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A hanging offense

More controversy erupted this week about the non-quote that's not from President Abraham Lincoln.

It's based on a story I wrote for Insight magazine in December, 2003, in which I quoted from President Lincoln's July, 1863 letter that the Union League distributed as a pamphlet later that year. In the letter, President Lincoln referred to the treasonous acts of a US Congressman, asking why a boy who deserts from the army must be shot, while a "wily agitator" (Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham) "who induces him to desert" should get a lesser punishment.

The implication I drew from the letter was that, if it was legal to execute the boy-deserter, it would be just as legal to mete out the same punishment to the saboteur congressman. I quoted from the original Union League copy of the Lincoln letter:

"Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier-boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings till he is persuaded to write the soldier-boy that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked Administration of a contemptible Government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert.

"I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy."

"His [Vallandigham's] arrest was made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops; to encourage desertions from the Army; and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.

"He was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the Administration, or the personal interests of the commanding general, but because he was damaging the Army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the nation depends.

"He was warring upon the military, and this gave the military constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands on him."

In the lead of my story, I began, "Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged. That's what President Abraham Lincoln said during the War Between the States."

Kind of to-the-point, but it was my interpretation of the Lincoln quote that was to follow. Problem is, a well-meaning copy editor ran quotation marks around the first sentence, making it appear that I was quoting Lincoln directly saying that saboteur congressmen should be arrested, exiled or hanged.

That's not what I intended to portray. FactCheck.com was the first to call me on it - in August, 2006, nearly three years after the fact. The researcher said that my quote had been used at least 18,000 times on various blogs and websites. It was the first I'd heard of it, and I immediately said that the quote was not real. On returning from vacation, I wrote a correction on FourthWorldWar.com.

I thought that was the end of it until this week, when my friend Frank Gaffney used the quote in his weekly Washington Times column. His editor at the Times alerted him to readers who had pointed out the error, and I related the story to both of them for correction. Frank had corrections made on the 20 or so websites that carry his column.

But the story got legs again when Congressman Don Young (R-Alaska) read from the column yesterday on the floor of the House. An Alaska newspaper found the FactCheck.com item and tracked me down. Again, I related the story.

Now others are having fun with it. Today the Washington Post ran a piece about Young, tracing the origin to me (and kindly calling me a "conservative scholar" - as if it labels liberal scholars as thoroughly) but being good-natured about it all. Liberal pundit Alan Colmes gave it a run on Fox News.

A spokeswoman for Congressman Young said the lawmaker stands corrected about the Lincoln "quote," but that "he continues to totally agree with the message of the statement." (Good for him!)

Editor & Publisher, which covers the newspaper industry, has written two stories so far: One on February 14 and one on the 15th, blaming the Washington Times for not issuing a correction quickly enough.

My apologies to all who were misled for not having been persistent in pursuing a correction to the editing error.

White Paper index

No. 1  The American way of propaganda: Lessons from the founding fathers

No. 2  Wartime public diplomacy: A strategy to deliver the messages

No. 3  The importance of words in message-making

No. 4  (Not yet available online)

No. 5  Branding as a tool against the enemy: Time to try it again

No. 6 (Not yet available online)

No. 7  Ridicule as a weapon in the war on terrorism

The American way of propaganda: Lessons from the founding fathers

Public Diplomacy and Political Warfare White Paper No. 1
The Institute of World Politics

by J. Michael Waller

This article is the first in a series of White Papers about the transformation of American public diplomacy and strategic communication.

Introduction

One of the most contentious debates in the war on terrorism centers on the “hearts and minds” aspect of the fight. Many argue for complete transparency in U.S. message-making, emphasizing the softer aspects of public diplomacy. A minority argues that the United States must make greater use of edgier information instruments such as propaganda, political action and psychological warfare. Critics of the minority view say such actions are un-democratic and unworthy of serious consideration as instruments – let alone weapons – of American statecraft.

The methods, however, were part of the American founding. This article discusses how the fathers of the United States employed public diplomacy, propaganda, counterpropaganda and political warfare as instruments of democracy in the struggle for independence.

An American tradition

John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recognized that the opinions and perceptions of foreign governments, publics, and armies mattered, and they used information operations as instruments of first resort in the American Revolution. They did it to seek support from elements within the British Empire and among Britain’s European rivals. Their efforts led to a global coalition in support of American independence and democracy, though in reality the coalition was united not by democratic principles but by a common enemy.

The positive American messages of justice, equality, independence and democracy had limited appeal at home as well as abroad. Often they conflicted with interests of potential or actual allies. American revolutionary leaders knew it, especially in France where they needed the financial and military support of the king but where their republican ideas were stridently anti-aristocratic, and indeed subversive to the French government. Among English Puritan and Presbyterian colonists, lingering hostility from the French and Indian War of a generation earlier, in which the Americans fought as British to force the French from North America, remained strong, to say nothing of anti-Catholic sentiment.

For all their mutual suspicions, the American revolutionaries and French monarchy found a common cause, if not in their ideals, in a common foe. Hopelessly outmatched against the world’s most formidable military power, the American founders compensated asymmetrically with public diplomacy, propaganda, counterpropaganda and political warfare. They never used those terms – all came into vogue as we know them in the twentieth century – but they employed all the measures, integrating them with domestic politics, secret diplomacy, intelligence and warfare with decisive strategic effect.

Public diplomacy, according to an operating U.S. government definition, “seeks to promote the national interest and the national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad.”[1]  It consists usually of positive messages as a polite and nuanced form of propaganda.

Counterpropaganda is, literally, the act or product of countering the propaganda of one’s adversary. Political warfare is the employment of aggressive and even coercive political means to achieve objectives, ranging from winning a tough campaign for public office to achieving military objectives through non-military means.[2]Closely related to political warfare, but almost purely military, is the discipline of psychological operations (PSYOP), which the military calls “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups and individuals.”[3] PSYOP is more manipulative than public diplomacy, and the U.S. generally uses it tactically, not strategically.

All these instruments bred the American revolution. Massachusetts patriot Samuel Adams pioneered what a biographer called a blend of “philosophy and action in ongoing political struggles.” A follower of 17^th century English philosopher John Locke, Adams typically mounted a relentless negative political or ideological attack followed by a positive alternative solution that would keep the enemy on the defensive. The alternative was soundly based in philosophical and moral terms. Adams strategically integrated the negative and the positive with political action both at home and, when necessary and possible, abroad.[4]

The positive approach:
Promote ideas, values, and an image of victory

The American struggle for self-determination spawned the creation of a country based not on language, race, class, ancestry or geography, but a nation whose common bond was an idea. This transformational concept of nationality derived from common ideas and values embraced “self-evident” universal truths that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The authors of the Declaration of Independence intended their words to go far beyond the American colonies and the king and parliament in London. They took their message to the world. Thus in the first action of its existence, the United States government initiated an international public diplomacy campaign.

Twice in the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress appealed to international public opinion in support of the cause and principles of freedom. In the preamble explaining the need for severing ties to Britain, the founders noted that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they [the people] should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” To substantiate their philosophical and practical reasoning, the elected representatives of the people said they would “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” Their message-making campaign was global.

Being morally right was insufficient, especially among European leaders who saw no moral superiority among the Americans or who viewed the conflict with Britain on traditional, great-power terms. Those leaders influenced or controlled the cash, the material supplies, the munitions, and the military forces that the outmatched Americans desperately needed. The colonial rebels had to project an image of strength and invincibility. Against the British who out-powered them in seemingly every way, building that credible image would take time and sacrifice. It would also mean waging constant political and psychological attacks on the crown and its agents.

The negative approach: “Keep the enemy in the wrong”

The second and inseparable track of the founders’ public diplomacy and political warfare strategy was to attack the enemy relentlessly. All forms of warfare need an enemy, including any good political campaign, and so vilification of the British government was at least as strong as positive messages in early American public diplomacy.Samuel Adams, the earliest proponent of secession who helped author and signed the Declaration, consistently pursued the two-track campaign. The first step, he argued, must be the negative attack, couched when possible in comity and amity by allowing the adversary’s misconduct speak for itself, but always attacking. He counseled in 1775, “It is a good Maxim in Politicks as well as in War to put & keep the Enemy in the Wrong.”[5]

Leading Bostonian opposition to the Stamp Act and other laws Parliament imposed on the colonies in the 1760s, he pioneered new methods of democratic political warfare, combining scandal, outrage, and demands for justice with public accountability and transparency, ridicule, shame and abuse.

He worked through the English constitutional and legal system, using the system as a weapon against its very self, exploiting laws, procedures and precedents to his revolutionary advantage. As he orchestrated political takeovers on the inside, he attacked the system as politically and morally illegitimate from the outside to show that the crown could do nothing to meet the people’s fair demands against taxation without representation. He worded legislative resolutions and other pronouncements in ways designed to put the local royal authorities, as well as parliament and the king, in impossible situations, placing them in lose/lose positions for which to attack them no matter what decision they made.

Taking advantage of the crown’s own mis-steps and the dislikable traits of royal authorities in Boston, Adams built parallel political and administrative structures that mocked and negated British rule while creating new, legitimate democratic formations that demonstrated both the limits of the crown’s power and the new powers of the people.[6]

Crowds made effigies of royal officials and hanged them from the branches of the Liberty Tree before thousands of enthralled Bostonians. A weak speaker, Adams understood the integration of oratory with the written word and the visual image. Recruiting a young, wealthy merchant named John Hancock, he ensured that protesters were outfitted with elaborate costumes, props, and musical instruments to lead protest songs in harborside demonstrations and parades through Boston’s streets. He filled broadsheets with news of events that he created or orchestrated. Newspapers throughout the colonies and in London reported about the brash and colorful spectacles that energized crowds and made stories interesting and exciting to tell and retell. They reinforced the fears and hopes of political figures in other colonies, warning them that if the people of Boston were threatened, the people of all the colonies would be threatened.

Adams defined his enemy early and kept it in the wrong for decades, relentlessly and often alone, provoking, alerting and educating the people about the dangers of a king’s rule and a parliament in which the far-flung subjects could never be truly represented.

1775: British saw political warriors more dangerous than soldiers 

Throughout the American independence period, the British repeatedly complained about revolutionary propaganda, and often viewed the political warriors as more dangerous than the shockingly unconventional warriors on the battlefield. For the Americans, propaganda and political action would compensate in the asymmetrical war ahead – areas where the British were not as competent in their wayward colonies – and the British knew it.

General Thomas Gage, British military governor of Massachusetts, considered the two as the most dangerous men of the nascent rebellion. On receiving orders to arrest the entire elected political leadership of the colony, Gage focused on Adams and Hancock, marching 800 troops to Lexington where his spies reported they were hiding, and which sat astride the road to Concord, where Gage intended to capture rebel a powder magazine. Paul Revere foiled the plan on his famous Midnight Ride, helping Adams and Hancock escape as the British approached the town. The war began literally as a British attempt to capture the colonial propagandists.

As volunteers massed around Boston to fight what would become the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Continental Congress named 43 year-old George Washington as commander of the new Continental Army, Gage issued a proclamation to pardon any and all American rebels – including Washington - who had opposed, fought or even killed the king’s forces. In capital letters he made only two exceptions: “SAMUEL ADAMS and JOHN HANCOCK, whose offences are of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than condign punishment.”[7]

A winning combination 

Neither man would hang; both would be re-elected to the Continental Congress and, with Hancock as Congress President and Adams operating behind the scenes, help craft the Declaration of Independence.

As the unanimous bedrock statement of principle of the United States of America, the declaration illustrates the founding fathers’ three-part approach to communicating their message.

The document begins with repeated positive statements of rights, ideals and obligations, including the right to oust repressive governments.

Second, it resists Britain’s divide-and-conquer colonial strategy and aims at attracting other large powers as allies by showing inter-colonial unity.

Finally, it vilifies the repressive government, while sparing the British people and even parliament, laying all blame on the king: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

For good measure, the Founders – 32 year-old Thomas Jefferson mainly, collaborating with Samuel Adams and his like-minded Virginia colleague, Richard Henry Lee[8] – substantiated their accusations with a litany of crimes that reads like an indictment of the king, accusing him of everything from arbitrariness, illegality, abuse and neglect to hinting that His Majesty was not only a tyrant, but unwholesome, criminal, and possibly even unmanly.

The king refused to approve necessary local laws, respected only those who signed away their rights, and harassed legislative assemblies “for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance.”   

George III dissolved public legislatures and blocked the people from electing new lawmakers, prevented the states from determining their own population policies, obstructed justice and manipulated judges, and “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat of their substance.” The king kept standing armies in local communities without the people’s consent, and outside the control of civil authorities. He waged economic warfare on the colonies, cutting off their trade, taxing the people arbitrarily, and denying them jury trials. Indeed, he abolished English law and replaced it with arbitrary government. Now, the framers said, the king “has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War on us.”

“He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of the people,” according to the Declaration. The document referred to the anticipated arrival of Hessian troops: “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat [sic] the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarousages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”That was certainly putting the enemy in the wrong. For the purposes of discussing public diplomacy, propaganda and political warfare, we see that the words comprise the first document issued by the United States of America.

Targeting British audiences

Well before the revolution began, colonial leaders targeted British public opinion and elites to push for changes that they were powerless to influence within parliament. They took advantage of the often freewheeling English newspapers’ substantial coverage of colonial politics and developments, and produced declarations and domestic news stories that they believed would be picked up in the British press. The newspaper industry of the time depended on contributed letters and essays, which were often published anonymously or pseudonymously, and American patriots wrote prolifically.   

Without their own representation in parliament, American anti-tax advocates ran campaigns to pressure the British legislature indirectly. Their successful boycotts forced parliament to repeal the Stamp Act of 1763. With the imposition of the Townshend Duties in 1767, Boston, New York and Philadelphia led a “non-importation” effort and public boycotts, a form of economic warfare. They would make English merchants feel the pain. The efforts succeeded with the repeal of the Stamp Act, but they soon found a far more British determined government of Prime Minister Frederick North.

Colonial legislatures circumvented the royally appointed governors and named their own agents to represent their interests in London. Four of them hired Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania. Known for his charm and quick wit, Franklin was a popular figure in London where he had lived for years, all the more respected for his reputation as a political philosopher, an inventor, and a cutting-edge scientist experimenting with electricity. 

Franklin, who like most colonists at the time considered himself an Englishman from America, arrived late to the cause of independence. He wrote influential articles in London against the Stamp Act and against the crown’s abuse of its colonial subjects. Like nearly all the Founding Fathers at that point, he merely sought to extend all the rights of English subjects, so he naturally was positioned to fuel internal British opposition to the ruling Tories. Franklin worked with pro-American groups like the Society of 13 and the Society of 1774, exploited the opposition press, and blamed Lord North for his failures to work out reasonable agreements with the colonies.

Pointing to Samuel Adams and other radicals who wanted independence, Franklin and other agents attempted to warn the British that they risked antagonizing the thirteen colonies forever. Sometimes they tried to mediate between sides. Franklin often used satire. He penned a pamphlet in 1773, “Rules By Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced,” a tongue-in-cheek guide to destroying the British imperium that showed that the king and parliament were following directions perfectly.[9]   

A year before declaring independence, on July 6, 1775, the Continental Congress explained colonial grievances in a “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” The declaration was an eloquent explanation from Americans who still considered themselves Englishmen, who feared a trans-Atlantic civil war (not dreamed independence) and sought to save the union with London. It was also fundamentally a propaganda document, addressing “our friends and fellow subjects in any part of the empire,” as well as “before God and the World.”[10]

Twelve months later, in the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress explained the colonists’ diligent attempts to communicate with their royal brothers in private diplomacy as well as public. They neatly summarized the Samuel Adams approach of keeping the enemy constantly in the wrong while promoting the goodness of one’s own cause. That approach would be the standard of American public diplomacy, political warfare and propaganda throughout the nation’s founding.

Targeting Canada, Bermuda and Ireland

As a major British possession adjoining the colonies, Canada presented both a dangerous enemy rearguard and an opportunity. The First Continental Congress voted in 1775 to invade Canada to cut off British supplies and replenished troops from Quebec and Montreal. Via the Boston Committee of Correspondence, Samuel Adams directed U.S. propaganda operations in Canada. He appealed for a combined North American front against the British.

Gen. George Washington wrote a specific letter “To the Inhabitants of Canada” and another to the people of Bermuda, calling for their support. Washington’s letter to the Canadians said, in part: 

Come then, my Brethern, Unite with us in an indissoluble Union. Let us run together to the same Goal. We have taken up Arms in Defence of our Liberty, our Property; our Wives and our Children: We are determined to preserve them or die. We look forward with pleasure to that day not far remote (we hope) when the Inhabitants of America shall have one Sentiment and the full Enjoyment of the blessings of a Free Government.[11]

The Continental Congress soon authorized a propaganda operation to urge Canadians to join as a “sister colony” against the British. Under the supervision of Franklin and a few others, the newly-created Committee of Secret Correspondence, considered the nation’s first foreign intelligence agency, sent a French printer to Quebec “to establish a free press . . . for the frequent publication of such pieces as may be of service to the laws of the United States.”

