by J Michael Waller
Public Diplomacy White Paper, No. 5
The Institute of World Politics
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.
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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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, 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.
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. 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here, bin Laden addresses Secretary of Defense William Cohen.
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.
Ibid. In his fatwa, bin Laden identifies the Saudi “regime” and its security forces, among others, as targets for attack.
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.
The White House, “Remarks by National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice to the Reagan Lecture,” 26 February 2004.
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.
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.
David Kaplan, “Sometimes, It’s Just All in the Name,” US News & World Report, June 6, 2005.
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.
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.
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.
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.
