such problems?

Who does Halloran say should be the targets for ~~military propaganda~~ strategic communication?

Successful strategic communication assumes a defensible policy, a respectable identity, a core value. In commercial marketing, the product for sale must be well-made and desirable. The strategic communication stratagem hasn’t been built that can pull a poor policy decision out of trouble. Strategic communication begins with identifying audiences. In military terms, what are the targets? In most cases, that should be fairly easy - the government and public of an ally, the pro-American leaders in a neutral nation, the dissidents in a potential adversary, American citizens regardless of political party or geographic region whose support is essential. Some may be immediate believers, others may be dubious. All need to be addressed. (my emphasis)

Actually, since we don't need allies and our military is invincible and our generals infallible, the only only one of those that count in this view of the world are the "American citizens regardless of political party or geographic region".

Don't kid yourself. As kooky as some of this sounds, it's hard dogma for a lot of the officer corps, many military theorists and virtually every Republican member of Congress that the American military can't possibly lose a war. The only thing, the only thing, that can cause a lost war is the traitorous hippies and Defeatocrats who criticize Republican war policies. Including any former generals who now dissent from the Party line, which makes them as bad as any other dirty hippie. Yes, the "culture war" kookiness is that strong in today's Republican Party. And 90% of military officers right now are Republicans.

This stuff makes sense only within the dishonest internal logic of the stab-in-the-back mentality. For foreign audiences, you can put out any dang ~~propaganda~~ strategic communications messages you want. As long as the Air Force is dropping 2000-lb. bombs in residential neighborhoods of Baghdad and Baquba on a daily bases, that's the only message that's going to matter.

And despite the shockingly dysfunctional nature of the American mainstream media, and the public's susceptibility to war fever, we've seen the very same thing these last four years with the Iraq War that we had during the Vietnam War. When generals and military spokespeople and prowar politicians come out month after month and year after year and tell the public that we're winning every battle and there are turning points and tipping points all over the place and that's not what's happening in the real existing war in progress, they're going to lose their credibility.

And they should lose their credibility. If citizenship means anything at all, it has to mean that citizens and voters need to recognize when they're being played for total suckers. That's why the appearance of Saviour-General Petraeus in Washington a few weeks ago that provoked invocations of divinity from Congress and goo-goo-eyed awe from the punditocracy hardly moved public opinion on the Iraq War at all.

Ah, but Halloran also recognizes the value of what nineteenth century European anarchists called the "~~propaganda~~ strategic communication of the deed":

Actions are among the better purveyors of strategic communication. Army engineers dispatched to Honduras in the 1980s built ramps over the beach in case heavy weapons and equipment needed to be landed to fight the forces of Daniel Ortega in next-door Nicaragua. The engineers also built a road that allowed farmers to get their produce to market more easily and economically, dug wells in a village so that women need not walk five miles with large tins balanced on sticks over their shoulders to get water for their families, and erected a tropical hut that was the best building in the village. The Hondurans turned half of it into a village hall, the other half into a school.

Of course, everyone remembers Ollie North and his co-conspirators building village halls for the friendly natives in Honduras. (NOT!) Halloran's article really starts to read like self-parody after a while.

At least the stab-in-the-back theorizing has some comedic relief. For instance, he gives some bullet-point advice to military ~~propagandists~~ strategic communicators, including:

Lying to the press is never permissible. Idealistically, it would be an ethical violation. Realistically, the liar will probably get caught and his credibility will be destroyed. A time may well come when you need the press to believe you, and they won’t. Lastly, the truth is easier to remember the next time around.

On Nixon's White House tapes, when discussing how to arrange bribes to keep a witness quiet, Nixon famously said that we could do, "but it would be wrong". In the context of this article, that bullet-point is just a laugh line: "We could lie to the public. But it would be wrong."

You can see at the CENTCOM or Air Force News sites the fundamental problem in anyone thinking the military can run a successful public ~~propaganda~~ strategic communications campaign for a war. Pork barrel appropriations for an epic boondoggle like the Star Wars program is another story. Because in the end, the military is going to decide that anything that shows less than total optimism or promises the remotest possibility of embarrassing our glorious generals in any way, much less possibly being exploited by enemy ~~strategic communication~~ propaganda has to be concealed.

As a result, what they come up with as ~~propaganda~~ strategic communication for the folks back home is at the same level as a corporate newsletter. I suppose anyone who's every worked for a company of any size has received the company newsletter. Everyone knows that they may have useful information about changes to benefits programs or things like that. And they will showcase the current company advertising line, which everyone then knows they are expected to pretend to believe in wholeheartedly when it's discussed in business meetings.

But you would need a lobotomy to imagine that an internal company newsletter is real news or that it's going to even hint at some company problem that hasn't already become public knowledge. But then again, some people actually seem to imagine that FOX News is real news...

Tags: harry summers, information war, iraq war, propaganda, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war

posted at 3:35:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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