The committee also recruited French Catholic priests to promote Canada secession to the rebel cause. The effort failed, however, due in part to excesses of American troops who attacked Montreal and Quebec, a hostile Canadian clergy, French-Canadian antipathy toward the openly anti-Catholic New Englanders on their border, and Congress’s inability to deliver more than promises.[12]

While the Continental Congress failed to gain the Canadian provinces’ secession from Britain, the British decried the effectiveness of American propaganda efforts. The British colonial secretary in Canada complained that unrest was growing with “the minds of the people poisoned by the same hypocrisy and lies practised with so much success in the other provinces, and which their emissaries and friends here have spread abroad with great art and diligence.”

British General John Burgoyne blamed his recruitment woes in Canada “to the poison which the emissaries of the rebels have thrown into their mind.”[13]

Coordinating secret intelligence with message-making 

The American founders sought to coordinate the collection of secret intelligence with public message-making. Fortuitous and well-exploited intelligence collection in England, warned the patriots in advance that the crown would send thousands of mercenaries from the German principality of Hesse to augment its own Redcoat regulars. That knowledge, combined with the Americans’ instincts for psychological warfare learned during the French and Indian War, enabled the Continental Congress and General George Washington to run successful psyops against the Hessian troops and divide thousands of them from the British.

From London in September 1775, Franklin warned the Continental Congress that the German Prince of Hesse was visiting to sign an agreement with George III to hire Hessian mercenaries. “The leading people, among the Germans of Pennsylvania, should likewise be consulted,” he said in his secret letter. The British king signed the agreement in November 1775, Congress found out quickly in January 1776, and by the spring the Americans had already devised a psychological warfare effort to divide the Hessians from the British army and discredit the British government.

Thanks to Franklin’s secret work, the Continental Congress received copies of the British-Hessian treaties in May. Gen. Washington asked Congress President Hancock about raising German-American groups to promote desertions, while the Congress appointed John Adams, Jefferson and to others to a new committee to make propaganda out of the treaties, or in its words, to “extract and publish the treaties,” and to “prepare an address to the foreign mercenaries who are coming to invade America.”

Events quickened their pace and they bear recounting to illustrate how the Americans operated. In June, a Samuel Adams protégé in Congress introduced the resolution to declare independence. Under Hancock’s leadership, continental lawmakers unanimously adopted the declaration on July 4, in which they referred to the incoming troop fleets of “large Armies of foreign Mercenaries.” With his distinctive penmanship Hancock signed the document immediately. The rest signed it on August 2. A week later, Congress set up a committee to devise a plan to encourage Hessian desertions. Three days afterward, on August 12, the Hessians landed in New York.

By that time, Franklin had returned to Philadelphia and joined Adams and Jefferson on the Hessian desertion committee. The Continental Congress resolved to protect non-English deserters from the British forces (Hessians, Irish, Scots and others) and give them each 50 acres of land for them to start a new life as free Americans. It ordered leaflets printed in English and in German, and sent copies to Gen. Washington in New York. The congressional desertion committee issued its report on August 14; on the 18^th, Washington summoned Christopher Ludwick, an American army cook born in Hesse, to be his agent to infiltrate Hessian ranks.

Franklin had the leaflets printed at his shop and sent them to troops in New Jersey on August 24. Two days later, Washington reported that his agents successfully infiltrated the leaflets among Hessian ranks. That same day, Franklin and John Adams wrote a congressional resolution to non-English officers in the British military, offering a sweeter deal of hundreds of acres of land to each deserter. The resolution was immediately translated into German and printed the night of August 26-27. The Battle of Long Island (Battle of Brooklyn) raged on August 27 and 28, ending in a quick British win before Franklin could send the congressional pamphlets to New York.

Washington wrote to Hancock on the 29^th, “As to the Encouragement to the Hessian Officers, I wish it may have the desired effect, perhaps it might have been better, had the offer been made sooner.”

The British soon occupied New York City. Washington learned in mid-October that a Hessian deserter said his comrades had not been receiving the leaflets, and that the British made the Hessians fear surrendering to the Americans. Later Washington and other military commanders learned that British officers told their Hessian mercenaries that if they deserted, the “shaggily clad” Americans would cannibalize them, so the Hessians would have to “exterminate first” if they were to live. It was easy for the Hessians to believe, as many American troops wore tattered and filthy civilian clothes unbecoming to any European soldier, and U.S. snipers, who had the bad form to shoot enemy officers, were dressed as “savage Indians.”

With time and patience, the strategy to divide the Hessians worked. One in six deserted. Playing up the use of German professional mercenaries among British troops also paid dividends to the United States, not only to discredit the empire, but to show the great odds against which the heroic Americans would fight. When news of British General John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga reached Europe in late 1777, the French realized that the American irregulars, against troops of two of the world’s best armies, had a fighting chance. Now in his third year in Paris, Franklin was already prepared for the moment.

Secret and public diplomacy in France 

Nearly a half-year before the first shots at Lexington and Concord, French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, noted the increasing friction between most of the thirteen colonies and what he called the metropolis in London. The loss of nearly all its North American territories in the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War) still fresh, Vergennes observed the tension with anticipation. “The quarrel between the colonies and the British government seems to grow more serious every day,” he wrote in late 1774. “It may prove the most fatal blow to the authority of the metropolis.” The rift was an opportunity for France – if the upstart Americans had a chance of winning.[14]

The war broke out in April, 1775. King George III declared the colonies in rebellion in August. In October, realizing that the Anglo-American political break was irreconcilable, Franklin returned to Philadelphia after a decade in England. During Franklin’s long sailing journey home, the French ambassador in London, the comte de Guines, proposed to Vergennes that he send a secret agent to Philadelphia to collect intelligence on the capabilities and needs of the revolutionary American government and its military. He dispatched a young retired military officer who had recently returned from the colonies for the job. Disguised as a merchant from Antwerp, the agent went to sea shortly after Franklin. 

Though transatlantic journeys were long and communications were slow, events moved quickly. Franklin landed in Philadelphia in October, whereupon citizens almost immediately elected him to the Continental Congress. In November, Congress established the five-man Committee of Secret Correspondence intelligence service. Franklin was the only committee member who knew Europe, and he was well known and regarded across the continent for his scientific and philosophical works.[15] He also spoke some French.

Despite the dire conditions of the American military, Franklin appears to have exaggerated the force’s strengths to French intelligence, just as Washington had been doing in elaborate deception operations against the British military. The French agent, Bonvouloir, filed a hugely inflated report on December 28, saying that “Everyone here is a soldier, the troops are well clothed, well paid and well armed. They have more than 50,000 regular soldiers and an even larger number of volunteers who do not wish to be paid. Judge how men of this caliber will fight.” In truth, only about five thousand poorly paid, ill-trained, hungry cold men comprised Washington’s army.[16] 

Bonvouloir apparently never second-guessed Franklin, and Vergennes did not question Bonvouloir. The false report persuaded King Louis XVI and his divided court to aid the Americans, covertly at first, and with the secret assistance of Spain. By early 1776, the Vergennes secured funding from the French and Spanish kings to set up a front company, Hortalez & Cie, to provide weapons and other material assistance to the Americans while officially keeping their neutrality.[17]

With France now covertly aiding the Americans in the war, the Continental Congress sent Franklin to France, where he would attempt to negotiate a formal military alliance against the British. The struggling United States had little to offer the cash-strapped French for such a high-risk venture, but the strategy was for the U.S. to check British imperial expansion, in this case by American diplomacy and political action backed by French wealth and military force. London saw the septuagenarian Franklin, crossing the Atlantic with his two grandsons, as one of its greatest threats.

British Ambassador Lord Stormont, who also headed the king’s secret service station in France, wrote less than admiringly to the British Foreign Secretary in London:

I cannot but suspect that he comes charged with a secret Commission from Congress . . . and as he is a subtle, artful Man, and void of all Truth, he will, in that Case, use every means to deceive. . . . He has the advantage of several intimate connexions here, and stands high in the general opinion. . . . In a word, my Lord, I look upon him as a dangerous engine and am very sorry that some English frigate did not meet him by the way.[18]

British agents spread rumors in Paris that Franklin had given up the revolutionary cause as lost, enriched himself with 30,000 pounds of gold, and sought asylum form the king. Stormont made the mistake of ridiculing Franklin’s humble beaver-skin hat, not appreciating adoring Parisians who swooned the American’s exotic back-woods appearance. In response, Franklin coined a French verb, stormonter, meaning to lie, and the word was an instant hit.[19] 

Franklin was hugely popular in France, where the Age of Reason began to eclipse that of divine right of kings. French journals already had published his works on science and theory. Parisians bought engraved and painted portraits of him and set them on their mantels. Franklin’s distinctive profile decorated snuff boxes. Deliberately trading his Philadelphia silk clothes for his hat and rustic “Quaker” attire, he personified the American Revolution.[20]

In the course of making the rounds of Parisian society and cultivating support in Spain, Franklin prepared action plans, well in advance, to implement instantly when the opportunity presented itself. That moment came in December, 1777, when news reached Europe that General Burgoyne had surrendered in October to American troops at Saratoga.

Franklin knew his next move: a proposed Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France, part of which included an American military alliance with France and Spain against the British. He had already written a draft in anticipation. Less than two months later he signed a Franco-American military alliance. The army and navy of King Louis XVI formally engaged, sealing ultimate defeat for the British.[21]

Counterpropaganda in Europe 

Well before independence, American influence operations in Europe were in response to aggressive British propaganda. Thanks to the regular reports on British attitudes that Benjamin Franklin and others supplied the colonies from London and elsewhere, the patriots knew what was being said about them and how to counter the negative publicity.[22] Adams was concerned that the governor’s portrayal of the colony would legitimize the sending of a large occupation force to Boston.

When provoked Redcoats fired on civilians in the March, 1770 shooting known as the Boston Massacre, the patriots wanted to be sure the world saw them not only as martyrs but as martyrs with whom British society would identify. Paul Revere’s famous engraving that depicted the event portrayed the British soldiers coldly and ruthlessly firing point-blank into a crowd of fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen. In reality, the victims were of the social classes that would evoke the least sympathy in England: dock workers, sailors, a runaway Afro-Indian slave and Irishmen. Adams then found a local lawyer who would defend the British soldiers in court without besmirching the reputation of Boston: his second cousin, and the future second president of the United States, John Adams.[23] 

When the war finally broke out, the Americans needed good information operations on the continent to present their view and to wage counterpropaganda against the British. Coordination fell to the Committee of Secret Correspondence whose function, according to the Continental Congress resolution that formed it, was to correspond “with our friends in Great Britain, Ireland and other parts of the world.”[24]

Sent as a U.S. emissary to the Netherlands, John Adams wrote to Franklin, “It is necessary for America to have agents in different parts of Europe, to give some information concerning our affairs, and to refute the abominable lies that the hired emissaries of Great Britain circulate in every corner of Europe, by which they keep up their own credit and ruin ours.”[25]

Franklin recruited a friend in Holland, Swiss journalist Charles Dumas, as a secret agent for the Committee of Secret Correspondence to collect intelligence and run propaganda operations in Europe. Among his activities, he “planted stories in a Dutch newspaper, Gazette de Leide, intended to give the United States a favorable rating in the Dutch credit markets.”[26] Soon, the U.S. had secret agents in Spain, Portugal, Berlin and Tuscany.[27] 

The American way of propaganda

The American Revolution showed that wars of ideas and battles for democracy are fought primarily as wars and not as diplomacy. And where public diplomacy plays a role, its tone is not necessarily positive or gentle.

The founders’ message strategy was simple: Relentlessly tell the best about the American cause and the worst about the enemy. As they provided us with our first principles and our Constitution, our founding fathers gave us with the diplomatic and political tools to promote and defend our interests around the world.

Those tools, properly used, meant the margin of victory for America’s first strategic hearts-and-minds campaign. They were life-saving ways of achieving military objectives by political means. They were created and implemented by the very individuals who helped draft and who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

In a seamless garment they combined intelligence and military force with what today is known as diplomacy, public diplomacy, propaganda, counterpropaganda, political warfare and psychological warfare, a spectrum of statecraft that carried the day for the founding of the United States and for its future defense.

---

J. Michael Waller is the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics.

Notes

[1] United States Information Agency (USIA) definition, cited by USIA Alumni Association, on its PublicDiplomacy.org Website, accessed 21 November 2005. Public diplomacy has many variations, according to the government agency involved, as well as to independent observers and practitioners.

[2] Political warfare, according to a National Defense University publication, is “the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one’s will, political being understood to describe purposeful intercourse between peoples and governments affecting national survival and advantage. Political war may be combined with violence, economic pressure, subversion, and diplomacy, but its chief aspect is the use of words, images and ideas, commonly known, according to context, as propaganda and political warfare.” Paul A. Smith, On Political War (Washington: National Defense University, 1989), p. 3.

[3] Joint Pubs 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (1994).

[4] John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (Rowland & Littlefield, 2004), p. 12

[5] Samuel Adams, letter to Richard Henry Lee, [21] March 1775, Samuel Adams Papers, Lenox Library; a shorter text is in Force, American Archives, 4th ser., vol. ii., p. 176 ; portions of the letter are printed in W. V. Wells, Life of Samuel Adams, vol. ii., pp. 256, 257, 281.

[6] Alexander recounts Adams’ political maneuvering throughout his book. In his 1935 biography, heavily sourced with primary materials, John C. Miller shows Adams as a skilled backdoor political maneuverer. See John C. Miller, Samuel Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Stanford University Press, 1966; reprint of Little, Brown edition of 1936), passim.

[7] Gen. Thomas Gage, “A Proclamation,” Philadelphia Evening Post, 14 June 1775, pp. 1, 2 and 3. In Institute of World Politics historical collection.

[8] Samuel Adams had more of a role in authoring the Declaration of Independence, both intellectually and operationally, than many historians credit. Though Jefferson physically wrote the Declaration, the much of the wording is from Samuel Adams, who had been using the rhetoric for a decade or more. Rep. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, a close Adams ally who was considered as radical as the Bostonian, introduced the resolution for the Continental Congress to declare independence while Adams, seeking unanimity, tried to limit dissent. (Alexander, pp. 154-155) Lee introduced the resolution on 7 June 1776, and Congress, under the presidency of Adams protégé John Hancock, created a committee to draft the declaration, which consisted of John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert Livingston of New York, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Jefferson, at age 32, was a compromise member. Fellow Virginian Lee was considered too militant, while the other, Benjamin Harrison, was too conservative for Lee’s supporters. Some saw a Samuel Adams in one of Jefferson’s writings, and while the young Virginian was very quiet, he privately shared Adams’ sentiments. John Adams persuaded Jefferson to join the committee because he was a Virginian and because “you can write ten times better than I can.”A. J. Langguth, Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 1988), pp. 344-345.

[9] Benjamin Franklin, “Rules by which a Great Empire may be reduced to a Small One,” The Public Advertiser (London), 11 September 1773, in Walter Isaacson, ed., A Benjamin Franklin Reader (Simon & Schuster, 2003), pp. 240-248.

[10] Continental Congress, “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” 7 July 1775, from Library of Congress.

[11] George Washington, “To the Inhabitants of Canada,” 6 September 1775, in George Washington: A Collection, comp. and ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988).

[12] Central Intelligence Agency, “Intelligence and the War of Independence,” undated. Electronic version accessed on CIA Website at: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/warindep/frames.html.

[13] Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester University Press, 1990, 2003), pp. 134, 135-136.

[14] Eric Niderost, “Revolutionary Spymaster: Benjamin Franklin,” American History, February 2006, p. 56.

[15] G. J. A. O’Toole, “Intrigue in Paris,” in Edmund R. Thompson, ed., Secret New England: Spies of the American Revolution (Provincial Press, 2001), pp. 68-69.

[16] Langguth, pp. 325-326.

[17] O’Toole, p. 71.

[18] O’Toole, p. 67.

[19] Langguth, p. 433-434.

[20] Taylor, p. 140.

[21] O’Toole, pp. 77-78.

[22] In October, 1769, the Boston Town Meeting approved a long essay that Samuel Adams principally authored, titled “An Appeal to the World; or a Vindication of the Town of Boston, from Many False and Malicious Aspersions” that the royally appointed governor of Massachusetts had been reporting to the crown.

[23] Alexander, p. 77-86.

[24] Niderost, p. 54.

[25] Taylor, p. 141.

[26] CIA, “Intelligence in the War for Independence.”

[27] O’Toole, p. 75.

