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2006 23: 19World Policy JournalMelik Kaylan

Losing the Propaganda Wars  

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© 2007 World Policy Institute 19

Most Americans, and most of the world, areby now clear about the failure in Iraq gener-ally, and in particular the failure of Ameri-can ideas to change or improve the en-trenched blocs of opinion there. From thevery beginning of the Iraq venture, theBush administration has not given much fo-cus or effort to that end, to winning overthe opinions of locals, or of the Islamicworld at large.

In an op-ed he wrote for the WashingtonPost soon after 9/11, former assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke said,“Call it public diplomacy, or public affairs,or psychological warfare, or—if you reallywant to be blunt—propaganda. But what-ever it is called, defining what this war isreally about in the minds of one billionMuslims in the world will be of decisive and historic importance.” He went on to ask (about Osama bin Laden), “How could a mass murderer who publicly praised theterrorists of September 11 be winning thehearts and minds of anyone? How could aman in a cave outcommunicate the world’sleading communications society?” A fewyears later, one might argue that bin Ladencommunicates a lot less, but surely there’sno doubting either the currency of Hol-brooke’s broader point, or its increasingsalience. Indeed, former secretary of defenseDonald Rumsfeld acknowledged as muchpublicly in an October 24, 2003, interviewin the Washington Times: “We are in a war of ideas, as well as a global war on terror.Ideas are important, and they need to bemarshalled, and they need to be commu-

nicated in ways that are persuasive to thelisteners.”

Not incidentally, at around the sametime, the State Department began to breakage-old diplomatic habits of circumspectionand publicly criticize the Muslim media.Spokesman Richard Boucher took Syria andLebanon to task for airing anti-Semitic doc-umentaries—evidence that the UnitedStates has understood that this era, like theCold War, is also a test of polemics and con-victions. Soon after, on November 6, Presi-dent Bush delivered a speech declaringAmerica’s mission to bring freedom anddemocracy to the Middle East, thereby fir-ing a shot in the war of ideas that shouldhave resonated around the world—not leastwithin his own administration—as a spur togreater communication. Former Bush WhiteHouse counselor Karen Hughes was thenappointed as the megaphone of the adminis-tration to the Muslim world and of the ide-ological convictions underlying America’spolicies. Her initial trip around the Islamicworld had little enduring effect, as most ob-servers noted, but unhappily it betokenedfailure in other ways too. It served as ahighly visible gesture that masked the Bushadministration’s inability or refusal to mobi-lize effective propaganda. A headline in theonline magazine Slate asked, “What onEarth Is She Doing in the Middle East?”and the answer has been, sadly, very little toany effect. She conducted a series of open fo-rums in which she heard what she alreadyknew, that from Turks to Saudis, no one wasconvinced by her or the Bush administration

Melik Kaylan contributes cultural and political commentary to the Wall Street Journal.

Losing the Propaganda WarsMelik Kaylan

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that either idealism or competence was be-ing displayed in America’s approach in Iraq.

A number of factors had coalesced inthese tokenist developments. President Bushhad always talked of a long struggle to befought at many levels, and this level had periodically come publicly to the fore. Thebipartisan, congressionally funded DjerejianReport on Public Diplomacy, which focused onhow to enhance America’s message abroad,came out in late October 2003, just as Congress sat down to debate thepresident’s request of $87 billion for Iraq.Perhaps most critically, at that time the Iraq war looked ever more like a guerrillastruggle—one that overflowed into otherparts of the world—and the Pentagonknows from combat against Marxist insur-rections that ideas, with invisible precision,can target a populist enemy better than anylaser. So, whatever the multiple causes,Washington had begun to bestir itself inter-mittently for this part of the task, but wasvery late even in making the gestures. Ac-cording to various experts interviewed forthis article, the task has become so uphillthat it compares in scale to the first years of the Cold War.

To rephrase Holbrooke’s query, how did the winner of two titanic propagandacontests (against fascism and communism),armed with so much experience and know-how, yield so much advantage this time toits opponents? What has been lacking?What needed doing and is the Bush admin-istration doing it with any effect?

