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US Starts a New War, for World's Hearts and Minds - Empire? - Global Policy Forum US Starts a New War,
for World's Hearts and MindsBy Rupert Cornwell
Independent
February 20, 2002
America's new covert effort to win hearts and minds in the "war against terrorism" has been spurred by one gnawing fear: that for all its military successes – or perhaps because of them – Washington may be losing the deeper struggle for public opinion around the world, above all in the Islamic countries where it is most essential. Soon after the military strikes began in Afghanistan, President George Bush and Tony Blair set up special war rooms in Washington, London and Islamabad, modelled on the rapid rebuttal press units of their domestic election campaigns, to counter claims by the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.
With the war winding down, the rooms may be closed. But the new Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) at the Pentagon looks as though it is there for the long haul. In one sense, that is no surprise. Since Roman times and before, but especially after the invention of modern mass communication, great powers have used such tactics to further their aims, in peace as in war.
The OSI belongs to a long and nefarious tradition. The most ambitious body of this kind was probably the Comintern, set up by Lenin in 1919 to spread the Russian revolution by fair means or foul. After the Second World War, Comintern was replaced by the Cominform, which in turn gave way to specialist sections of the KGB, the acknowledged maestro during the Cold War of dezinformatsiya – disinformation – the technique of spreading wholly false information or a fragment of truth woven into a tissue of lies.
Samples of its technique include a 1952 campaign during the Korean War accusing the US of using germ warfare and, in the Eighties, a similar exercise, aimed at the developing world's media, to suggest US scientists had created Aids as a form of biological warfare.
The British too were no slouches in propaganda and disinformation. Among the early stunts of the Foreign Office's secret Information Research Department, which existed from 1948 to 1977, was a campaign to promote an Arabic edition of George Orwell's anti-Communist allegory Animal Farm. A British diplomat in Cairo said the idea was "particularly good for Arabic in view of the fact that both pigs and dogs are unclean animals to Muslims". The effort stemmed from fear in London of communist disturbances in the Saudi oil fields. Substitute "Islamic fundamentalist" for "communist", and in 50 years little has changed.
Almost 30 years before that, British intelligence services almost certainly helped perpetrate one of the biggest disinformation coups in history, the leak in 1924 of the forged Zinoviev letter, purporting to come from Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Comintern. The letter urged Communists to stir up a workers' revolution in Britain, and its publication in the press helped bring about the defeat of the Labour Party in a general election that year.
Long before the Pentagon's latest initiative, the US too was indulging in war by propaganda, despite the powerful strand of idealism in the American psyche which still finds the term abhorrent. Between 1951 and 1956, the US loosed hundreds of thousands of balloons carrying 300 million leaflets, posters, books, and other printed matter into Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. It used propaganda in Vietnam and in its covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, when Psyops teams of the US Army beamed in radio and television programmes designed to weaken support for the Ortega regime. Such tactics were used, and publicly acknowledged, to try to discredit the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But nothing eclipses the story put about after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, of how of the Iraqi troops wrenched tiny Kuwaiti babies from incubators, then sent the incubators back to Baghdad to cover an Iraqi shortage of them. The tale was untrue, but the PR agency Hill and Knowlton arranged for a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to tell it to Congress. Her testimony, many believe, helped win President George Bush senior's approval for going to war.
For Hill and Knowlton, read the Rendon Group, the Washington-based communications consulting firm which, is advising the OSI today. But will the strategy work? The answer, based on previous experience, is probably yes, up to a point. For many years, propaganda and disinformation were vital tools for the Soviet Union, to persuade the gullible in third countries (and in the US and Western Europe) of the merits of a largely merit-less cause. In the end Moscow could not make its subject peoples disbelieve the evidence of their eyes.
The Pentagon's new efforts may have more merit. But the strategy carries other risks. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, loves to cite the celebrated dictum of Churchill that "in wartime truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies". But the Pentagon, however imperfectly, does runs a straight news operation. The credibility of this, such as it is, might be fatally corroded by the new department.
Mr Rumsfeld faces an additional danger. The American press is free, powerful and takes itself immensely seriously. It did not appreciate being misinformed at the infamous "Five o'Clock Follies" briefings of the Vietnam war. Today, it would have little hesitation in turning on the Pentagon, should the military make a fool of journalists by allowing them to fall for one of the new bodyguard of lies.
Truth or lies? the sinister art of black propaganda
The Iraq lie
In November 1990, a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl testified before the US Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers tossing premature babies onto the floor of a Kuwaiti hospital so their incubators could be sent back to Iraq. Her testimony was cited by senators as a crucial factor in their decision to go to war with Iraq. It later turned out that the girl, who had been brought forward by a US public relations company hired by Kuwait, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US.
The Bosnian lie
Britain's longstanding policy of opposing the breakup of Yugoslavia led to MI6 deploying secret agent Robert Craig to the Balkans. He posed as an adviser to the British military Balkan secretariat in the Bosnian war. In 1994, two articles appeared in The Spectator by Mr Craig, under the byline Kenneth Roberts, backing the withdrawal of UN forces protecting the Muslim population. His cover was blown when renegade MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson said the stories had been planted by MI6, a charge denied by The Spectator.
The Zimbabwe lie
Australian and Zimbabwe television last week broadcast a secretly-filmed video purportedly showing the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, plotting to kill President Robert Mugabe. Mr Tsvangirai was accused of arranging the assassination with a Canadian company headed byAri Ben-Menashe. He is a discredited former Israeli intelligence officer with contacts in the Mugabe government. The clearly doctored tape shows him asking leading questions. Mr Tsvangirai says the video was a Harare government setup.
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