Wartime public diplomacy: A strategy to deliver the messages

Public Diplomacy and Political Warfare White Paper No. 2
The Institute of World Politics

by J. Michael Waller

This article is the second in a series of White Papers about the transformation of American public diplomacy and strategic communication.   This version is a draft that is posted for public comment.

Introduction 

As the United States struggles to shape coherent messages to the world, it must shape the means through which it delivers its ideas. The near-universal default is public diplomacy – the U.S. government’s communication with the publics of the world – and a larger evolving discipline called strategic communication.

Yet policymakers and others lack a clear definition of how one relates to the other, or how either relates to present international political, diplomatic, military and security realities. Our public diplomacy approaches and applications are inconsistent with the realities of the new international environment.

Advances in information technology and the proliferation of electronic media outlets have enabled small powers, non-governmental organizations, and even individuals to undermine Washington’s carefully crafted messages rapidly and constantly. Cheap and plentiful information outlets allow adversaries or any size to attack in swarms and refute, distort and drown out U.S. messages, and agitating an increasingly shrill opposition that can dominate news reporting and public discourse worldwide. 

The United States can reorient its approach for immediate-term wartime necessities. It need not wait for the crucial but time-consuming structural changes in the public diplomacy machine, but can begin by reexamining its messages, recalibrating them, and modernizing their means of delivery.

What are those messages? What do we want to do with them? How effective have they truly been and are they likely to be? What can we do to give those messages greater impact, right now when we need them, and with the people and resources we already have? How much can we expect to accomplish when public affairs offices work only one shift a day in an age of 24/7 news cycles?   

“Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but for the most part we - our country - our government, has not adapted,” the secretary of defense said in February, 2006. “For the most part, the US Government still functions as a five and dime store in an eBay world.”^[1]

Creative and capable use of information technologies can make up for years of lost time. A new approach toward information technology will help the nation to pull itself out of its political nosedive. The issue is more than mastering Blackberrys and blogs. Good public diplomacy and strategic communication in support of the war effort – and larger 21^st century national interests – need an accelerant. That is what this paper is about: Accelerating the tempo and intensity of the nation’s conduct of the war of ideas.   

Points of departure

To develop successful wartime messages, we must know first what we seek to accomplish and how we wish to achieve it. We want to win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and win a long-term global war. We must maintain a strategic propaganda presence around the world to support not only the current conflicts, but other issues, present and future.   

Our audience, therefore, is most of the entire world: allies new and old who need reinforcement, traditional allies who no longer support us and are drifting away, neutrals whose bias we must keep or regain in our favor, soft opponents who can be made softer, and hard opponents who can be rendered ineffective. We also need to be sure of certain understandings:

• Terrorism is a form of political and psychological warfare, of protracted, high-intensity propaganda. It is aimed more at the hearts of the public and the minds of decision-makers, and not at the physical victims.
• The positive and gentle nature of traditional public diplomacy is not well-suited to neutralize or attack such psychological and political warfare.
• Explaining U.S. policies and culture, and non-offensive messages about American ideals, are vital but insufficient for current realities.
• Some U.S. policies and statements inadvertently benefit the enemy.
• We cannot credibly sell a bad policy, no matter how it is packaged.
• There are some issues, good and bad, that we simply cannot convince people to support, yet we must pursue them nevertheless.
• There are other issues that people will support as long as the United States is not the messenger.
• Despite profound differences and antipathies, the U.S. and most of the Islamic world do share common interests and causes.
• We cannot afford to wait for the cumulative effect of traditional public diplomacy to work because we have lost several years and risk running out of time.

More public diplomacy, please

Policymakers of all persuasions seem to agree that the nation needs “more public diplomacy” to wage the war of ideas around the world. The debate has been more about how many dollars should be budgeted annually, and less about the needs that determine the dollars. We pull public diplomacy resources from Europe, where we need support from our traditional allies, to new areas, rather than determine our national needs and budget accordingly to fund all necessities.   

Most of today’s debate re-hashes the successful public diplomacy efforts of the Cold War years and, with few new specifics, calls for reviving it with an Islamic twist. In practice, some government officials insist on avoiding the religious dimension or approaching it as non-offensively (as uselessly) as possible.

This timid approach defies reason and precedent and has demonstrably failed. Adherents to current policy want it both ways: fight an ideological war by using diplomacy as the lead instrument.

The problem, of course, is that such an approach mismatches the tools to fix the problem. Diplomacy is not necessarily, if ever, the best primary tool against hostile strategic psychological warfare.

We can call for all the public diplomacy we want, but we don’t even have a good idea of what it is, what it isn’t, and what we really want to do with it. In refining the idea of public diplomacy and the goals in fighting terrorists, extremists, proliferators and other threats, most agree that the U.S. must change its rather thoughtless structures and policies for public diplomacy and strategic communication.

Most proposals to date argue for such structural changes. But changing the structures, which takes years, is not a useful first step toward solving immediate problems.

Until the vision, laws, structures, guidelines, appropriations, authorizations, doctrines, personnel re-training and turf battles are settled – a process that has not even begun – the U.S. should implement new ways to use the inadequate structures and resources already in place.

This paper is concerned specifically with political extremists who use mutated forms of Islamic ideology with Leninist methods in a political movement called radical Islamism. One can apply the same message-making logic against any extremist movement or violent ideology, including aggressive ultranationalism and ethnic chauvinism, Ba’athism, neocommunism, paleocommunism, and Bolivarianism emanating from Venezuela.   

Radical Islamism is political, not religious, because it seeks political power, as in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan or present-day Iran. It is a political movement with an agenda to influence international politics and governments around the world. Radical Islamists seek to change or destroy established political, legal and constitutional orders. Their movement employs intimidation, terrorism and subversion, classical means of political warfare. The U.S. and other countries have successfully fought and defeated those who have used such means in the past, but only by understanding the enemy and its ideology.

Approaching radical Islamism as a political force can liberate American policymakers from the self-imposed, paralyzing angst that many are suffering about the religious aspects of the conflict. The political approach should relieve the armies of government lawyers who have stymied effective operations by evoking the “separation of church and state” default and literally preventing civilian agencies and military forces alike, at times, from combating Islamism in a proper ideological fashion.   

We are defending ourselves and others from a strain of political warfare that uses religious rhetoric, ideology and symbolism to pursue political ends. Ultimately here at home, extreme Islamists seek the overthrow of the Constitution of the United States. Every U.S. government official, civilian and military, is bound to protect and defend the Constitution against such foreign and domestic enemies. Thus the need for something between (and apart from) public diplomacy and military force becomes more apparent as an immediate wartime tool.

Building on – and breaking with – the traditional approach

The idea of public diplomacy, and indeed the official definition of the term, has changed over time and often varies according to the perspectives of those who view the mission. At one extreme, it is psychological and political warfare. On the other extreme it is passive “soft power.”[2] Both conceptions are important, but neither is sufficient in itself.

Before being absorbed into the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) gave public diplomacy an explicitly national security dimension: “Public diplomacy seeks to promote the national interest and the national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad.”[3]

The approach that characterized public diplomacy under President John F. Kennedy was the same as that under President Ronald Reagan. The Reagan-appointed head of the State Department Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Edwin Feulner, summarized the mission well:   

Public diplomacy supplements and reinforces traditional diplomacy by explaining U.S. policies to foreign publics, by providing them with information about American society and culture, by enabling many to experience the diversity of our country personally, and by assessing foreign public opinion for American ambassadors and foreign policy decisionmakers in the United States. It is not one-shot dramatic efforts that make public diplomacy succeed. Rather, it is the steady, wise use of all the resources of public diplomacy over time. It is recognition by those who seek disproportionately to enhance educational and cultural exchange that the articulation of U.S. policies is also necessary to mutual understanding and rational international dialogue.[4]

The Reagan approach

The Reagan administration redirected U.S. national strategy from the failed policy of containment of the Soviet Union to one of undermining and ultimately toppling the Soviet regime through political and economic warfare. It thus re-defined public diplomacy and re-oriented it as an offensive tool. 

In a classified policy document, President Reagan boiled the issue down to its concentrated form: “Public diplomacy is comprised of those actions of the U.S. Government to generate support for our national security objectives.”[5]

Building upon his 40 years as a professional communicator, Reagan used public diplomacy as a relationship-building device and as an offensive weapon against the Soviet enemy. In January 1983 he integrated it into his larger – and at the time highly controversial – scrapping of the “containment” of communism policy that had been in place since the late 1940s, and waged a “liberation” strategy to undermine Soviet Communist power and hasten the collapse of the USSR.[6]

The change in public diplomacy strategy was a fundamental, integrated component of Reagan’s radically changed approach to the Soviet empire and communist ideology. The president signed both strategy documents within three days of one another.

While putting in place the coordinated strategy, which included cultural, economic and military incentives and disincentives, the Reagan administration exploited new communication technologies, such as satellite TV, in a relentless campaign of ideological warfare. Elements of this integrated approach, among them technology controls, economic pressure and a vast military buildup designed to bankrupt the Soviet central government, are credited with forcing a new generation of Soviet leaders to open up the system and ease information controls.

That loosening of the regimes’ control of expression, a publicity campaign called glasnost, failed to save the system and, with continued American pressure, ultimately ushered in the Soviet collapse.[7] 

Stripped-down public diplomacy

Following the strategic success of taking down the USSR, a bipartisan coalition in Congress and the Clinton administration agreed to weaken the public diplomacy and political warfare machinery. They abolished the USIA and merged the distinctively action-oriented public diplomacy apparatus into the very different and excessively cautious reporting culture of the State Department.

There public diplomacy has sat, unimaginatively, ever since. The broadcasting component became an independent entity. As of this writing, the present administration is sending the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to a similar fate as USIA, even though the administration placed international humanitarian and development assistance on equal footing with diplomacy and the military.[8] 

Which returns us to our present national needs: To strengthen wartime public diplomacy, one must integrate it within a larger national strategic communication regime. For strategic communication to be effective, it must include a substantial action component. The public diplomacy designed for the Cold War to contain communism was different from the public diplomacy approach needed to subdue the Soviets, and today’s challenges require even more innovative approaches than before.

Accelerated public diplomacy 

In broadening the idea of public diplomacy and strategic communication toward the national goal of actually fighting and winning the war of ideas, we must first consider what we seek to achieve as a nation.

We seek to help the world understand what we are all about, but we are locked in mortal combat with an enemy that is waging political and ideological warfare – not diplomatic support activity, but actual psychological combat – against us and the rest of the world.

So there is indeed coercion in this war of ideas. Just as the generally accepted concept of traditional diplomacy contains a coercive element,[9] public diplomacy advocates and practitioners must either include a warfighting function within the discipline. Failing that, they must accept and embrace a national-level political and psychological warfighting element elsewhere in the federal government. Ideally, they should do both. 

Most forms of traditional public diplomacy – cultural and educational programs, exchanges, informative broadcasting, and dialogue – are generally non-invasive, even passive, and take years to root and flower. They function as a constant, usually in the background, with little difference in content between presidential administrations. They provide informal, allowed grievance and discussion channels cushion political damage caused by a particular crisis, policy or personality.

Such traditional public diplomacy forms naturally promote the warming of relations and cooling of tensions, and should operate constantly, much like a computer’s operating system that supports any given application at any given time. The existing action aspect to public diplomacy, such as training and funding democratic movements, independent media and NGOs, has made decisive differences and, structural problems notwithstanding, will continue to do so.

But what to do about that gap between traditional diplomacy and public diplomacy on one side, and the threatening, often blustering and counterproductive coercive diplomacy on the other? Let’s fill it. Networked extremism can no longer be stanched by pressuring or changing a central regime, and information technology has collapsed the message window from months or years to days or even minutes. 

Hence the need for the assertive side to public diplomacy. Here, we require accelerants to jump-start the shaping of perceptions and attitudes, the changing of minds, and the influence on others’ policies and actions in areas that matter most. The reform proposals to date, for the most part, continue to treat public diplomacy in conventional Cold War terms, and usually sans integration with other strategic communication components.

One of the exceptions is the important 2004 Defense Science Board (DSB) report, which defines public diplomacy in relation to public affairs, public relations and strategic communication.[10] But even that vital report overlooks what communication methods the U.S. should use when traditional communication fails. Military force is not the only option.   

The third way

Another option was almost instinctive to American strategists from the early years of the republic[11] and episodically thereafter, up to and through much of the Cold War. It was not necessarily instinctive to diplomats or public diplomats, yet both readily recognized the need and knew how it integrated with their missions. After the National Security Act of 1947 a permanent government entity, the CIA, existed to provide the intellectual, legal, political and material tools to carry “it” out.   

Though the passage of time and changing attitudes to statecraft give it an almost archaic air, no other term capably describes the third way between diplomacy and armed combat: political and psychological warfare. U.S. national security culture once fostered careful study and practice of psychological strategy in order to resolve or win conflicts around the world without escalating to all-out war between the superpowers. It’s time to bring back the practice for new realities, and view ideological combat through the prism of asymmetrical warfare, and not diplomatic support.

Political warfare and psychological operations 

Veteran public diplomacy practitioner and historian Wilson Dizard traces U.S. public diplomacy’s origins to the Office of War Information of World War II, and unabashedly calls public diplomacy’s function ideological warfare.[12] Public diplomacy’s tactical military counterpart is psychological operations (PSYOP), a discipline broadly described as “the planned use of communications to influence human attitudes and behavior.” PSYOP “consists of political, military, and ideological actions conducted to induce in target groups behavior, emotions, and attitudes that support the attainment of national objectives.” Proper use of PSYOP “should be coordinated fully and carefully with other agencies of government.”[13] A fighting spirit need not compromise the discipline’s integrity as long as the discipline of public diplomacy is a component of, instead of an umbrella for, a larger communication strategy.

A 1989 National Defense University study offered an integrated view of how public diplomacy fits into the American defense arsenal: 

Public diplomacy is a form of international political advocacy directed openly by civilians to a broad spectrum of audiences. . . . It is aimed at civilians and is confined in the main to forms of advocacy available to host governments. It seeks to elicit popular support for solutions of mutual benefit that avoids threats, compulsion, or intimidation. It is not a form of political warfare, although it may be used in combination with political warfare.[14]

Political warfare is the art and practice of waging and winning international conflicts by non-military means. Political warfare is explicitly aggressive and hostile in intent. Many public diplomacy purists are uneasy with or even hostile to the idea of strategic political warfare, as are many government public affairs professionals.[15] But political warfare, like PSYOP, is an important, non-lethal weapon that can work where public diplomacy and other forms of communication cannot, and at the national strategic level, can complement or even substitute for military action.

Political warfare and PSYOP by necessity must be separate disciplines from public diplomacy, yet public diplomacy strategists must accept and integrate all strategic communication tools into their planning and operations.[16]

Here is where we depart from the other post-911 proposals and discuss how the U.S. can develop effective public diplomacy messages. By combining public diplomacy and strategic communications with strategic political and psychological warfare, we create the necessary accelerant for the United States to make up for lost time and to adapt to new realities in the hot war of ideas.

Winning a protracted conflict

Waging a psychological form of siege warfare, some of the world’s top terrorists and their supporters believe that most of mankind will lose heart if the conflict is sufficiently drawn out. Modern democratic societies are especially vulnerable to a highly motivated enemy that can manipulate the public opinion and the perceptions of their leaders, and erode and break national will. Armed with a supernatural motivation that welcomes death, the enemy is comfortable with the concept of diminishing the target’s will to fight – not necessarily at the combatant level on the battlefront, but on the psychological and political levels in the targeted societies.   

Captured al Qaeda manuals show that the radical Islamists have made careful studies of the writings of Mao and of the conduct of the Vietnam war, the latter of which is a classical case of how a militarily and politically inferior force can defeat a quantitatively and qualitatively superior force by undermining the will of that force’s home population and political leadership. Al Qaeda manuals and methods show natural expertise in manipulating images and emotions to exploit democratic policymaking processes in the United States and elsewhere.[17]

Bin Laden’s message 

Terrorism is “propaganda by deed.” Terrorist attacks on civilians, by definition, are designed with psychological ends in mind: to terrorize, break morale and cause capitulation. Guerrilla attacks on superior military forces likewise are calculated for their psychological effects. The enemy’s delivery system channels images and messages into the eyes and ears of the world public, especially those who make and shape opinion and policy. The enemy monitors American public opinion. Osama bin Laden affirmed this directly, addressing the American public in a recording aired through Al Jazeera in January, 2006: 

what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush in his comment on the outcome of the U.S. opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq, but he objected to this desire and said that the withdrawal of troops would send a wrong message to the enemy.

Bin Laden noted the daily roadside bombings in Iraq whose attrition of U.S. and coalition military personnel, and countless more Iraqi civilians, is a major contribution to the erosion of support for the war effort there. The al Qaeda leader attempted to draw parallels between U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Vietnam:

The Pentagon figures indicate the rise in the number of your dead and wounded, let alone the huge material losses, and let alone the collapse of the morale of the soldiers there and the increase in the suicide cases among them.

