PoliticalWarfare.org

Information a vital weapon

by J. Michael Waller
USA Today

USA Today ran an editorial that criticizes the US military for planting propaganda in the Iraqi press. The editors invited Professor J. Michael Waller to provide an opposing view after the Pentagon refused. Both pieces appeared together on December 7. For the USA Today editorial, click here. Dr. Waller's column is reprinted below.]

Three scandals hide behind the U.S.-propaganda-in-Iraq controversy.

The first scandal is that the United States hadn't been planting favorable, truthful stories in the Arab media all along.

Americans will lose the war in Iraq — and the global "battle for hearts and minds" — if their military, diplomatic and intelligence services don't become more creative than the enemy is about influencing how people think in the Arab world.

That's why the Pentagon's foreign influence activity is so vital to winning in Iraq. It's a fundamental part of supporting the troops.

Until this year, the U.S. government was probably the only force that did not regularly plant stories in the Iraqi media. It left that game to extremists from Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda itself. With predictable and possibly fatal results.

Here's the dilemma: Individual Iraqi journalists sympathetic to the democratic mission are constantly vulnerable to terrorist death squads. Iraqi editors are more likely to publish articles to advance freedom if doing so won't expose their reporters to retaliation. Yet the Iraqi public is more likely to believe local newspapers than our overt editorials or paid advertisements with our disclaimers and foreign-sounding names. The Pentagon found a way around the problem by paying Iraqi journalists to run Arabic translations of truthful, military-authored articles and stories.

Which brings us to the second scandal: Disgruntled Pentagon officials who disagree with policy continue to leak secrets with impunity. Their sabotage of strategic information campaigns after 9/11 ensured that the military had no propaganda strategy against al-Qaeda and none when it went into Iraq.

Paired with it is the third scandal: the hubris and recklessness of some news organizations that pontificate about democratic media principles as they place their struggling Iraqi colleagues in mortal danger.

They may as well tell moderate Arab journalists, "If you cooperate with our troops, we will expose you to the death squads."

All the more reason for our military to keep up the good work. The Iraqi people — and our troops — depend on it.

J. Michael Waller teaches public diplomacy and political warfare at the Institute of World Politics. (The Defense Department and Lincoln Group declined to provide an opposing view.)

It's propaganda time

"It's propaganda time," by Walter Jajko, Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2005.

Critics of the Iraq war are outraged over the revelation that the U.S. military has been paying millions of dollars to plant pro-American, Pentagon-written propaganda articles in Iraqi newspapers and to buy off Iraqi journalists with monthly stipends.

But in my opinion, it's about time. Information is a critical part of any war, and the U.S. has for too long — to its own detriment — ignored this powerful and essential tool, a tool especially well-suited to the globalized Information Age. Even third-rate countries routinely use information and disinformation as an instrument of foreign policy, often against the United States. The U.S., in turn, cannot win the war of ideas by speaking softly or keeping its mouth shut. But we have been doing just that.

The United States Information Agency, the only open, global information organization run by the U.S. government, was abolished in 1999, supposedly because it served no purpose in the post-Cold War world. It has not been replaced. U.S.-sponsored entities such as Radio and TV Marti (which broadcast to Cuba) and Al Hurra, the U.S. television station broadcasting to the Arabs, have proven ineffective.

We need to be using all the means available in the war of ideas: public diplomacy, psychological operations, influence agents, disinformation and computer information warfare — from open and overt to clandestine and covert, from public explanation of policy to secret subversion of enemies. All of these must be well-orchestrated.

Our current situation is quite a turnaround from the Cold War years. In 1953, the CIA's celebrated Cold War information and disinformation arm — centered in the "Mighty Wurlitzer" propaganda offices of OSS veteran Frank Wisner — was an enormous operation, with thousands of employees adept at planting press and radio stories, engaging with labor unions, applying economic pressure, offering direct monetary payments and waging political and cultural warfare in an all-out effort to prevent European countries from falling to the communists.

According to a 1977 New York Times investigative series, the CIA owned or subsidized, at various times, more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communications facilities, most of them overseas. In some cases, these were used for propaganda efforts; in other cases, they served as covers for other operations.

Paid CIA agents infiltrated a dozen more foreign news organizations, and at least 22 U.S. news organizations employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA. Nearly a dozen U.S. publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA.

Today, this kind of effort has ended, and it is now unimaginable. Few American officials know how to play this game, and fewer would risk doing so. The left has argued that this shouldn't be done — that it's unethical, it's dishonest, it's a violation of journalistic standards. Our use of information today is insufficient, limited to disjointed efforts: the State Department's passive, reactive and defensive public diplomacy; the Defense Department's tactical, battlefield psychological operations; and the CIA's limited covert influence operations.

Examples abound. The State Department only seldom (and belatedly) has provided Arabic-speaking interviewees to refute stories on Al Jazeera. The CIA never did establish a clandestine radio station to propagandize against the Iranian mullahs.

Each of the few weak, unconnected information efforts has been undertaken episodically, coordinated haphazardly and funded poorly. Each ekes out its existence as transient tools accepted only in extremis, facing resistance from apathetic agencies, clueless congressmen and misinformed media.

A permanent leadership is needed in the form of a new Cabinet department that can knock together heads to force integrated influence activities — a Ministry of Propaganda, if you will.

Some influence operations are cheap, such as distribution of opinion pieces to newspapers; some are expensive, such as setting up a satellite television station; some are technically sophisticated, such as spreading disinformation into government computer networks; many are simple, such as immediate, vigorous, undiplomatic rebuttals by U.S. ambassadors to false accusations. But all require commitment by the national leadership.

In the war against Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, aggressive, relentless and exhaustive attacks are needed, including arguing against the terrorists' theological heresies, rebutting their lies, undermining their popularity, blackening their reputations, falsifying their public and private communications, publicizing intelligence against their fellow-traveler friends and jamming their radio, television and computer networks.

America's failure to use the indispensable instrument of information to protect its own national interests is inexcusable, especially as it wages a protracted war to the death against Islamic terrorists to preserve democratic governance, a free society and Western civilization.

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WALTER JAJKO, a retired Air Force brigadier general and former assistant to the secretary of Defense for intelligence oversight, is a professor of defense studies at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. His views are not those of the Department of Defense.