The Information War

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds’ comment last Thursday, “terrorism is an information war disguised as a military conflict,” should be embroidered and hung over every journalist’s desk.

It’s bad enough that the same major U.S. media organizations that repeat the mantra critique that we should have had far more troops invading and occupying Iraq, devote relatively puny resources there themselves. From almost 700 embedded journalists during the invasion, the number dropped to a few dozen, sometimes surging to 70 or so as during the securing of Fallujah. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to cover the Olympics; Associated Press has thousands of employees around the globe; trivial, redundant and repetitive herd articles fill newspaper pages; and expensive coiffed hairdos fill network and cable air with hot-air non-stories. In Iraq, relatively inexpensive stringers are used, often of dubious skill and loyalty, who file the blood and bombs stories their masters want. Stories of a boring peaceful patrol in most of the country, of village-by- village reconstruction projects, of personal bravery and persistence by U.S. and Iraqi troops and ordinary extraordinary civilians, these are not sought after news that editors at home want to feature.

As a result of plain old cheapness by major media, the negativity of the homefront is increased. I’ll bet that there’s enough professionalism among journalists that, virtually regardless of personal opinions, if there were far more in Iraq there’d be more attention able to be paid to the reporting depth that gets below and beyond the terror photo-ops largely staged with undermining resolve in the U.S. homefront in mind.

It’s bad enough that many in the media both echo Democrat themes to undermine the war effort, but in the case of our information efforts within Iraq seem to prefer a professional guild mentality restricting news production there over winning the information war, the battle for hearts and minds that so many extol but only treat as a platitude when it comes to actually doing the job.

The Washington Post today has a smarmy piece, “Propaganda? Nah, Here's the Scoop, Say the Guys Who Planted Stories in Iraqi Papers” that still contains much basic information and common sense.

Some excerpts:

Bombs are blasting in Baghdad. War fills the air there and fills the airwaves here. But a more quiet war -- the information war -- is waged by stealth, in the words and images deployed by pundits, partisans, policymakers, propagandists, psychological operators and influence specialists, both civilian and military.

Call it influence. Or call it propaganda, info-ops, psyops or strat comm (that's short for "strategic communications"). It's all information, and information can be a weapon as lethal, at times, as bullets and bombs.

But wait! Not only are we in an information war, we are also in a war over the info war -- over techniques such as Lincoln's and the extent to which the U.S. government should or does disseminate propaganda, even pay to publish favorable "news" stories….

Says Garfield [Lincoln Group exec]: "One of the things our critics do in the deployment of the term propaganda is they then seek to stifle any debate."
Now he breaks into a full-bore lecture: "It's as if telling the Iraqi people about the positive aspects, about the emergence of democracy in their country, the significant efforts being done by the coalition to protect them, to achieve the security that everybody acknowledges is necessary for people to embrace a new government and a new armed forces -- as if all of that is bad. The moment you label it with the term propaganda, you immediately end any debate. It's absolutely necessary to counter the negative use of information by our adversaries."…

They've planted those fake news articles trumpeting pro-U.S. stories. They've conceived and distributed anti-terror comic strips and leaflets. They ran a campaign that distributed water bottles bearing a phone number that Iraqis could call to report terror activity to U.S. authorities. They do research, media analysis, polling and focus groups. They seek to completely understand a culture, so they can better influence it….

But Americans just don't understand. The culture hasn't come to grips with information as a part of warfare. That's Garfield, lecturing again….

"People are more comfortable with killing than they are with influencing," he says. "The majority can be convinced that the use of military force is acceptable, but everybody becomes very uncomfortable when you talk about the use of information," like "promoting your cause, promoting your ideals" and "discrediting the tactics and the arguments and the strategy of the enemy."…

In an op-ed piece last month in the Los Angeles Times, Rumsfeld bemoaned the uproar over the Lincoln Group and described its work as a "non-traditional means to provide accurate information to the Iraqi people in the face of an aggressive campaign of disinformation. Yet this has been portrayed as inappropriate: for example, the allegations of 'buying news.' "…

Craig and Garfield make much of their assertion that they traffic in the truth. It's as if they think truth and propaganda are mutually exclusive. But consider this:
"For a long time, propagandists have recognized that lying must be avoided," wrote Jacques Ellul in his classic 1965 work, "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes." For the masses to believe it, "propaganda must be based on some truth that can be said in a few words and is able to linger in the collective consciousness."
But truth can be elastic, even inconvenient. For instance, Garfield says Lincoln really had no choice but to hide the authorship of those upbeat "news" stories.
Had they been identified as products of the U.S. government, someone could have gotten killed. And just how receptive would Iraqi readers have been to a U.S. government product anyway?…

So, yes, there was that deception.
"But the aim is not deceit," he says.
It's just a means to an end in wartime.

Would we prefer more U.S. troops, or more Iraqi support? Would the U.S. media prefer to have more reporters assigned to Iraq, or to see the information war lost there as well as on the homefront? Those are key questions the media needs to ask itself, and be constantly reminded of the choices it makes.