So, just imagine the state of psychological breakdown that afflicts the soldier while collecting the remnants of his comrades' dead bodies after they hit mines, which torn them. Following such situation, the soldier becomes between two fires. If he refuses to go out of his military barracks for patrols, he will face the penalties of the Vietnam butcher, and if he goes out, he will face the danger of mines.

So, he is between two bitter situations, something which puts him under psychological pressure - fear, humiliation, and coercion. Moreover, his people are careless about him. So he has no choice to commit suicide.

The results of American public opinion polls seemed to reinforce bin Laden’s confidence: “To go back to where I started, I say that the results of the poll satisfy sane people that Bush’s objection to them is false.” A third time in the Al Jazeera broadcast, bin Laden commented on “the substance of the results of opinion polls on withdrawing the troops” from Iraq.[18] Bin Laden offered a truce and threatened similar terrorist campaigns in the United States. He hinted that the Americans lack the patience to win:   

• “Do not be deluded by your power and modern weapons. Although they win some battles, they lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are better than them.”
• “we will take revenge . . . until your minds are exhausted and your lives become miserable.”
• “our situation is getting better, while your situation is getting worse.”
• “We will remain patient in fighting you.”[19]

Could the al Qaeda leader have a point about American resolve? Weeks after Al Jazeera aired the bin Laden recording, a wealthy American antiwar activist commissioned a prominent polling company to survey the views of U.S. military personnel deployed inside Iraq. (Why U.S. commanders allowed the pollsters access to the troops is unclear.) The poll purportedly found that the majority of American troops in Iraq felt that the U.S. should pull out within 12 months, thus contradicting official government and Pentagon statements.[20]

The results, and widespread reporting of them, appeared to ratify bin Laden’s analysis. The American psychological fatigue that the terrorist leader observed is indeed occurring.

We need to break the psychological siege not only by trying to win the wide middle of undecideds and softer opponents, but by directly attacking the enemy’s own circles of support – and even the terrorists’ cadres – on the intellectual and emotional fronts.[21]   

Bring the fight to the enemy

Here again is where we adapt traditional public diplomacy to current wartime realities: to promote American ideas and ideals in a positive way, but to bring the political and ideological fight to the enemy by using public diplomacy instruments and related resources as means of attack.

This approach has many precedents since the American Revolution. Founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence offer a model: present uplifting goals and beliefs to take the moral high ground, and attack the enemy mercilessly, in the words of Samuel Adams, to “keep the Enemy in the Wrong.”

The message-makers under Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan followed the Founders’ model. They ably combined passive public diplomacy with political and psychological warfare to confront and attack, instead of merely defend against, German and Soviet propaganda and ideological warfare.

Note the simple wartime message-making formula:A soft policy to tell the world of our intentions in positive and hopeful tones, with the punch of a simultaneous strategic offensive to discredit and ultimately destroy the enemy as a political, moral and psychological force. Public diplomacy, and strategic communications in general, are thus back in balance. The tools now assume far more vitality than mere auxiliaries for diplomatic support. They become strategic weapons.[22]

Celebrate diversity

The U.S. must be unashamed of using strategic influence. The proposed positive-negative formula gives the nation more choices in the gray area between traditional diplomacy and lethal force. Indeed, the area is no longer gray but can be seen as a bright and well-defined spectrum of diverse instruments. This “new” spectrum of tools now offers the U.S. a second chance in the war.  America paradoxically finds itself taking the moral high ground leading the fight against the terrorists and other global threats, but places itself in a weak, self-defeating and morally reprehensible situation by failing to marshal its formidable forces to persuade. In pursuing a strategy that emphasizes killing more than influencing, the U.S. has taken unnecessary casualties and undermined its own cause.

An immediate-term approach: Messages on two fronts

We can summarize traditional public diplomacy’s message making approach with the following basic themes: tell America’s story, engage in dialogue with the rest of the world, resolve misunderstandings, build international relationships, and work together in a spirit of friendship. We lack the time to allow that venerable approach alone to bear fruit in wartime. 

Current approaches must be calculated to divide our opposition, wherever it is, even of and within our traditional allies. U.S. messages must be calculated to isolate the enemy, coerce and subdue hostile will, and ultimately eliminate those who would do harm. While keeping the basic public diplomacy approach, we add the accelerant that intensifies part of our messages as wartime weapons of attack.

The following simplified chart illustrates (1) how the two approaches differ, and (2) how they can be integrated. Trying to win friends is not the primary wartime goal. Friends come and go; our immediate need is allies against a common enemy. Close and positive strategic alliances, even national friendships, develop on their own from wartime emergency relationships. That’s where classical public diplomacy comes in. For the short term, the United States must overcome the need to be liked and focus on winning the war. The following diagram illustrates how: 

Traditional public diplomacy	The added accelerant
Promote America’s good image Engage in dialogue Discuss our differences Resolve misunderstandings Build relationships Cooperate (as friends) Tell America’s story	Discredit the enemy’s image among its supporters Discredit the enemy’s story Take control of the language Discuss our common enemy Reach the proper understandings Divide our critics and opponents Collaborate as the enemy of our enemy (as allies)

This is not an either/or scenario. We can reinterpret the diagram as a stylized mathematical formula, showing how the traditional public diplomacy approach plus the wartime accelerant add up to victory in the war of ideas.

The dual approach is the heart of an immediate wartime message strategy. Its development and implementation requires no legislation or bureaucratic reorganizations; with a simple directive, the president can create an interagency task force and appoint and empower his own staff to call and run the meetings and ensure the compliance of all relevant agencies. Strong and successful precedent exists for such an entity.[23]

Conclusion

Terrorism and extremism are inherently manifestations of psychological warfare. We must fight them on that basis. Today’s American wartime public diplomacy must rediscover and adopt its original fighting spirit, proudly and unapologetically, if the United States is to stop and reverse its global image freefall.

A simple immediate-term message strategy must accelerate the shaping of international perceptions, opinions and behavior about the United States and its enemies for wartime purposes.

It must combine the positive vision and soft approach of traditional public diplomacy with offensive political and psychological campaigns.

That combination must be designed to subdue the enemy’s will and prevent others from developing the will to terrorize, while providing optimism and charity to sustain morale at home and abroad. The immediate strategy provides the intellectual and political spadework toward building a new, more energetic and creative public diplomacy and strategic communication system.

The new system anticipates rather than reacts. It is dynamic and flexible when it must be reactive. It accepts a diversity of new approaches and functions. And it is opportunity-oriented to take immediate advantage of rapidly-changing situations. Finally, the strategy must contain at its core a fighting spirit to wage the war of ideas twenty-four hours a day, every day, until the war is won.

---

_{Image credit: Iranliberty.com}

_{[1] Donald H. Rumsfeld, Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, February 17, 2006.}

_{[2] Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Public Affairs, 2004).}

_{[3] As related by the USIA Alumni Association, www.Publicdiplomacy.org, accessed February 18, 2006.}

_{[4] Edwin Feulner, in Richard F. Staar, ed., Public Diplomacy: USA Versus USSR (Stanford: Hoover Press, 1986), pp. 119-120.}

_{[5] Ronald Reagan, “Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security,” National Security Decision Directive 77, January 14, 1983.}

_{[6] Ronald Reagan, “U.S. Relations with the USSR,” National Security Decision Directive 75, January 17, 1983.}

_{[7] For an insider’s look at the strategy, see Norman Bailey, The Strategic Plan that Won the Cold War: National Security Decision Directive No. 75 (Potomac Foundation, 1999).}

_{[8] George W. Bush, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” September 17, 2002.}

_{[9] Alexander George, Forceful Persuasion: Coercive Diplomacy as an Alternative to War, (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1991); Barry M. Blechman and Steven S. Kaplan, Force Without War (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1978). For an examination of how coercive diplomacy, shorn of a major political and/or psychological warfare element, fails U.S. interests, see Alexander George, David K. Hall and William E. Simons, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam (Little, Brown, 1971).}

_{[10] Defense Science Board, 2004 Summer Study on Transition to and from Hostilities (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, December 2004).}

_{[11] For a discussion of American revolutionary public diplomacy and political warfare, see “The American Way of Propaganda: Lessons from the Founding Fathers,” Public Diplomacy White Paper No. 1, January 26, 2006.}

_{[12] Wilson P. Dizard, Jr., Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency (Lynne Reinner, 2004).}

_{[13] Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., “Military Psychological Operations,” in Carnes Lord and Frank R. Barnett, eds., Political Warfare and Psychological Operations: Rethinking the U.S. Approach (National Defense University, 1989), p. 45.}

_{[14] Paul A. Smith, On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989), p. 7.}

_{[15] The government public affairs culture is so hostile to the idea that some of the most damaging post-9/11 leaks to the press about U.S. wartime influence operations were orchestrated by military or Department of Defense public affairs officers. Cases in point: the February 2002 leak to the New York Times that discredited and ultimately destroyed the new Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the December 2005 leak to the Los Angeles Times about the placing of news stories and commentary in the Iraqi press that portrayed American troops in a positive light. The OSI leak was orchestrated by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs as part of a turf battle. The 2005 leak is believed to have originated from military public affairs officers at Camp Victory, Iraq.}

_{[16] Building firewalls between public diplomacy, political warfare and other strategic communication while integrating each element, is an ongoing subject of study. See Bruce Gregory, “Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication: Cultures, Firewalls and Imported Norms,” paper presented to the American Political Science Association Conference on International Communication and Conflict, August 31, 2005.}

_{[17] David E. Spencer, “Red-Teaming Political Warfare,” paper delivered at the Second Conference on Public Diplomacy, Counterpropaganda and Political Warfare,” Institute of World Politics, May 2005. Spencer is a professor at the National Defense University.}

_{[18] Osama bin Laden, “Text – Bin Laden Tape,” BBC, January 19, 2006, accessed at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4628932.stm.}

_{[19] Ibid.}

_{[20] Al Pessin, “Poll Indicates U.S. Troops in Iraq Favor Withdrawal,” Voice of America, March 1, 2006. The federally-funded LeMoyne College Center for Peace and Global Studies commissioned Zogby International to conduct the poll.}

_{[21] We discuss the issue of splitting the terrorists and other anti-U.S. movements in “Messages Directed at the Enemy Camp: From Support Networks to the Terrorist Core,” Public Diplomacy White Paper No. 9, forthcoming. Notably, the Voice of America did not help the war effort in the way it covered the March 1 poll of troops in Iraq. The poll was the lead story on VOA’s English-language online service, and VOA did not mention that a wealthy American antiwar activist paid for the survey until the last sentence of the 15-paragraph story. VOA did not cover comments by analysts across the American political spectrum who found fault with the poll’s methodology.}

_{[22] Strategic communications could assume a role as a peer to classical diplomacy and military power, much as the Bush administration has elevated foreign development and humanitarian assistance as pillars of national security. Such a role implies entirely new conceptual, structural and procedural changes that go beyond the scope of this paper.}

_{[23] The Reagan Administration’s public diplomacy coordination model is a useful example, as formed by National Security Decision Directive 77, “Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security,” January 14, 1983..}

The importance of words in image-making

Public Diplomacy and Political Warfare White Paper No. 3
The Institute of World Politics

by J. Michael Waller

Introduction

Words and images are the most powerful weapons in a war of ideas. Used skillfully, they can serve the cause well. Used carelessly, they cause collateral damage and the equivalent of death by friendly fire.

Effective messages require understanding, development and deployment of the proper words – not only as Americans understand them in English, but as the rest of the world understands them in many cultural contexts.

Message-making requires sophisticated understanding of both friend and enemy. It requires confident self-knowledge. It requires instinct about how information works today. Most of all, successful message-making requires personal courage against critics abroad and at home.

Inexpert use of words undermines the mission and inadvertently aids the enemy every bit as much as the careless dropping of bombs or the military indiscipline that made Abu Ghraib a metaphor for America’s presence in Iraq.

In this white paper:

• We study how words are used as instruments of conflict and weapons of warfare.
• We look at how the meanings of words differ among languages and cultures, and often within the same language and culture.
• We examine how the nation’s adversaries and enemies have used our own understandings of words against us, and how we accepted those hostile definitions as our own.
• Finally, we discuss how we can take the language back from the enemy and make it work for the wartime and long-term interests of civilized society.

Words as weapons

The human mind is the battlespace of the war of ideas. Words and images create, define and elaborate ideas, and are used to popularize or destroy their appeal. They require relentless repetition. Words are not static objects. The written and spoken word, as George Orwell said, can be used “as an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.”

In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell explained the relationship between language and thought: “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.” [1] 

Deliberate and unwitting corruption of language and thought applies as much to law, literature, love, marketing and politics as it does to diplomacy and warfare. Men have been using words to fight wars since the beginning of recorded history.  Like iron, words can be forged from plowshares into swords and back again. Thucydides, in his monumental history of the Peloponnesian Wars, noted how the upturning of society during the Corcycrean civil war of 427 B.C. was paralleled by distortion of language on the part of the combatants:

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. . . .[2]

Terms of moral judgment were used to describe actions and events wholly alien to their true meanings, so that men could better justify deeds that would have been deemed reprehensible in times of peace.The chaos that resulted from the devious political manipulation of words did much to exacerbate the conflict and serves an early example of the power of rhetoric in conflict.

Niccolò Machiavelli, the 15^th century Florentine political philosopher and strategist, revolutionized statecraft in the western Christian world with his cynical, often amoral guidebook The Prince. His plays on words, invented definitions and purposeful distortions of language were part of his craft, yet most translators of his works, according to Angelo Codevilla of Boston University, attempted to fix what they saw as Machiavelli’s errors of syntax and usage, and inadvertently denied readers of English an accurate understanding of the use of words as weapons.

Codevilla translated The Prince with as faithful a preservation possible of Machiavelli’s word games, making heavy annotations throughout. The result was a livelier if less smooth-sounding translation that offered a deeper understanding of Machiavelli’s devious mind.[3] 

The idealistic architects of American independence two-and-a-half centuries after Machiavelli saw word meanings change with their own ideas. They viewed themselves as patriotic Englishmen living in America, loyal to king and empire. Their grievance was that in America, the crown was denying them their rights as Englishmen.

By 1769, Samuel Adams in Boston began successfully changing public opinion so that the loyal English patriot in America seeking his just rights was now an American patriot. One by one, over the years, other colonial leaders underwent the same transformation. Words and political organization were Adams’ sole weapons, and the incendiary political strategist used them well. More than most, Adams recognized and worried about the enemy’s distortion of language: "How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"[4] 

Free people must safeguard their languages. They must jealously protect the true meanings of words. Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel, just as the Soviet bloc was collapsing in 1989, warned the Western democracies about words and their double-edged power to corrode and demoralize the good.

“Alongside words that electrify society with their freedom and truthfulness, we have words that mesmerize, deceive, inflame, madden, beguile, words that are harmful – lethal even,” Havel said. Giving example after example, the former political prisoner-playwright-turned-president noted, “The same word can, at one moment, radiate great hope; at another, it can emit lethal rays. The same word can be true at one moment and false the next, at one moment illuminating, at another deceptive.” 

Havel’s strongest example was the word peace: “For forty years, an allergy to that beautiful word has been engendered in me, as it has in every one of my fellow citizens, because I know what the word has meant here for all those forty years: ever mightier armies ostensibly to defend peace.”[5]

Semantics and rhetoric

Semantics, derived from the Greek semantikos, for “significant” or “significant meaning,” is “the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning,” according to the Oxford dictionary. Webster gives semantics a more operational definition: “the language used (as in advertising or political propaganda) to achieve a desired effect on an audience especially through the use of words with novel or dual meanings.”

The first cousin of semantics is rhetoric, the ancient art of using expression and language effectively in order to persuade.

Even Aristotle, who produced the first systematic treatment of rhetoric and invented the idea of logic, saw the dark side of the art as well as the bright. To Aristotle, rhetoric consisted of three “proofs” of persuasion: logos (words), ethos (character of the speaker), and pathos (the psychological element).[6]

A competent rhetorician could argue through use of words in a logical form to move popular passion, explain complicated ideas simply, whip up emotions and calm down hatred and fear.

Aristotle discussed how rhetoric fits in a democratic society. He seemed torn by his own idea. Among his concerns about the use of rhetoric was the danger that in the hands of the wrong people, the art could be a destructive weapon.

We can conclude from Aristotle that, like any weapon, rhetoric is a danger when used by the enemy, and when used carelessly, by ourselves. Democratic forces must not be unilaterally disarmed. They must be thoroughly trained, enculturated and mobilized to be as adept with words as they are with precision arms.

Americans in government have lost the art of rhetoric as an instrument of statecraft, though many of the Founding Fathers, including Samuel Adams, were devoted students of Aristotle. Sixty years ago Orwell saw a sharp decline in the skillful use of language among English-speaking politicians and journalists. He warned after World War II that if the trend continued, the societies and leaders of the English-speaking world would find that poor use of language would corrupt their thought processes and alter their perceptions of their own civilizations. Critics of today’s “political correctness” movement would agree.

