The news that the Pentagon ran a systematic information campaign to get favorable analysis on Iraq from military officers should hardly be news to many people. The New York Times has used the Freedom of Information Act in America to get some 8,000 pages of transcripts of e-mails and other communications in the Pentagon to reveal how Donald Rumsfeld waged the war of spin over Iraq, and lost it.
The high point came in 2005, when it was clear that things were really falling apart in Iraq. Chosen analysts, former generals and colonels to the fore, were given privileged access to information, which they then spun on through the media. Some were hired talking heads for mainstream channels like CNN and Fox News. In all, says the New York Times, some 75 officers were hired by Rumsfeld to do the job.
The most striking thing about this story about a story — and full marks to the NYT for uncovering it at last — is how badly the whole thing was done. It has not helped the administration’s credibility over Iraq, nor America’s standing in the world. As a campaign, it has been less than victorious.
When a former army general, Montgomery Meigs, claimed to NBC, that there “had been over $100 million of construction” at Guantanamo, he, and more to the point his editors, must have known that the increasing band of skeptics in the audience were unlikely to be persuaded. The general had been a part of carefully selected group of “analysts” allowed by the Pentagon into the Guantanamo complex.
Keith Allard, a former consultant to NBC and an instructor in information warfare at the National Defense University, said that what the analysts were given in their “private” briefings bore little relation to the facts later uncovered by inquiries and reporters’ books. “Night and day,” Allard told the New York Times, “I felt we’d been hosed.”
The Pentagon spokesman who devised the whole program of embedding journalists with forces in the Iraqi operations, Bryan Whitman, said “the intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people”. One of his colleagues at the Pentagon, Torie Clarke, a former public relations executive, started planning, well before Sept. 11 2001, a scheme of “key influentials” to support the Rumsfeld plan and philosophy at the Defense Department. In similar vein, Scooter Libby in Dick Cheney’s office took the same approach in feeding the NYT’s Judith Miller about weapons of mass destruction.
And on these shores, village Westminster, with Alastair Campbell as town-cryer, has been no stranger to such methodology.
There is a much bigger issue behind this than the misspeaking or credibility of the retired brass hats talking on the American networks, the BBC, ITV and Sky. The issue is the much wider use of information operations in the American-British campaign in Iraq since 2003. Much of the initial operation in Iraq was to be based on information, propaganda, and psychological persuasion. In total over a billion dollars must have been spent on the “information line of operations” as the military call it. Newspaper free-sheets and leaflets were distributed by the million. American aircraft and a British ship pumped out propaganda radio, and there were at least three television services beamed into Iraq.
The exiled leader of the Iraq National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, said it would be easy to persuade most Iraqis to ditch up Saddam and link up with the Americans and British to build a better Iraq. E-mails were sent, and text messages to the mobile phones of Iraqi officials and commanders. Chalabi had told MI6: “At least 40 percent of the Iraqi Army would come over and be usable.”
So why was this colossal piece of electronic persuasion, arm-twisting and spin, such an utter failure? Few Iraqi soldiers actually surrendered to the invading force — and many chose to go home with their weapons to fight another day. I have read no detailed analysis, either in the public domain or in unpublished form, of why the information operation was such a comprehensive dud.
The failure of the information operations complemented the mess in intelligence. Intelligence gave little hint of the Sunni nationalist insurgency, and the unrest stirred by the Shiite militias, which came within a weeks of Saddam being overthrown and the arrival of the British and the Americans. Once the violence came, there seemed little that the elaborate apparatus of information operations of the collation forces could do to mitigate it.
Recently the British government appears to have adopted the approach of the Bush administration toward information and media operations. Each of the services used to have a senior officer at brigadier level who would direct their public relations — they were known as “DPRs”. In a fit of pique, Geoff Hoon abolished the post because he caught the army DPR having a convivial lunch in the RAC Club with John Kay, chief reporter of the Sun. Now the MoD vets correspondents who wish to “embed” with British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have also taken to allowing access to authors to forces on operations, provided they submit their books for vetting, line by line, before publication. While precautions on issues of genuine operational security are understandable, the authors are now expected to be on message politically. Such a concept of literary maneuver is hardly likely to cover the full complexities of what is really going on among the Afghan communities, for example, now caught up in the ragged and asymmetric conflict of Helmand and Kandahar. Strategically, this approach to propaganda warfare could be self-defeating.
The Rumsfeld Pentagon, and Alastair Campbell at Number 10, ran on the idea that they could capture and control the information moment, capture the news in fact. They may well have succeeded, but only for the briefest moment, for they could never capture and control the collective memory over time — in other words, history. For all the bluster of the on-message analysts, paid or unpaid, history will see through the fog of spin and war in its analysis of what Bush, Blair and Brown have wrought with their ill-conceived adventure in Iraq.
