WASHINGTON, 4 April 2003 — White House officials struggled this week to retool a war communications blueprint that didn’t allow for strong Iraqi resistance and overestimated the welcome allied troops would receive.
The administration countered setbacks on the global airwaves by using classic campaign techniques such as dogged repetition of scripted messages and flat denials of dissent. When the war plan itself was under attack, officials tried to regain their footing by saying that the plan was flexible enough to accommodate any eventuality.
“We should have made that part clearer early on,’’ one official said.
Bush aides pride themselves on the iron message discipline they maintained through his candidacy and early years in office, but their techniques haven’t immediately succeeded when applied to war. Now, Bush’s messengers must compete with other sources of information that include reporters embedded with military units, commanders in the field who bluntly speak their minds and a vocal community of retired military officers receiving intelligence from the Pentagon.
Besieged on so many fronts, administration officials all but shut down communication outside formal briefings, with the White House referring many questions to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon referring some of those questions back to the White House.
Historians and political scientists said the administration’s approach has the makings of a credibility gap if the Bush team’s assertions from their lecterns and on Sunday talk shows become too far divorced from the impression the public is getting from the battlefields in Iraq. “They have been guilty of trying to put a positive interpretation on everything and ignoring the bad news,’’ said Alex Jones, director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
Some administration officials said they realized they need to be more forthcoming about US mistakes and civilian casualties than they were during the Afghan war. “It’s a lesson we learned from Afghanistan,’’ when the Pentagon’s first response to such reports was usually denial, one official said.
Another administration official said Bush’s aides know they need to get information out faster. “I don’t think anybody overtly sought to obscure reality,’’ the official said. “They just thought the plan was really good.’’
Officials said they still must improve their outreach to Arab audiences, a primary goal of their war messaging, by offering more Arab-speaking officials to networks serving the Gulf area this week, and the White House sent a communications official to London to try to reach Arab audiences there.
Officials planned an intricate Iraq information strategy and created the White House Office of Global Communications to improve the US image overseas after the nasty months of diplomacy that led up to the war.
That office has focused closely on ways that language influences attitudes. Several days after military briefers began using “Fedayeen’’ to describe Iraqi militias loyal to Saddam Hussein, the office stepped in to remind them that the word “has almost heroic implications’’ in Arabic that might undercut their propaganda efforts in the Arab world, an administration official said.
Word went out last week to begin referring to Iraqi fighters in urban guerrilla battles against US forces were better referred to as “terrorists,’’ “death squads’’ and “thugs.’’ The new language has sought to reinforce the connection between Saddam and international terrorism by emphasizing reports that the Iraqis were using women and children as shields and using suicide bombs.
Much of this new language is directed at overseas audiences. An administration official said Americans, by and large, “don’t even need to be told’’ about a car bombing more than a few times. “You mention it a couple of times and the light bulb goes off,’’ the official said. ‘’In other parts of the world, labeling helps to put it in perspective.’’
The administration’s campaign-style approach was on display Tuesday morning when the Pentagon sent its daily update to Capitol Hill with no mention of the seven civilians who’d been shot to death by American soldiers at a checkpoint in Iraq. The incident was dominating news coverage. Instead, the talking points said coalition forces “continue to make good progress toward our objectives.’’ At the White House, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was telling reporters that Bush’s conclusion from his briefings was that “slowly but surely the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people are being won over as they see security increase in their area.’’ That afternoon, Fleischer described a sharp administration dispute over how to distribute aid and run postwar Iraq as “discussions that are routine around here, that involve the various agencies.’’
Part of the media strategy has been to focus attention on the Pentagon and limit public appearances of other senior officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