Twenty-first century Americans have demonstrated little inclination or ability to use language effectively in the war of ideas abroad, showing much greater facility and ease with destroying fellow human beings physically as a first option, instead of trying to “destroy” the pernicious ideologies that motivate their hostile will.

Yet they use semantics and rhetoric instinctively and skillfully in fighting political wars against one another at home, with politicians of all stripes routinely using military jargon in their civil discourse and action.[7] One can see how the political lines are drawn about any one issue by picking out the wording that a faction consciously or unconsciously uses. Each side employs idealistic or distorted language to promote one’s own views while demonizing or otherwise de-legitimizing the positions of the other.[8]

Complications of culture

Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural factors complicate semantics and rhetoric, especially where there is no Webster to standardize definitions, and where meaning is in the beholder’s mind.

To demonstrate how even some of the most successful communicators can fail by misunderstanding semantics, many marketing and business texts and seminars point to a disastrous faux pas that General Motors is said to have made in the 1960s when it sold one of its most successful U.S. models, the Chevrolet Nova, in Latin America. To a Spanish-speaker, some textbooks say, the English word Nova sounds similar to the Spanish expression no va, which means “won’t go.” 

Understandably, despite a reversed syllabic order, the unintended slogan “Chevy won’t go” helped explain the car’s poor regional sales and why GM changed the name for Spanish-speaking markets.

Or so the storytellers said. The tale is an urban legend. The Chevy Nova, in fact, sold well in Latin America as the Nova. In trying to show how ignorant the world’s largest automaker could be despite its army of Spanish-speaking marketers and dealers, the legend’s purveyors and believers display their own lack of cultural awareness. They presume that English words and phrases have exactly the same meaning when translated literally to or from other languages.

The Nova/no va blunder simply does not translate. Cars might “go” in English, but not in Spanish. Depending on regional word usage and the age of the speaker, automobiles “walk” (caminar), “march” (marchar), “function” (funcionar) or “serve” (servir). Cars that “go” and “run” sound as absurd to the Spanish speaker’s ear as cars that walk and march sound to the ear of the native speaker of English. 

The entirety of the Nova myth, from the false story itself to its almost unquestioned repetition, illustrates how misunderstanding of even the most familiar foreign languages and cultures can affect our perceptions of the rest of the world, both as we see other peoples and as we attempt to deliver messages to change perceptions, attitudes and behavior abroad.[1]

Our main sources of public information, political leaders and journalists, use foreign words and expressions in their own daily written and verbal communication, and inject them into public discourse. Satisfied with popular usage or Webster’s American English definition, few double-check with linguists or scholars about the precise or varied meanings, and many occasionally repeat “new” words, readily accepting them at face value without regard to the source, and pass them and the distortions of their meanings to the public and decisionmakers.

Those distortions, a form of shorthand that become unprovable “known facts,” affect the new users’ perceptions and can adversely influence policy. Unquestioned acceptance or repetition of the distorted words can cause fundamental misunderstandings, and not only at home. By their cumulative repetition in the press and in public statements they can be politically or diplomatically damaging abroad as well. Our adversaries can and do exploit this weakness with relative ease and without our awareness. 

Defensive mechanism

We in the United States have no institutional defense against our own misinterpretations of true meanings, or against the conscious efforts of adversaries to induce or reinforce our own misunderstandings.

Concerned about the problem during the heated years of the Cold War, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy reported,

We believe that the times require a conscious effort to improve the accuracy and political impact of words and terms used by our leaders in speaking to the world. By so doing, they can help disclose the hypocrisy and distortions of hostile propaganda. This is not a problem that will go away, and we must be prepared to deal with it on a systematic and continuing basis.

The commissioners recommended:

that a task force be created, under the National Security Council and including representatives of the Departments of State and Defense and USIA [US Information Agency], to assess the problem and propose an institutionalized means to respond to inaccurate or misleading terminology in international political discourse.[2]

The recommendation was not to form a task force to counter disinformation; the White House National Security Council already had an interagency working group and USIA had established a new office for that purpose.[3]

Nor would the task force craft positive messages about the United States, which was one of the decades-long public diplomacy missions of the USIA as a whole. The commissioners were referring specifically to words and terms that, through misuse or abuse, had the unintended consequence of aiding the enemy.

Semantic infiltration

A war of ideas is well-fought when a skilled or persistent semanticist can persuade an opponent to accept his terms of debate, especially when the words are those that form the ideas that motivate the will. The opponent thus unwittingly, even willingly, adopts the semanticist’s usage of words and by extension, the ideas, perceptions and policies that accompany them.

Fred Charles Iklé, in a 1970s Rand Corporation study on the difficulties the United States faced in negotiating with Communist regimes, called the phenomenon “semantic infiltration.” According to Iklé, 

Paradoxically, despite the fact that the State Department and other government agencies bestow so much care on the vast verbal output of Communist governments, we have been careless in adopting the language of our opponents and their definitions of conflict issues in many cases where this is clearly to our disadvantage.

Or perhaps this is not so paradoxical. It might be precisely because our officials spend so much time on the opponents’ rhetoric that they eventually use his words – first in quotation marks, later without.[4]

Commenting on Iklé’s paper, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called semantic infiltration “the systematic distortion of the meaning of certain words to confuse or mislead.” Semantic infiltration, said Moynihan,

is the process whereby we come to adopt the language of our adversaries in describing political reality. The most brutal totalitarian regimes in the world call themselves ‘liberation movements.’ It is perfectly predictable that they should misuse words to conceal their real nature. But must we aid them in that effort by repeating those words? Worse, do we begin to influence our own perceptions by using them? [5]

By adopting communist labels, the senator and former U.N. ambassador argued, the State Department bought into the enemy’s rhetoric and adversely affected U.S. attitudes toward a particular conflict. In Moynihan’s words,

Even though the State Department proclaimed its neutrality in the conflict there, its very choice of words – its use of the vocabulary of groups opposed to our values – undermined the legitimacy of the pro-Western political forces in the area. We pay for small concessions at the level of language with large setbacks at the level of practical politics.[6]

That “totalitarians will seek to seize control of the language of politics is obvious; that our own foreign affairs establishment should remain blind to what is happening is dangerous,” Moynihan said. Soft-line foreign service officers weren’t the only culprits. Even some of the staunchest hard-liners proved susceptible in Moynihan’s time, as they can today, to semantic infiltration. 

The worst totalitarians of Moynihan’s time, the Soviets, mastered the use of semantics in political warfare, corrupting positive words like “democratic,” “fraternal,” “liberation,” “progressive,” “people” and, as Havel noted, “peace,” and applying them to totalitarian and terrorist regimes and movements.[7]

It was as if the West had stopped believing in its own values. American officials often shied away from using those words in defense of U.S. policy. Worse, they sometimes applied them in ways that benefited Soviet propaganda. They even were reluctant to turn Soviet jargon against Moscow, shying from calling the USSR a dictatorship or empire. “Soviet imperialism” was almost never a term of U.S. public diplomacy; the State Department ceded the words – and thus the ideas – to the politburo to dominate.

For example, many in the American media and politics referred to Soviet-backed terrorist groups as “liberation movements,” idealistic and selfless manifestations of oppressed people’s democratic aspirations. Radical protests in Europe against the U.S. and NATO were led by “peace activists,” when in reality they were always anti-American and never anti-Soviet, under the influence or control of the KGB and Soviet-controlled fronts.[8]

Some Americans denounced their government’s efforts to halt Soviet expansionism as “American imperialism,” a made-in-Moscow epithet that has long outlived the USSR. Few in the mainstream ever referred to Soviet expansionism in an imperialistic light until after the Soviet collapse in 1991.[9]

Meanwhile, the Soviets raged against American “imperialism” while U.S. officials cringed and sneered at calling the USSR an empire, even after their president did. Though few really believed that the Soviets were committed to “peace,” these critics considered the U.S. and NATO the more clear and present dangers. Most of the world completely accepted and unwittingly helped to spread misleading communist jargon like “German Democratic Republic” and “People’s Republic of China,” validating totalitarian propaganda that suggested these regimes were republics of the people. 

Indeed, during the Cold War, Soviet use of peace propaganda had made many in the West so cynical that those who understood the Soviet danger best, from the center-left Havel to Reaganite conservatives, had difficulty using the word “peace” constructively or even with a straight face. Such was the noxiousness of Soviet political warfare: civilized society lost control of the ideas that peace animated, and the Soviets hijacked naïve western hopes and fears by infiltrating, funding and manipulating the peace movements in the democracies.

Those who saw through the propaganda were usually ideologically hostile to the Soviets and communism. However, they generally responded not by taking back the word but by declaring the “peace” movement to be nothing more than a sham of dupes and fools, hippies and sellouts. Some proudly proclaimed their militancy against the Soviet threat with statements and actions that reasonable but ill-informed people could perceive as being truly anti-peace.

Until a communicator like Reagan arrived to lead, many anti-Soviet intellectuals used rhetoric and policies that alarmed the soft middle-of-the-roaders who found the KGB line so soothing. 

Havel noted the difference: “The same word can be humble at one moment and arrogant the next. And a humble word can be transformed easily and imperceptibly into an arrogant one, whereas it is a difficult and protracted process to transform an arrogant word into one that is humble.”

Welcome others’ definition – and lose the language

We willingly embraced terminology that others applied to us with calculated and hostile intent. Most Americans like, or at least fully accept, the idea that their nation is a superpower. The word was not invented as a compliment.

The late Chinese communist leader Chou En-lai coined the term “superpower,” pejoratively against the USSR and the United States. He did so in a 1970 interview with French journalists, as part of an effort to show developing nations a third way between America and the Soviet bloc. The name stuck.[10]

Both the Soviets and the Americans identified with the term and applied it proudly to themselves, though the idea helped crystallize fear and resentment around the world – sentiments that remain against the United States and complicate the current war effort. The term also helped solidify a global attitude of moral equivalence between the U.S. and the USSR.[11]

This easy, unchallenged acceptance of the adversaries’ terms of debate showed a lack of national confidence and conviction, almost an admission that we thought we were on the losing side of history. It appeared to show an abandonment in some quarters of the exceptionalism that had given the U.S. its moral standing in the world.

Many Americans – shapers of opinion and policy among them – actually believed it, resigning the world to permanent “peaceful coexistence,” at best, with the USSR, and rejecting as dangerous the idea that the U.S. could nudge the decayed and overextended Soviet system to collapse from within.[12]

The peaceful coexistence and détente advocates made it all the more difficult to resist or combat the infiltration of the adversaries’ semantics into the American lexicon.

Some recognized the problem and tried to change it. Early in his presidency, Ronald Reagan issued a directive to: “prevent the Soviet propaganda machine from seizing the semantic high-ground in the battle of ideas through the appropriation of such terms as ‘peace.’”[13]

For three years in a row, the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy under Edwin Feulner repeated its recommendation to institutionalize a means to challenge inaccurate or misleading terminology. The government ignored it.

Then came the Soviet collapse. The United States entered into a period of drift and withdrawal in the early 1990s. It abolished the highly successful U.S. Information Agency, folding USIA’s remains into the State Department where the agency lost its independent culture and mission, and degrading the nation’s public diplomacy capabilities. When faced with a new enemy, U.S. leaders found themselves groping for the right words in the new war of ideas, wondering why it was so difficult to get the world to support or understand our cause.

“The costs of inattention seem to escape even those among us who pride ourselves on their ‘hardheadedness’ in matters of geopolitics and military strategy,” Moynihan wrote in 1979.Neither political party was immune: “This is not a phenomenon of one administration, but almost, I think, of our political culture.”[14]

The words could have been written today. The more receptive the United States and the world become to enemy terminology, Moynihan warned, “the more will the nations of the world begin to accommodate themselves” to the adversary’s strategic aspirations.[15]

This maxim was so during the height of the Cold War when a Soviet collapse was furthest from the minds of almost everyone, except those few who believed it could and must happen – and who took action to make it occur. And it is true today in the “Global War on Terror,” not only among Americans or in the West, but in the ummah of Islam itself.

In the next White Paper, we explore how words from the Arabic language and Islamic culture are used and abused, how semantic infiltration has warped the United States’ understanding of key Muslim concepts, how that misunderstanding worldwide has allowed extremists to dominate language and ideas in Islam, and what the forces of civilization can do about it.

Conclusion

Knowing and dominating the definitions of words is key to winning the international war of ideas.

Public diplomacy, public affairs, information operations, psychological operations, political warfare, and other aspects of strategic communication will be effective only if their practitioners fearlessly exploit the wealth of words that culture offers to define ideas and shape understanding of them.

Those practitioners must lead: not at the presidential level or cabinet level, but at every level in the bureaucracy of every government agency involved with communication. They need not wait for bureaucratic reorganizations, legal reviews and congressional appropriations cycles.

Fundamental shifts can begin with a single speech and skillful follow-up work. Successful shifts require leadership and relentless repetition at all levels. But the war of ideas will continue to suffer setbacks as long as those at the top continue to misunderstand or abuse words without regard for their best meanings.

---

[1] What passes for proficiency in foreign languages in the U.S. government shows that we are unlikely to understand the cultures with which we hope to communicate.

[2] Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Chairman, United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, The Role of USIA and Public Diplomacy, January 1984.

[3] The USIA unit was the two-man Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation and Active Measures, which existed from 1983 to 1989. Its former director, Herbert Romerstein, authored a chapter on counterpropaganda for a forthcoming companion volume to this monograph.

[4] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Further Thoughts on Words and Foreign Policy,” Policy Review, Spring 1979.

[5] Ibid., p. 53.

[6] Ibid.

[7] See Georgi Arbatov, The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1973); and Graham D. Vernon, ed., Soviet Perceptions of War and Peace (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1981).

[8] Vladimir Bukovsky, “The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union,” Commentary, May 1982; and U.S. Information Agency, Soviet Active Measures in the ‘Post-Cold War Era,’ 1988-1991 (Report for the Committee on Appropriations of the U.S. House of Representatives, June 1992);

[9] Not that some didn’t try. Hugh Seton-Watson’s The New Imperialism (Dufor Editions, 1961) is an example. The bitter controversy surrounding President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 denunciation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” shows how unacceptable such truth-telling was even in the Cold War’s final years.

[10] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Further Thoughts on Words and Foreign Policy,” Policy Review, Spring 1979, p. 57.

[11] At home, seeking convenient labels as shorthand to explain foreign issues to a domestic audience, the prestige press routinely and inaccurately referred to the KGB as the Russian “equivalent” to the FBI at home and CIA abroad, as if it was a legitimate law enforcement and intelligence service. And so on.

[12] The Reagan administration laid out the strategy to bring down the Soviet Union, as one of the architects, Norman Bailey, describes in his monograph. Norman A. Bailey, The Strategic Plan that Won the Cold War – National Security Decision Directive 75 (McLean: Potomac Foundation, 1998).

[13] Ronald Reagan, “U.S. Relations with the USSR,” National Security Decision Directive No. 75, January 17, 1983.

[14] Ibid., pp. 58-59.

[15] Ibid., p. 55.

Branding as a tool against the enemy: Time to try it again

Public Diplomacy and Political War White Paper No. 5
The Institute of World Politics

by J. Michael Waller

Branding – the art of conditioning an audience to associate a given product, person or idea with a desired cognitive or emotional response – can be an important part of developing messages. The U.S. attempted to “brand” itself after 9/11, but after some innovative attempts with negligible results, quietly abandoned the effort. The idea, however, is sound. In the commercial marketplace of ideas, branding is a proven path to success, and the failure to brand can put one out of business.

It is time to try branding again, but this time the U.S. should start with a message that its audiences are most likely to accept readily: the evil nature of the enemy. Reinforcement of that negative “brand” sets the stage for greater audience receptivity to positive follow-on messages about the United States itself.            

In some types of commercial and political branding, an effective approach is not the collection of endorsements, but denunciations. Vilification from one’s opponents can be just as valuable, if not more valuable, as a supporter’s praise. In these types of campaigns the negative is a strong, emotional, energizing, and unifying factor in building support where a positive message is insufficient. In American politics, each side can benefit from denouncing the other, and each side can gain from the other’s denunciations.

Campaign veterans say that the systematic telling of unpleasant truths about the opponent, what some call negative campaigning, can be crucial – if you can’t win, at least you can make your opponent lose – despite the wishes of the candidate and usually the electorate, for more positive and genteel messages. Here is where third-party voices again become important, where others can create and sustain powerful negative messages against the opponent while keeping the candidate and his persona (or in the war effort, the United States or the president and top leaders) above the unseemliness of it all.

