In a blunt but productive critique of Coalition information operations (IO) in Iraq, an IO practitioner offers a way out of the mess.
Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) Senior Fellow Andrew Garfield writes in the Middle East Quarterly that US-led efforts to communicate with Iraqis have been unimaginative, disorganized, largely irrelevant to the target audiences, slow to anticipate or respond, and often wasteful of funds and resources. The bottom line, he argues, is that current IO strategy is not supporting the warfighters in Iraq. The enemy is running IO circles around us.
My read on Garfield's article is that our IO policy is getting our guys needlessly killed.
The "insurgents," Garfield says, have mastered various forms of political and cultural communication, from high-profile images and videos of their attacks to the simple stuff like grafitti, art, poetry, songs, leafletting, publishing and multimedia productions.
While US-led forces should reign supreme in all those areas - and monitor the enemy's visual imprint to diminish its psychological presence - the effort fumbles. "The slow speed of the U.S. military's clearance process—typically it takes three to five days to approve even a simple information operations product such as a leaflet or billboard—creates an information vacuum that Iraqis fill with conspiracy theories and gossip often reflecting the exaggerations or outright lies of insurgents and extremists," Garfield says.
The insurgents, terrorists and militiamen are adept at exploiting TV cameras to project their message globally, while "US authorities handicap themselves. US military lawyers fear 'blowback' to US domestic audiences, which they interpret as a violation of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which prohibited domestic distribution of propaganda meant for foreign audiences. As a result, US commanders forbid coalition authorities to openly engage on the Internet. The decision has ceded this key tool to the Iraqi insurgents," he adds.
Indeed, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 pertains only to the State Department. Congress narrowly defined the law to pertain exclusively to State and to what became the US Information Agency, which has since been absorbed into the State Department. Military lawyers and PAOs who invoke Smith-Mundt to limit Defense Department information ops are flat wrong. This blog published an alert about Smith-Mundt last May.
Garfield identifies wastefulness in US-funded information operations: "While the coalition has spent a hundred million dollars on advertising in Iraq, the strategy of re-awarding huge contracts to advertising firms who spend tens of millions of dollars on nationally-broadcast radio and television commercials but who cannot demonstrate effective audience penetration is questionable. Local Iraqi firms have designed the most effective commercials at a relatively low cost. For example, one commercial showing the impact of an improvised explosive device on an Iraqi family cost only $15,000 to make. However, most coalition advertisements, perhaps one hundred times more costly, lack resonance and relevance among ordinary Iraqis, even as they saturate the airwaves."
Some US-funded ads, he says, have done more harm than good. Lack of IO coordination is another problem: "There is an interagency process meant to coordinate the coalition's information campaign but, in reality, this becomes a forum for information sharing rather than a mechanism for command and control."
Garfield calls for "a single command authority" to "guide and supervise all information and psychological operations and public affairs staff," rather than have the current competing structure with many chiefs and little grand strategy.
A slow message approval process has killed excellent initiatives. Senior officials, Garfield writes, "take days if not weeks to clear information operations products, even excellent products developed by Iraqis for their own ethnic groups." Approval of an advertisement for a newspaper in an Iraqi city like Fargo, North Dakota, requires passing through a colon of staffers, lawyers and senior officers up to the three-star level. Garfield proposes a quick approval process modeled after that of private news organizations.
Garfield provides a mother lode of observations and ideas to fix the current chronic IO problem in Iraq. Everyone in the IO community should read and debate it. To read the article, click here.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quashed any idea that the troubled Iraqi Interior Ministry would dictate who would protect US diplomatic personnel in Baghdad. 
