Pentagon Iraq Propaganda Also Targets "US Audiences"

By Cernig

The US is back in the business of paying for "good news" propaganda stories about Iraq, according to the Washington Post.

The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to "engage and inspire" the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government.

... One official described how part of the program works: "There's a video piece produced by a contractor . . . showing a family being attacked by a group of bad guys, and their daughter being taken off. The message is: You've got to stand up against the enemy." The professionally produced vignette, he said, "is offered for airing on various [television] stations in Iraq. . . . They don't know that the originator of the content is the U.S. government. If they did, they would never run anything."

"If you asked most Iraqis," he said, "they would say, 'It came from the government, our own government.' "

The Pentagon's solicitation for bids on the contracts noted that media items produced "may or may not be non-attributable to coalition forces."

Middle East expert Marc Lynch writes (emphasis mine):

It's easy to see why eager information warriors think that paying for positive press makes sense in pursuit of tactical advantage in the strategic propaganda war.  It gets the "messaging" out with greater credibility, it "counters" the adversaries efforts, and it might shift some perceptions in the short term.   Even at this level, the strategy is deeply flawed.  When the payments are exposed, as they inevitably are in today's global media environment (for example, with page one stories in the Washington Post), they then discredit not only the specific messages but also every other pro-U.S. message which will quite reasonably then be dismissed as "paid for by the United States." ...  Nothing could be more devastating to the credibility of third party messengers than this kind of program. 

At a deeper level, these efforts fatally compromise the long-term objective of building free, credible and independent media as the foundation of a democratic system.

Not just any Iraqi democratic system either. Lynch also notes a significant wording in the contract specification:

one goal is to "communicate effectively with our strategic audiences (i.e. Iraqi, pan-Arabic, International, and U.S. audiences) to gain widespread acceptance of [U.S. and Iraqi government] core themes and messages."  Presenting American audiences as a key target for manipulation through the covert dissemination of propaganda messages should be seen as scandalous, subversive of democracy, and illegal. 

Well, Marc, it would be if the Bush administration weren't making use of a step-around on the law. It's legal for the Pentagon, CIA and other agencies to disseminate propaganda in foreign countries. The propaganda goes up in foreign countries, then gets imported to the US by the mainstream press or by rightwing pro-occupation internet sites. "It's not the Pentagon's fault if there's overspill from Iraq (or the UK, or Israel, or Australia...) with this stuff - honest!"

It's quite easy to identify administration stenographers in the foreign press who create most of their reports around deliberate propaganda items. In the UK Con Coughlin and Phil Sherwell at the Daily Telegraph and Sarah Baxter at Murdoch's London Times are the most common conduits for stories to be imported back into the US at one deniable stage of removal from their agency source. In Israel, the Jerusalem Post (another Murdoch paper) -  and in particular deputy managing editor Caroline Glick - does admirable service for the Fourth Branch's preferred narratives. Murdoch's Australian outlets are just as bad. Glick, Coughlin and the Time's Uzi Mahnaimi double up on their stenography on behalf of Mossad too. Baxter and Sherwell for MI6.

I've covered this kind of stuff before, as well as other related propaganda pushes. I'm going to take the sinful liberty of quoting myself, rather than repeating myself.

There's no statute against the military or the administration conducting psyops campaigns in Iraq - and if the media then decides to take that information as gospel for reporting in the US then that's their lookout. There's no law against using shills like Phil Sherwell at the Telegraph or Sarah Baxter at the Times to publish "anonymous US sources" saying all kinds of stuff - and if rightwing internet pundits then decide to link that report as gospel truth then that's no fault of the US governments. There's no law - technically - preventing the pentagon from keeping a stable of pet military analysts in the loop on its preferred talking points - and if those analysts then choose not to reveal their insider status when using those talking points, then that's hardly the Pentagon's fault, is it? There's no law against a military flack in Iraq sending an email to a blogger to push a preferrred narrative - the internet is international and the sender is in a foreign country where US psyops are allowed. There's no law against pressuring intelligence analysts into giving your politically-preferred answers then pushing those answers as the consensus findings of the intelligence community. There's no law against publishing to the press "information" gained from offshore torture without revealing the methods used to gain that information. In other words , there are loopholes in the US statute you could drive a tank through - and the Bush administration have, repeatedly.

The current administration, like others before it, have long ago decided where the stand on the debate between freedom of the press from interference in a democracy and pushing their own preferred narratives - and it isn't on the side of democracy. I'm still amazed that serious experts like Marc, who I respect greatly, are surprised by this when it reaches out and slaps them in the face.

Comments

[anderson]

I can't help but doubt that the Pentagon, as implied in the story, ever went out of the propaganda business in Iraq. After initial exposure, it probably just went more covert. Besides, shopping prop overseas and then reimporting it is a time-honoured American propaganda vector, hardly something new to this era's Pentagon.

And if you are going to outraged by Pentagon propaganda targeting US audiences, a better place to start would the much more obviously illegal activity of the Pentagon's dancing generals show, which was continuous during the run-up to the invasion, downplaying abuse at Guantanamo, through efforts in gaining support for the surge.

I'm not saying this isn't annoying. It is. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars telling Iraqis (and Americans) that things are great is almost always a long term waste of time, effort and money. Things will tell us whether things are great, and this is especially true for Iraqis who are living them. No amount of happy talk is going to change the ground. The effort, as always, must come in actual performance and not in fables of performance.

The difference between propaganda here and in Iraq is that American directed propaganda isn't meant to change anything other than public perception of somewhere far away. And it does that. But it won't change reality for those living in that place afar, so it is ultimately doomed. Better to actually do a good job than to simply tell people you are doing a good job. Talk talk only works for so long.