Branding the enemy

The first rule in branding the enemy, as with all message-making, must be to avoid inflicting harm upon oneself. The United States has declared that terrorism, terror, or extremism, regardless of ideology, are the enemies of mankind, and that America is leading a war of the world’s civilized people against those who use terrorism as a means of influencing events or seeking power. While much disagreement remains over the scope and definitions, the overall U.S. message has been firm and clear, making the Afghanistan campaign and international counterterrorism cooperation relatively uncontroversial considering the breadth of the coalition.[1] 

Equally clear is the American “branding” of the more specific terrorist enemies.President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s first named Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda organization as dangers to the United States. In doing so, the president helped draw an obscure businessman-turned-terrorist from the relative anonymity of his network in Sudan and Afghanistan to become one of the most ubiquitous names and faces on Earth. Bin Laden was one of countless extremists seeking to lead a global “jihad” against the United States and its allies, but he offered both material resources and a greater vision beyond a holy land or geographic area to impose his particular view of Islam on the rest of the world. He also had a track record and a following. His ideology therefore held a global appeal to those contemplating revisionist “jihad,” and threatened not just the occupiers of Jerusalem and its allies but all those who were “nonbelievers” or insufficiently Muslim.

With minimal investment in the propaganda machinery that most political groups and leaders must build to attract and maintain recognition, bin Laden and his associates let their actions speak for themselves, attracting a global following through tracts and websites in the ummah, seldom if ever issuing any statements in English and relying on others, both friend and foe, to create and market their “brand.” Their most powerful propaganda was that, unlike other Arab or Muslim leaders, they actually brought the fight directly to their perceived oppressors.

Bin Laden’s August 1996 fatwa declaring war, though titled as a war against U.S. “occupiers” in Saudi Arabia, site of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, declared a war on the world. In addition to attacking the United States, al Qaeda’s declaration spanned from Europe, across Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia, to Southeast Asia, warring against Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Bin Laden said in his declaration, 

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims’ blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, the Philippines, Fatani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn't respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its' allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves.

The people of Islam awakened and realized that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about ‘Human Rights’ were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world. . . .

. . . I say to the [U.S.] Secretary of Defense:[2] The sons of the land of the two Holy Places [Mecca and Medina] had come out to fight against the Russian in Afghanistan, the Serb in Bosnia-Herzegovina and today they are fighting in Chechnya and – by the permission of Allah – they have been made victorious over your partner, the Russians. By the command of Allah, they are also fighting in Tajikistan.[3]

Thus before his big 1998 debut as the mastermind of the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, bin Laden created the political context of himself as an uncompromising defender of all Muslims everywhere. He gave no credit to the non-Muslim countries that helped fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, or the Serbs on behalf of the Kosovars. He publicly cautioned against Muslim-on-Muslim violence even as he justified it in the name of wiping out collaborators with the infidel.[4]

For his target audience in the worldwide ummah, some would perceive his message as positive and inspirational, even uplifting. Bin Laden branded himself as a liberator against the Americans who propped the corrupt regime in Saudi Arabia first, and secondarily the Zionists in Israel.   

The declaration was an ambitious political agenda for the black sheep of a prominent Saudi family, a man without a country hiding in Sudan and Afghanistan, a sociopath on the fringes of the fringe. Indeed bin Laden had a substantial following of tens of thousands who went through his terrorism and ideological training camps, but to most Muslims he was a dangerous threat.

The American message played into bin Laden’s hands. Personalized presidential rhetoric elevated the terrorist from obscurity and disgrace to rhetorical peer status with the President of the United States. White House rhetoric from two successive presidents degraded the status of the president to bin Laden’s level. It poured the foundation of the U.S. message, and cemented the davidian stature of bin Laden, that both sides built upon ever since.

Branding bin Laden

The U.S. lacked or failed to deploy the intelligence and military capabilities to kill or capture bin Laden and destroy al Qaeda prior to 9/11, and it chose not to accept Sudan’s offer to hand over the terrorist. As a stopgap, the U.S. might have tried to diminish bin Laden’s prestige. Instead, it did the opposite, branding him Public Enemy Number One. Osama bin Laden’s name and face became world-famous not simply on the FBI’s Most Wanted list or a low-level State Department report, but through repeated personal pronouncements of the President of the United States and his senior cabinet members.

Not since Fidel Castro took power nearly half a century before had so small an entity become the focus such a personal and sustained verbal attack of an American president. Presidential rhetoric helped bin Laden convert himself in much of the ummah and beyond from a wayward son or common nuisance to somewhat of an underdog.[5]

The American branding intensified after every al Qaeda attack, from the embassies in 1998 to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and again under a second American president from the other political party after 9/11.   

The inadvertent presidential elevation of bin Laden from nobody to überterrorist set the stage for unintentionally raising the prestige of others. Having adopted some of the terrorists’ distorted jargon as the official American definition, senior U.S. figures would soon “brand” other terrorists by name, elevating them, too, as in this instance in early 2004:

Because people like [Abu Musab-al] Zarqawi and their al Qaeda affiliates and their al Qaeda colleagues know that when Iraq is stable and peaceful and prosperous and democratic, that we will blow a huge hole in their sense of inevitability for this murderous jihad that they're trying to carry out. That's why Zarqawi and those people are in and if you think for one minute that if we weren't in Iraq, they were just going to be someplace drinking tea? No. (Laughter.) They were going to be fighting the jihad somewhere.[6]

At the same time, the federal government has yet to use information at its fingertips that would discredit the enemy. In one of many examples where tunnel vision damaged the war effort, U.S. intelligence compiled an excellent 200-page collection of Osama bin Laden’s statements, yet never released it to the public due to copyright concerns.[7] A simplified collection of bin Laden quotes shows a decade-long pattern of a man who uses Islam for political purposes while being an apostate or unbeliever (kafir).

Indeed, it could be argued that bin Laden is more worried about losing his prestige among Muslims than he is about losing his life to the Americans; on several occasions he has made statements defending himself against allegations of apostasy and blasphemy. If this is true, the American public diplomacy and strategic communication messages must constantly quote from recognized Islamic figures around the world denouncing the terrorists as unbelievers. (Some fatwa declarations, such as that of the Spanish Muslims in March, 2005, squarely aimed at bin Laden and al Qaeda; others, including the British and American Muslim fatwas of July, 2005, did not.)

Branding the war   

A real war needs a real name that everyone can immediately recognize and understand. The name must inspire confidence and unity of purpose, especially if the war is to be protracted. It must draw stark differences between both sides, unambiguously pitting the forces of good against the forces of evil. It must label the war’s current nature or invoke the names of Good Fights of the past.It must have at its core an us-versus-them approach that leaves no doubt about the enemy and no room for neutrality. It must reinforce a sense of international togetherness against an unrelenting but defeatable foe.

It must inspire confidence and invincibility despite the promise of a long and bloody struggle and terrible sacrifice. The name must be easy for ordinary people across cultures to understand. It must captivate the average citizen and make him part of the war effort, infusing the world with the sense of justice and solidarity. The nation’s greatest conflicts have had inspiring if sometimes varied names: American Revolution, Revolutionary War or War of Independence; Civil War or War Between the States (depending on one’s sympathies; some in the South prefer the more vivid War of Northern Aggression); the Great War of 1914-1918, as the cataclysmic conflict was called until the outbreak of the next great war, ultimately known as in the free world as World War II,[8] caused the Great War to become World War I.

Even the Korean war and Vietnam war, though not technically wars in the legal sense, provided a sense of geography and the idea of where the enemy was, as did the Mexican War, Indian wars, and the Spanish-American War in the nineteenth century. Interestingly, those five geographically-themed wars are the least romanticized and often the most criticized of the nation’s armed conflicts.

The oddly named War of 1812 might evoke few passions from the average educated citizen today, but it burst with inspiration and romance, from the immortal “Don’t Give Up the Ship” standard of the Battle of Lake Erie to Francis Scott Key’s poem, penned on Baltimore harbor during a British naval bombardment, that became our national anthem. 

The American label on the present war, either Global War on Terror or on Terrorism and dubbed GWOT (pronounced GEE-wot) in Pentagon terminology, should become an interim name, with the official name of the military response to 9/11, Operation Enduring Freedom, having fallen away as the war expanded. Senior U.S. officials seemed to agree on the need for a GWOT name change by mid-2005, with some saying that the enemy is “extremism” and not necessarily terrorism. Some proposed a new name: War on Extremism, with the unfortunate acronym WOE.[9]

In 2006, administration officials contemplated not calling it a war after all. Instead, the conflict was a “struggle,” specifically, a Struggle Against Violent Extremism (SAVE). By lowering the war footing to a mere struggle, advocates of the terminology change intended to send a message that the conflict was more than just military. Struggle, though, is anything but a decisive and confident-sounding term, especially in reference to a war effort led by the world’s wealthiest and most militarily powerful nation. The defensive-sounding SAVE acronym needs no comment.

Some have proposed calling the war a world war; World War III and even, for those considering the Cold War to have been the third world war, World War IV. Changing “Global War” to “World War” is only a question of rhetoric.[10]   The term, say proponents, reduces the confusion about whether or not one “war” is connected with another.

In World War II, there was no mistaking that our troops in the Pacific were fighting the same war as our troops in North Africa, Asia, and Europe. U.S. leaders referred to each area of fighting as the “War in the Pacific” and “War in the Atlantic,” but unmistakably as separate “theaters” or “fronts” of the same worldwide war. Even the most massive and protracted of fighting in one or two European countries or in and around Japan did not earn the official individual name “war.” They were different “battles,” bloody parts of a much greater conflict.

President George W. Bush did refer to the U.S.-led invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as “battles” in a global war. He specifically, if only briefly, mention what he called the “Battle of Afghanistan” and the “Battle of Iraq.” However, the rest of the administration failed to follow, and soon the U.S. government and public as a whole defaulted back to the two-war position of the “Afghan War” and the “Iraq War,” thus eliminating the message of connectedness between both conflicts as part of a larger global war.

The name of the war should minimize the room for conflict among the very varied protagonists. The name should not try to define the universally undefinable term “terrorism,” and it should not consider the enemy to be a methodology. Instead each protagonist should choose a definition that best suits its own political and cultural climate, without ambiguity and fully implying international solidarity.

The accepted name must provide wiggle room for complicated local situations, allowing individual national leaders to interpret the meaning as they must, permitting certain parties to see the light and switch from enemy to ally (as with the Soviets in World War II) while presenting the broadest of broad fronts against the faceless enemy.

The name must put the people and bureaucracy on a war footing, presuming that the world is in mortal danger, while inspiring and uplifting people. A proper name accepts hardship and sacrifice against apparently insurmountable odds, and lends the unspoken assurance that in the end, if we all pull together, everything will be all right.

The Good Guys were the victors in World Wars I and II, plus the Cold War which, with the benefit of hindsight, was indeed World War III without the expected nuclear Armageddon. There is no reason, then, not to present an invincible front for the next generation or two until winning current World War IV. A speech by a distinguished national or international statesman, properly delivered, could educate the world and popularize the name.

Branding in Iraq

Through conviction and persistence, the U.S. effectively termed the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a “liberation,” though it has fought hard for its still incomplete, and waning, acceptance.

The name of the mission, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” shaped the message unequivocally. (A review of American public diplomacy on Iraq is beyond the bounds of this paper, though it must be said that the U.S. failed even to attempt to communicate strategically and persuasively with the world during the planning stages, undermining pro-U.S. leaders and political parties.[11])

For our present purposes, we can see how the war produced its own crop of mis-used words that harmed the U.S. mission and inadvertently helped the enemy. Even the clearest words and phrases can be misinterpreted, so it is again important to stress that messages be crafted to reinforce one another.A term for one part of the war effort must never conflict with, or detract from, the overall message of the war aim. One can never presume that the words or phrases will translate faithfully into other languages or cultural contexts.

Neutrals and even advocates can misinterpret innocently; critics and adversaries can coin malicious translations or interpretations. This was true of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Legally, Iraq was not part of Operation Enduring Freedom, but the name implied a useful metaphor as a sub-conflict of the larger war.

At the same time, while obviously intended to inspire the troops, the Iraqi people and the rest of the world, name of the operation inadvertently helped divert attention from the “war on terrorism” aspect of the conflict. It reinforced not the GWOT message, but created a new tangent under a different set of reasons. Consequently the idea that the “War in Iraq” was part of the Global War on Terror was a tough sell, especially with a weapons of mass destruction rationale, apparently the result of lowest-common-denominator interagency negotiations, never materialized in ways easy for the public to see and understand.

So what was the problem? The name of the operation needlessly opened itself to satire and worse, making it appear to validate enemy propaganda which portrayed the military action as an Anglo-American imperialist power grab for Iraq’s oil. With much of the world predisposed to believe the worst about the British and Americans, the propaganda line should have been expected to find ready believers, and a peculiarity in the English language made the line even more plausible.

Here is sensitivity to the nuances of culture comes into play: To London and Washington, Operation Iraqi Freedom was an unmistakably positive name for the mission. However, it opened itself up to credible misinterpretation.

In English, particularly American English, the words “freedom” and “liberty” are usually used interchangeably.Other languages have only one major word to describe the idea. “Freedom” has Anglo-Saxon origins, while “liberty” finds its roots in the Latin word libertatem. Speakers of languages with even stronger Latin roots than English, use variations; in French, the preferred word is liberté.

It is logical and reasonable, then, for people of good or ill will to misunderstand or mistranslate Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation Iraqi Liberty – with the unfortunate acronym OIL. Critics across the Internet passed along a false story that the Pentagon had originally chosen Operation Iraqi Liberty as the name of the invasion, but to avoid looking like a petroleum grab, had changed the word to “freedom.” Al Jazeera occasionally used the OIL abbreviation without comment, as did some mainline Western news organizations.[12]   

The OIF/OIL controversy reinforced Saddam Hussein’s line about American and coalition war aims, which a top Baghdad official presented to the United Nations in September, 2002. Some argue that fear of an American invasion for oil may have raised needless suspicions of Iraqis who otherwise might have supported or at least not opposed the coalition in its initial days and months.Since the “no war for oil” campaign had begun a half-year or more before the announcement of Operation Iraqi Freedom, senior U.S. officials would have had time to craft a name that would neither detract from the larger, worldwide war effort, nor reinforce the enemy’s own propaganda.

Branding the enemy in Iraq

The U.S. very effectively demonized the initial enemy in Iraq – the regime of Saddam Hussein and the ruling Ba’athist party well before the fighting began. Once the regime had collapsed, however, the U.S. leaders did not brand the new enemies who emerged, even though those enemies proved more resilient and deadly than the Ba’athist power structure. Several months after the liberation, when coalition forces announced the transition from invasion to counterinsurgency, the U.S. military officially designated the new enemy in Iraq. From a purely military perspective, the suicide bombers and attackers of coalition forces and free Iraqis might properly be called “insurgents.”   

Yet “insurgent” in this case is a technical military term, not a political one useful for rhetorical or public diplomacy purposes. The value-neutral word “insurgent” sanitizes the enemy of its terroristic nature, given that the enemy’s main targets are no longer merely foreign occupation forces, but the Iraqi people themselves. It retains the possibility that the entire insurgency is legitimate.

The enemy was as bad or worse than the toppled regime, yet the coalition offered no vilification campaign despite the perfection of the circumstances. As its modus operandi, the enemy was targeting mosques, churches, streets, shops, markets, government officials, clergymen, local citizens seeking employment to rebuild their country and feed their families, even children excitedly taking candy from American soldiers: perfect examples of the work of mufsidoon evildoers.

Journalists and public figures, even official spokesmen, persist in giving the “insurgents” dozens of other names – many of which are incomplete or otherwise misleading.Some are wildly inaccurate or even dishonest, conferring legitimacy and even virtue. Labels include: activists, agitators, anti-Americans, Ba’athist holdovers, Ba’athist remnants, bitter-enders, criminals, criminal gangs, dead-enders, fedayeen (a praiseworthy and thus inappropriate term for fighters ready to sacrifice their lives), former regime members, fringe groups, fundamentalists, guerrillas, insurgents, martyrs, militants, mujaheddin, paramilitaries, radicals, regime loyalists, resistance fighters, renegades, rogue elements, Saddam elements, Saddam followers, Sunni extremists, unlawful combatants, and of course, jihadists.[13]

As Guirard suggests, if the government and news media can introduce Arabic words like jihad into official and public discourse and incorporate them into the English language, certainly they can do the same with concepts like mufsidoon. All it takes is persistence in daily press briefings and public statements.

Lessons for shaping the “brand” message 

We conclude, then, with lessons for shaping the American and allied message through effective branding:

• Do no harm. Never help the enemy enhance his prestige among his followers and wound-be followers.
• Recapture the language.
• Always craft messages that diminish the enemy’s reputation, especially within his own camp.
• The most effective attacks on the enemy’s reputation are often from recognized figures within the enemy’s own community, and not necessarily from official U.S. pronouncements.
• Never brand the enemy in ways that diminish the American presidency or the United States government in general.
• Coin the name of the conflict at your own initiative and on your own terms.
• Choose a name that stirs the name stir people’s emotions and imagination, cross-culturally when possible.
• Demonize the enemy using the enemy’s own words and actions against him.
• Ensure that the themes never conflict with or diverge from one another, and ideally make them reinforce one another.
• Be consistent and persistent to the point of being relentless.

---

[1] Much of the domestic and international consensus supporting the U.S. in the “Global War on Terrorism” quickly broke down over Iraq. The U.S. administration clearly stated from the outset that it was making war against practitioners and state sponsors of terrorism in general, and not simply against those responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks; its near-exclusive focus on al Qaeda and allied Islamists (at the expense, for example, of non-Islamist terrorists like the FARC in Colombia), nevertheless gave the impression that “terrorism” meant bin Laden and his allies. While the U.S. administration portrayed Iraq as part of the global terrorism problem and indeed maintained the Saddam Hussein regime on the State Department list of state sponsors of terror, its focus on weapons of mass destruction and violations of United Nations resolutions led to public perceptions that Iraq was a separate issue from terrorism.

[2] Here, bin Laden addresses Secretary of Defense William Cohen.

[3] Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” fatwa published inAl Quds Al Arabi (London), August, 1996, trans.

[4] Ibid. In his fatwa, bin Laden identifies the Saudi “regime” and its security forces, among others, as targets for attack.

[5] President Reagan’s brushoff of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi as a “flaky barbarian” is an example of presidential rhetoric to dimish the standing of a terrorist leader, and as a chief of state, Qaddafi was already a diplomatic peer of the president. Reagan did not personally denounce figures from terrorist organizations as two of his successors have done. The author argues that any presidential identification of a terrorist by name serves only to elevate the terrorist and diminish the presidency.

[6] The White House, “Remarks by National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice to the Reagan Lecture,” 26 February 2004.

[7] The document is titled “Compilation of Usama bin Ladin Statements, 1994-January 2004,” produced by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and published in January, 2004. It is marked “For Official Use Only.” The author posted the document on the Internet in 2005, at the following address: http://binladenquotes.blogspot.com.

[8] To this day in the Russian Federation, Stalin’s brand-name for World War II – the “Great Patriotic War” – remains the popular and legal name.The branding is so deeply engrained in the Russian psyche that half the public, in 2005, continues to defend the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August, 1939, that precipitated the war.

[9] David Kaplan, “Sometimes, It’s Just All in the Name,” US News & World Report, June 6, 2005.

[10] Credit for coining the term goes to Eliot A. Cohen, “World War IV: Let’s Call This Conflict What It Is,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2001.

[11] When this writer in August, 2002, asked the White House National Security Council press officer for talking points on the administration’s goals in Iraq, the press officer told him that talking points were not necessary. Three days after this writer’s story was published with the NSC’s quote, the White House issued a set of talking points.

[12] Gilles Kepel of the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, testified before the 9/11 Commission that many Arabs thought “the reason the armed operation was called Operation Iraqi Freedom and not Operation Iraqi Liberty was that the acronym for Operation Iraqi Liberty would have been O-I-L, and that O-I-F was more misleading.” According to the transcript, instead of following up on the observation about Washington’s flawed communications and taking the comment seriously, the commissioners laughed.See “Terrorism, Al Qaeda and the Muslim World,” Hearing on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,July 9, 2003, typed transcript, pp. 82-83.

[13] And then there are the U.S.-centric labels like “foreigners” and “foreign fighters” in Iraq, terms that sound odd to anyone outside the United States, to say nothing of the Iraqi people, who also view American forces as foreigners. The author thanks Jim Guirard, who developed this list in a larger form.

Ridicule as an instrument in the war on terrorism

Public Diplomacy White Paper No. 7
The Institute of World Politics

by J. Michael Waller

This article is the seventh in a series of White Papers about the transformation of American public diplomacy and strategic communication. USA Today featured this paper in its March 23, 2006 issue. The New York Times reported that this paper was reviewed by the Joint Staff and elsewhere at the Pentagon, and by US military forces in Iraq, and the reporter said that the paper helped inspire production of the video mocking an al Qaeda leader in iraq.

Introduction

Demonization of the enemy is the general default position of American message-making against international threats. The history of warfare shows, however, that while demonization can build and maintain alliances and coalitions, and is important to maintain national unity in a protracted conflict, it can inadvertently aid the enemy’s own war aims. 

Incessant, morbid portrayals of an individual, movement, or nation as a mortal enemy might rally support for the American side, but they have a shelf-life that gets tired over time. Constant specters of unrelenting dangers risk sowing defeatism and chipping away at our own morale. Abroad they risk making the U.S. look like a bully in some places and surrender the propaganda advantage to the other side. The questions at this stage of the war are:

• Do we inadvertently aid our enemies and potential enemies by taking them too seriously?
• Does our relentless portrayal of individuals, ideologies, movements and philosophies as mortal dangers to America enhance the enemies’ status and prestige?
• Is it an unsound political strategy to hype the image and power of the enemy and the few leaders who personify it?
• Is there something else the United States and its allies should be doing in their attempts to discredit, undermine and defeat the enemy?

This paper argues in the affirmative. It suggests that U.S. strategy includes undermining the political and psychological strengths of adversaries and enemies by employing ridicule as a standard operating tool of national strategy. Ridicule is an under-appreciated weapon not only against terrorists, but against weapons proliferators, despots, and international undesirables in general. Ridicule serves several purposes: 

• Ridicule raises morale at home.
• Ridicule strips the enemy/adversary of his mystique and prestige.
• Ridicule erodes the enemy’s claim to justice.
• Ridicule eliminates the enemy’s image of invincibility.
• Directed properly at an enemy, ridicule can be a fate worse than death.

The power of ridicule

Used as a means of positive persuasion, humor can be an important public diplomacy tool. “If I can get you to laugh with me,” said comedian John Cleese, “you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge the truth.”[1]

Humor is an excellent means of making policy points and building constructive relations abroad. Everybody wins.  Laughing at someone – ridicule - is another matter. It is the use of humor at someone else’s expense. It is a zero-sum game destructive to one of the parties involved. Like a gun, it is a dangerous weapon. Even in trained hands, it can misfire. Used carelessly or indiscriminately, ridicule can create enemies were there were none, and deepen hostilities among the very peoples whom the user seeks to win over.

In nearly every aspect of society and across cultures and time, ridicule works. Ridicule leverages the emotions and simplifies the complicated and takes on the powerful, in politics, business, law, entertainment, literature, culture, sports and romance. Ridicule can tear down faster than the other side can rebuild. One might counter an argument, an image, or even a kinetic force, but one can marshal few defenses against the well-aimed barbs that bleed humiliation and drip contempt.  Politicians fear ridicule. Some take ridicule well and emerge stronger for it; others never recover from it. The perpetual circle of democracy absorbs and even breeds ridicule against individuals and ideas, while the system itself remains intact. While ridicule can be a healthy part of democracy, it can weaken the tyrant.

The ancients and ridicule

We get the word “satire” from the ancient Greek satyr, the mythical drunk, hedonistic or otherwise naughty man-goat. Satyrs performed the fourth and final part of a tetralogy drama, usually in a burlesque performance that poked fun at the preceding serious or tragic trilogy. The audience would leave the performance satisfied and upbeat.

Prominent Classical literary figures used satire and ridicule against war. Poet-playwright Aristophanes, for example, in 425 B.C., satirized Athenian policy of the Peloponnesian War in The Acharnians, and mocked government, society and war in subsequent plays; he filled his plays with invective and ad hominem attacks as well as sexual humor. Greek society, irrespective of the type of government, placed boundaries on the types and intensity of ridicule, as did other ancients.

While permitted under certain circumstances, ridicule was seen as such a devastatingly powerful weapon that the ancients proscribed its use except in extreme situations. Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar banned jokes about the emperor.

In Christianity, ridicule of another person is considered uncharitable and can even be sinful, except, one reasons, in time of war when violence and killing can be morally permissible.  In the Talmud, the basis of Jewish law, the ancient Hebrews proclaimed, “All mockery (leitzanut) is prohibited except for mockery of idol worship (avoday zarah),” as mockery is so destructive it can be used only against evil.[2]

Muhammad, the founder of Islam, personally used ridicule as a weapon of war early after he announced his prophethood.[3] Islamic poets were not mere literary artists; they were often warriors who wrote satire and ridicule of the enemy as an important weapon of offensive warfare. Muhammad banned the faithful from drawing human images, including his own, in large part to stamp out idolatry. Violent Muslim overreactions in early 2006 to some European cartoons depicting Muhammad appear to be less manifestations of offended sensitivities than of vulnerability to the power of ridicule.[4] 

Tyrants, terrorists and ridicule

Dictators, tyrants, and those aspire to seize and keep power by intimidation and force can tolerate no public ridicule. They generally harbor grandiose self-images with little bearing on how people really think of them. They require a controlled political environment, reinforced by sycophants and toadies, to preserve an impenetrable image. Some are more tolerant of reasoned or principled opposition but few of satire or ridicule. The size of their egos may be seen as inversely proportional to the thickness of their skin. However, few are true madmen; most are rational and serious.[5]

Saddam Hussein had a strong sense of humor, and is known to have told mildly self-deprecating stories about himself in public.[6] That is not to say he accepted others’ stories; Saddam’s storytelling was under his own control. Hence the vulnerability: Control is the essence of an authoritarian movement or dictatorship.

Jokes and contempt know no philosophy and a good laugh, even of the gallows humor variety, spread virally, almost impossible to control.  Russian émigré comedian Yakov Smirnov often referred to the Soviet government’s “Department of Jokes” that censored all spoken and written humor. While we have found no evidence of a Soviet unit with that specific name, we do know that the Communist Party Central Committee’s Propaganda Department and the KGB Fifth Chief Directorate respectively set and enforced ideological discipline in which a “Department of Jokes” or its equivalent would reside. “No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled,”

Czechoslovakian novelist Milan Kundera wrote in The Joke, “because laughter is the rust that corrodes every thing.”[7]   

Fidel Castro understood the principle when, six months after seizing power in 1959, he had signs placed in all official buildings that read, “Counter-revolutionary jokes forbidden here.” One of the first Cuban publications that Castro shut down was Zig Zag, a magazine of humor.[8]

While the Russians ultimately did away with a department of jokes, their president, Boris Yeltsin, could laugh at his political opponents’ innovative, irreverent and wildly popular political satire TV puppet show, Kukly. But the sense of humor of his tough-minded successor, former KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Putin, has no such ability. Putin shut down Kukly and the NTV television channel that produced it. In Putin’s Russia, mocking or insulting the president is a crime punishable by imprisonment.

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez pushed through a similar law to protect him from open ridicule. In the 1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran went so far as to assassinate jokesters abroad, even in western Europe, where the regime murdered an exiled humorist in Germany and a London merchant who sold CD recordings that mocked the mullahs.

Humor survives repression; in the words of Professor Luis Aguilar of Georgetown University, repression “only drives it underground. For repressed people, it is a subtle form of rebellion; a collective means to pay back the oppressor; the last resort; the last laugh.”[9] 

Empowering the powerless

That collective payback, that last laugh, can empower the powerless. It need not be expressed outwardly, where doing so could mean punishment or even death. In Iran, friends take taxi rides just to share jokes away from informers in their schools and places of work. Even quiet or inward expression remains alive, ready to flame with the first breath of oxygen. Jokes are a release of the fearful, a rewarding act of defiance, a rhetorical rock hurled at the oppressor.

The best ones spread because they speak the truth, and the truth leads to freedom. The joke is quietly shared and spread; the people know that they are not alone. “Every joke is a tiny revolution,” said George Orwell. “Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny.”[10] 

Ridicule as an offensive weapon

Like rifles and satellites, submarines and propaganda, ridicule is a neutral piece of technology. It can soften up entrenched and hardened targets, especially when those targets have alienated large parts of the population, or even small but loud elements in society.

French revolutionaries preceded their overthrow and murder of the king and his family through relentless campaigns of ridicule in the politically rather open society of late 18^th century Paris. Constant, vicious, often crude parody and mockery of the king as an individual and the monarchy as a system, the aristocracy, and the Church, arguably motivated and radicalized the public more than the high-minded philosophies of the revolutionaries. Combined with positive philosophical, reasoned and inspiring campaigns of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, the abuse stripped away the moral legitimacy the monarchy had from the outwardly respectful French subjects, and made the king the butt of constant sexual and scatological humor that, along with the excesses of the time, reduced the monarchy in many French eyes to a contemptible canker that required and deserved destruction. Popular history falsely remembers the pious Marie Antoinette as her French executioners caricatured her.   

Mass murderers can still have a good laugh, but usually at others’ expense. Adolf Hitler’s sense of humor knew no self-deprecation; his was what the Germans call schadenfreude, a word that has no English equivalent but can be understood as taking malicious pleasure at others’ misfortune. Hitler loved cruel jokes on his own ministers, especially on Foreign Minister Ribbentrop,[11] but always away from public view. He could never laugh at himself. His propagandists in 1933 tried to appeal to the satirical German public by issuing a compendium of tame political cartoons, but the effort went nowhere.

The Nazis and fascists required either adulation or fear; their leaders and their causes were vulnerable to well-aimed ridicule. Hitler with his Charlie Chaplin-style toothbrush mustache (a former aide later said it made him look like he had a cold), his uniform-loving Hermann Goering, and his club-footed propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels made great caricatures of their own, as did the flamboyant Benito Mussolini, who rehearsed his oratorical gesticulations – which could be impressive in person or on film, but made to look silly in still frames – before a mirror. German jokes about the Nazis quickly went underground, but resurfaced when the people saw the regime near collapse toward the end of the war. 

Defensive weapon

Little if any American World War II-era ridicule had much effect on continental Europe, but it was still vital to the war effort. Ridicule can be a defensive weapon if it helps calm the fears of the public at home and give hope that they can indeed defeat the enemy. British and American boys sang anti-Hitler songs, mostly mocking the fuehrer’s private parts, as one might expect from adolescents, but laughing at the enemy during wartime helps one become less fearful and more optimistic of victory.

Popular culture also mocked the Axis powers – not after a decent interval following a given incident or atrocity, but from the start. The Three Stooges, one of the most popular comic groups in cinema at the time, performed the first parodies of the enemy in 1940, with slapstick episodes of Moe making ridiculous impressions of Hitler; Larry heiling as propaganda minister, and Curly dressed as Goering with his belly and buttocks festooned with medals. Moe also impersonated a laughable Tojo. One episode poked fun at Stalin, who was allied with Hitler when the film was made.

Others in Hollywood also helped the war effort through humor and ridicule. Charlie Chaplin’s famous full-length movie, The Great Dictator, though developed years before, followed the first Stooges episode in 1940. Chaplin – complaining that Hitler had stolen his trademark mustache - starred as fuehrer lookalike Adenoid Hynkel, accompanied by his sidekick Benzoni Napolini, dictator of Bacteria.   

Like many in Hollywood did at the time, the cartoon studios put their talent at the disposal of the war effort. Disney’s Donald Duck, in the 1942 short “Donald Duck In Nutziland” (retitled “Der Fuehrer’s Face”), won an Academy Award after the unhappy duck dreamed he was stuck in Nazi Germany. Disney produced dozens of anti-Axis cartoons, as did Warner Bros. starring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Both studios have released some of the cartoon shorts on video but limited the rebroadcast and banned the re-release of some on what critics call political correctness grounds.[12]

Current anti-terrorist ridicule that worries little of political correctness is Team America: World Police, a clever animated marionette show about a covert counterterrorism force that patriotically if clumsily fights Islamist terrorists and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il.[13] Team America is a brilliant work that plays on the obvious faults of an insecure and lonely Kim, the absurdity of United Nations diplomacy in the person of weapons inspector Hans Blix, and on popular stereotypes about Islamist terrorists and Hollywood anti-war personalities. Developed by the creators of the South Park cartoon, Team America limits its effectiveness, as well as the size of its audience, with extremely crude adolescent (some might call it “adult”) humor.[14] Nevertheless, it is a masterpiece of over-the-top ridicule that could be to the current young generation what the irreverent Monty Python and the Holy Grail was to young people thirty years ago. Team America puts the bad guys in their place and shows that, as clumsy and arrogant as Americans might be to many people, they are still the good guys. 

The United States occasionally used ridicule and satire in film to influence elections abroad. Large-scale American intervention in Italy’s 1948 election, in which the Communist Party was believed able to win a parliamentary plurality, saved the day for the Christian Democrats. Among the many instruments the U.S. used to convince Italians to vote against the Communist Popular Front was the romantic comedy Ninotchka, a parody of life in the Soviet Union starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. “This film, which hilariously satirized life in Russia, tended to leave an audience with a feeling that if this is Russia please deliver us from such a society,” one observer reported. “Distributors provided double the usual number of copies of the film, and special arrangements were made so that he film would be shown immediately among the low-income-level population.” The film was so effective that the Italian Communists tried to prevent it from being shown; after the Italians voted against the Communists, one party worker complained, “What licked us was Ninotchka.”[15] 

Ridicule and US strategy

Americans have used ridicule as a potent weapon to cut its enemies down to size since the Revolutionary War. Ridicule served two wartime purposes: to raise the people’s morale by helping them to laugh at their enemies, and to dent the morale of enemy forces.

Despite their far superior training, discipline, skill and firepower, the British were unprepared for irregular combat with the colonists. The Americans were guerrilla fighters who had the bad form not to stand in formation on a battlefield and to shoot at enemy officers.   

The British handily won the first engagement, the Battle of Lexington in April, 1775, but suffered heavy losses during their march from Concord back to Boston with Americans shooting at them from behind trees and rocks. Bostonians jeered. Among the many poems and ditties circulating around Boston after the opening shots of the war at Lexington and Concord was this one:

How brave you went out with muskets all bright,
And thought to befrighten the folks with the sight;
But when you got there how they powder’d your pums,
And all the way home how they pepper’d your bums,
And is it not, honies, a comical farce,
To be proud in the face, and be shot in the arse.[16]

Such mockery stung: the British army at the time was the finest, most experienced and most formidable in the world, its officers and men proud of their history, in their view, of gentlemanly warfighting. The practically un-trained, mostly un-uniformed, often un-disciplined, frequently uncouth, and generally low-class American riffraff, in British eyes, were no worthy adversary at all.   

With fife and drum as important means of battlefield coordination and communication, British troops ridiculed the Americans with songs like “Yankee Doodle,” whose mocking lyrics the colonists changed and embraced as their own anthem. That counter-ridicule operation unsettled the Redcoats. One British soldier recorded, “After our rapid successes, we held the Yankees in great contempt, but it was not a little mortifying to hear them play this tune.”[17]

Local patriots heaped abuse on British civilian and military officials. They directed a poem at General William Howe, whom George III had named royal military governor of Massachusetts in the winter of 1775 and took Mrs. Joshua Loring as his mistress:

Sir William, he, snug as a flea,
Lay all this time a-snoring
Nor dreamed of harm, as he lay warm
In bed with Mrs. -------.[18]

Benjamin Franklin was famous in the colonies and Europe as a colorful humorist as well as inventor and scientist. As a colonial agent in London, he used humor to win sympathy for the colonies’ grievances, and tried persuasion through gentle satire, such as his 1773 essay on “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” a blueprint that showed how, through poor treatment of its colonies, the British government was destroying its imperium.

Franklin at the time viewed himself as an Englishman from Pennsylvania, and did not support the idea of American independence. He also used ridicule as a weapon at home as a printer, writer and patriot, and later in France as a diplomat, propagandist and intelligence officer.[19]

Ridicule in 21^st century conflict

With the proliferation of communications technology, ridicule is a cheap and easy way to wage conflicts short of war, or to undermine an enemy in time of war. Thin-skinned dictators include Castro of Cuba, Kim Jong-il of North Korea, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and the regimes of China, Vietnam, and many predominantly Muslim countries.

The more extreme the leader, the more vulnerable he tends to be to ridicule.  Being a declared adversary – even enemy - of the United States is a status symbol among the world’s terrorists, dictators, and political extremists. By taking that enemy too seriously, by hyping it up as a threat, the United States is unintentionally credentializing a heretofore insignificant individual or group, and giving it the stature it needs to rise above its own society, establish itself, attract recruits, and gain influence.

Ridicule can cut the enemy down to size. Arab, Persian and other predominantly Islamic cultures have long traditions of using ridicule for political and military purposes, presenting the U.S. with ample opportunities. The practice of militaristic ridicule dates from the third- to fifth years of Muhammad’s annunciation as prophet, when he employed ridicule aggressively against enemies, ahead of his invading forces. Poets wrote not so much for entertainment or storytelling as for psychological purposes to help achieve military ends. The popularity of some medieval Arab poets has been undergoing a revival since the 1980s, where the most extreme have provided intellectual and ideological foundations for Wahhabi/Salafi brands of militant Islamism and their terrorist manifestations.

Muslims around the world have ridiculed Islamist extremists and their terroristic interpretations of the Koran as few American writers, comedians and broadcasters would ever dare. Pakistani TV has run shows mocking the extremists. Political satire in literature, music and movies are some of the biggest sellers in the Arabic-speaking markets. Arab, Iranian and Indonesian stand-up comics already perform stinging political satire but few are well-known and even fewer have outlets, though if they were “discovered” their listenership could be in the hundreds of millions.

The previous Iranian government tolerated some forms of political satire, but Iran’s top political impersonator Ali Dean, who did hilarious impressions of various mullahs, was forced to an American exile. Private Farsi-language TV stations in North America lampoon Iranian leaders. The most influential station, NITV, is owned by an exiled Iranian rock star, with Dean as its top humorist, broadcasting into Iran.[20] 

U.S. policymakers must incorporate ridicule into their strategic thinking. Ridicule is a tool that they can use without trying to control. It exists naturally in its native environments in ways beneficial to the interests of the nation and cause of freedom. Its practitioners are natural allies, even if we do not always appreciate what they say or how they say it.

The United States need do little more than give them publicity and play on its official and semi-official global radio, TV and Internet media, and help them become “discovered.” And it should be relentless about it. In his California exile form Iran, Ali Dean studies the mullahs’ sermons and speeches for his material. “They hate me because they don’t like nobody impersonate them,” he says. “To them, they are untouchable. To me, there is no untouchable.”[21]   

Conclusion 

Ridicule is a powerful weapon of warfare. It can be a strategic weapon. The United States must take advantage of it against terrorists, proliferators, and other threats. Ridicule is vital because:

• It sticks.
• The target can’t refute it.
• It is almost impossible to repress, even if driven underground.
• It spreads on its own and multiplies naturally.
• It gets better with each re-telling.
• It boosts morale at home.
• Our enemy shows far greater intolerance to ridicule than we.
• Ridicule divides the enemy, damages its morale, and makes it less attractive to supporters and prospective recruits.
• The ridicule-armed warrior need not fix a physical sight on the target. Ridicule will find its own way to the targeted individual. To the enemy, being ridiculed means losing respect. It means losing influence. It means losing followers and repelling potential new backers.
• To the enemy, ridicule can be worse than death. At least many enemies find death to be a supernatural martyrdom. Ridicule is much worse: destruction without martyrdom: A fate worse than death. And they have to live with it.

---

The author acknowledges the PeoplesCube.com for the satirical images used to illustrate the online version of this article.

Notes

^{[1] Harry Mills, Artful Persuasion (American Management Association, 2000), p. 131.}

^{[2] Rabbi Uri Cohen, “Balak – God’s Laughter: Making Fun of Balaam,” Nishmat, Jerusalem Center for Advanced Study of Jewish Women, accessed January 18, 2006 at http://www.nishmat.net/article.php?id=155&heading=0. Rabbi Cohen, a professor at Princeton University, is also a stand-up comedian.}

^{[3] Chronology of Islam, Canadian Society of Muslims (Toronto)http://muslim-canada.org/chronol.htm}

^{[4] Were one to use cartoons against Islamist extremists, one would seek to marginalize the extremists from their support base and from the rest of Islam. The cartoonist would make the extremists’ own appearance and behavior the object of ridicule, and never the Islamic religion or its founder themselves. In addition to betraying the principles of freedom of religion and respect for other religions, making fun of another’s religion is counterproductive to the war effort. For more on this, see White Paper No. 6 in this series, “Splitting the Opposition.”}

^{[5] See Jerrold M. Post, Leaders and their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior (Cornell University Press, 2004).}

^{[6] Mark Bowden, “Tales of the Tyrant,” The Atlantic, May 2002, pp. 36-37.}

^{[7] Milan Kundera, The Joke, trans. Henry Heim (Harper & Row, 1984). The author acknowledges writer Ben MacIntyre for locating the Kundera reference and others in his column, “Saddam Has Only Got One Ball,” The Times, 26 August 2005, p. 24.}

^{[8] Luis E. Aguilar, “Chistes” – Political Humor in Cuba (Cuban-American National Foundation, 1989), p. i.}

^{[9] Ibid.}

^{[10] George Orwell, “Funny, but Not Vulgar,” Leader, 28 July 1945, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945, The Collected Essays, Journals and Letters (Nonpareil, 2000), pp. 283-288.}

^{[11] Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Simon & Schuster, 1970).}

^{[12] Bugs & Daffy Wartime Cartoons (Warner Bros., 1942-45; released on VHS video, 1998); Walt Disney Treasures – On the Front Lines (Disney DVD, 2004).}

^{[13] Team America: World Police (Paramount DVD, 2005).}

^{[14] One must not discount the value of adolescent humor in winning the war of ideas. While many find it patently offensive, it can appeal to adolescent boys and young men unlike no other form of propaganda, and by its nature is self-replicating. In the global war of ideas, the young male demographic is one of the most important yet, to date, impenetrable markets for counterterrorism strategists.}

^{[15] Ninotchka (MGM, 1939; Warner Home Video DVD, 2005).}

^{[16] Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind (Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 135.}

^{[17] Ibid., p. 135.}

^{[18] A. J. Langguth, Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 313.}

^{[19] J. Michael Waller, “The American way of propaganda: Lessons from the founding fathers,” Public Diplomacy White Paper No. 1, Institute of World Politics, November 2005/January 2006.}

^{[20] Author’s interview with Zia Atabay, President, NITV.}

^{[21] Bob Simon, “Lights, Camera, Revolution,” CBS News, 18 June 2003. Accessed at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/22/60II/main526501.shtml.}

Boycott allies who arm our adversaries

by J. Michael Waller
Providence Journal, May 24, 2006

WASHINGTON - The arms embargo recently announced by the U.S. against the revolutionary regime in Venezuela is long overdue. Venezuela's dictator, Hugo Chavez, has gone out of his way to align his country with terrorist regimes, aid extremist movements and break anti-terrorism treaty obligations.

But at least one of our North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies wants to ignore U.S. security concerns and sell military equipment to Venezuela - while competing to sell the same equipment to the U.S. Coast Guard and Pentagon.

Worse, that ostensible ally is collaborating with the dictator's propaganda campaign to trash the United States, while simultaneously lobbying Congress for billions of dollars to buy its military products.

In a globalized economy, it's no longer possible to procure defense systems that are 100-percent made in America. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, provided the suppliers are reliable allies who share U.S. security concerns. But in the Venezuela case, the suppliers - the Spanish government and the state-owned aircraft manufacturer CASA - are no longer reliable.

Until two years ago, Spain was a staunch ally in the global war on terrorists and their supporters. Most observers expected Spain's pro-U.S. government to win re-election until the al Qaeda bombings of the Madrid transit system propelled the Socialist Workers Party to power.

In one of his first acts in office, after pledging to pull Spain from the Iraq coalition, President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero flew to Venezuela to sell military patrol boats and CASA CN-235 transport planes to the dictator Chavez.

The Bush administration, after fruitlessly voicing its concerns to Spain, invoked a 1992 law allowing the United States to veto other countries' sale of military hardware built with U.S.-made components.

Undeterred, CASA stripped out nearly five dozen U.S.-made parts to allow the sale to Chavez. From that point, the Spanish and Venezuelan governments conspired to rub it in America's face abroad, while CASA lobbied in Washington for U.S. tax dollars.

The game worked.

Last November, after CASA lobbyists had gotten Congress to spend $68 million on the first Coast Guard CN-235s, Spanish Defense Minister Jose Bono flew to Caracas "to stress what (Chavez) described as a 'defeat' of the United States," according to the major Madrid daily El Pais. In Caracas, Bono publicly criticized the United States as an "empire" as he stood with Chavez, who praised Spain for "confronting the hegemonic and imperialistic ambitions of the elite that now governs the United States (and is) massacring the people of Iraq."

While Chavez celebrated the deal with the Spanish defense minister, he refused entry to a bipartisan U.S. congressional delegation that had been cleared to visit Venezuela. In an act orchestrated to humiliate Congress, Chavez forced the lawmakers (led by 81-year-old House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill.) to sit in their plane for two hours without being allowed to disembark. Chavez then ordered the congressmen expelled from the country.

Meanwhile, Chavez - to his credit - has taken exception to CASA's and Spain's assurances to Washington that Chavez would use the aircraft exclusively within Venezuela and for peaceful purposes.

CASA and its socialist patrons in Madrid have played a double game, taking part in Chavez's anti-U.S. propaganda while lobbying Congress as valued members of the NATO security network.

Now, CASA is competing for its biggest contracts ever: more planes for the Coast Guard's Deepwater program and the new Army-Air Force Joint Cargo Aircraft, worth $3 billion to $4 billion in the short term, and as much as $30 billion over the decade ahead. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said recently, "national security cannot take a back seat to world trade." He's right. Congress should deny contracts to foreign companies that undermine U.S. national-security interests. Making an example out of the CASA aircraft deal would be an excellent place to start.

The U.S. arms embargo won't mean much if Washington continues to share military suppliers with the Venezuelan regime. Our diplomacy with Spain failed, but we needn't enrich the eurosocialists as they stab us in the back. They have chosen whose side they're on. Let them pay the price.

Larry, Curly and Osama: Ridicule as a weapon

by J. Michael Waller
Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2006

OSAMA BIN LADEN says he doesn't fear dying. He says he fears being humiliated.

So let's give it to him.

Bin Laden and others have thrived on the almost obsessive American focus on them as personal rivals. We give them the coveted "Enemy of the Great Satan" brand whenever our national leaders single them out by name.

What would happen if we ridiculed the terrorists instead?

Would young people still flock to become "fighters" and suicide bombers? Would they still leave on their doomed missions with tearful support from their mothers, fathers, grandparents and the pretty girls at home, blessed by a cleric who justifies murder as a noble sacrifice in Allah's name?

Terrorism is psychological warfare: to accomplish much with little by manipulating people's perceptions, emotions and actions. That's why the terrorists like soft targets — innocent civilians in a skyscraper or mosque — that have little if any military value. The killings serve to terrorize civilized society, Muslim and otherwise. Ridicule strips the terrorist of his power. If we stop being afraid, we turn the icons of fear into objects of contempt.

The U.S. military may be developing its war-fighting skills to do just that. Recently it shattered the seemingly invincible persona of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, whose beheadings and bombings have terrorized Iraq and the world, by pairing his latest video release with captured raw outtakes.

The outtakes showed Zarqawi not as a fearsome fighter but as a confused, bumbling fat boy in American sneakers and a black ninja costume who couldn't figure out how to operate a simple machine gun. (And even if it wasn't simple, there was no way to know that from the outtakes.) For the first time ever, the world saw Zarqawi's weak side: a pudgy, vulnerable, even contemptible creature who can't fight like a real warrior.

To most Americans, ridiculing terrorists might seem trivial, even sophomoric, as a weapon of war. But dictators and terrorists, being unable to function in the free market of ideas, need propagandists to control (not merely spin) their public images. They require obedience or acquiescence — a fear factor that cannot long coexist with put-downs and snickering. (That's why, six months after taking power in 1959, Fidel Castro had signs placed in official buildings that read "Counterrevolutionary jokes forbidden here." One of the first publications he shutdown was Zig Zag, a humor magazine.)

Pride, honor and shame are profound in much of Arab Muslim culture. The Zarqawi video was devastating. That's why Iraqi television and other moderate Arab media gave it plenty of play.

The ancients of the Middle East understood the mortal power of ridicule. In the Talmud, the basis of Jewish law, the Hebrews proclaimed, "All mockery (leitzanut) is prohibited except for mockery of idol worship."

Muhammad, the founder of Islam, weaponized ridicule. From the third to fifth years of his annunciation as a prophet, Muhammad deployed warrior poets ahead of his invading armies to soften the targets through mockery and derision.

Back in simpler times, Americans reflexively ridiculed their enemies. In a 1940 episode of "The Three Stooges," Moe did a ridiculous impression of Hitler while Larry heiled as propaganda minister, and Curly dressed as Goering with his belly and buttocks festooned with medals.

When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, the Army turned film studios into wartime propaganda mills. Humor about sacrifices at home and ridicule of the enemy were staples in Disney and Warner Bros. productions that starred Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny. (In fact, "Donald Duck in Nutziland" won an Academy Award in 1942.) To home audiences, the parody brought comfort and reassurance that, mighty as the enemy was, we could still defeat it.

In a January 2006 recorded message, Bin Laden signed off by saying: "I swear not to die but a free man even if I taste the bitterness of death. I fear to be humiliated or betrayed."

If he's not afraid to die, let's pour on the humiliation.

As long as the terrorists can make themselves look like fearsome winners — and as long as we inadvertently help them — they will always recruit followers. But nobody likes to follow a loser.