To the question, how did we go fromzenith to nadir of preparedness, the simpleculprit was the Clinton White House andthe Republican Congress of the time. Cer-tainly, at the time of Holbrooke’s article, no other explanation was necessary. The defunding, demotivating, and confusion of purpose that famously beset the intelli-gence services in the Clinton years equallyafflicted the overseas propaganda organs.That damage may itself take years to undo.The story of America’s loss of ability to

persuade is in some considerable part a bureaucratic story. The minutiae can be confusing but, as so often is the case withstate-run endeavors, the devil is in the bureaucratic details. The United States,throughout the Cold War, relied on a vari-ety of methods for getting its messageacross. Generally speaking, they comprisedbroadcasting, the United States InformationAgency (USIA), and the diplomatic corps,some of which were intertwined. In thebroadcasting field Radio Liberty (RL) andRadio Free Europe (RFE) were originallylaunched in the 1950s by the Central In-telligence Agency. In the 1970s, the CIA’srole became public and the radios came under the control of a quasi-independentbody called the Board for InternationalBroadcasting (BIB). Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed a host of “sur-rogate news” radio programs into the oldIron Curtain countries in local languages.Their mission was to provide local news and views, a version of their culture and history that subject populations would nototherwise get from their official Soviet-runservice.

They broadcast on shortwave and thoughtheir explicit mission was propagandistic,their tone and tenor were not. According toJim Critchlow, a Russian- and German-speaking retired career bureaucrat who co-founded RL in Munich in the 1950s andbroadcast into the Soviet Union for decades,“We tried to give local people the feelingthat they had their own authentic radiotruer to their culture than the Soviet ver-sion. The content was highly researched andoften quite intellectual. It took a lot of ded-icated knowledge, funding, and expertiseover many years.” Arch Puddington, anothercareer broadcast officer, was the assistant bu-reau chief of the New York bureau of RL/RFE

as the Cold War waned from 1985 to 1993.Under President Clinton he saw the NewYork bureau closed and overall funding fallfrom $200 million to $70 million. He re-grets that “surrogate broadcasting might

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have been switched to the Middle East fromEastern Europe as part of a strategic reallo-cation rather than mere downsizing.”

Voice of America (VOA) operated in parallel but with a different pedigree andpurpose. It was run by the USIA, itself anodd hybrid agency that, at one time in theEisenhower era, fielded a Cabinet-level chiefin the White House. More of that later.Voice of America modeled itself on theBritish Broadcast Corporation and was in-tended to give foreigners a window ontoAmerica, and on the world through Ameri-can eyes. It broadcast in 53 different lan-guages but these were mere translations ofthe main broadcast in English. Like the BBC

it prided itself on a degree of independence,or the appearance of such, from state con-trol, though it was funded by the state.Voice of America believed that its missionwas not propagandistic but impartial and assuch meant to set an example of broadcast-ing in the free world. But that model be-came controversial in the Clinton yearswhen conservative critics deemed VOA tooliberal by half. They called it “NPR (Nation-al Public Radio) for foreigners”. In Afghan-istan, expatriates dubbed it Radio Taliban.

Over the years, Radio Martí and RadioFree Asia were added to the portfolio. In1999, President Clinton, under considerablecost-cutting pressure from congressional Republicans, separated them from USIA andfolded them, along with RFE and RL, into anew authority entitled the Broadcast Boardof Governors (BBG), a semi-independent “en-tity,” not an agency. Its mission became (andremains) “impartial news not propaganda,”no doubt considered the highest statementof integrity in a Clintonian pre-9/11 see-no-evil world. The budget for worldwide statebroadcasting ultimately fell to $550 mil-lion, down 40 percent from Cold Warpeaks. The USIA, which ran VOA for fourdecades, grew out of the Cold War as Amer-ica’s primary medium for waging publicdiplomacy for the free world. That is, theUSIA became a public advocate for the West.

It did so through broadcasting and throughpublic affairs officers (PAOs), attached toAmerican diplomatic missions abroad. Unlike State Department diplomats, PAOsbruited their business out loud, engagingforeign media in debates, crafting printcampaigns, befriending intelligensia and the like. In the Clinton era, as part of cost-cutting and as a “peace dividend,” USIA wassharply defunded, stripped of broadcastfunctions, and finally merged into the StateDepartment in 1999. Most USIA veterans,indeed many diplomats, believe that endedthe agency’s effectiveness and muted Ameri-ca’s vocal throwweight abroad because Stateand USIA possessed utterly contradictory cultures. Penn Kemble, who became deputydirector of USIA in the year before the merger, and who considered himself a Democrat anti-Soviet policy hawk, bitterlymourns the decisions.

The post–Cold War period was ob-viously a confusing time where welacked an overarching mission, so we were reduced in size and in vi-sion, putting out disparate brush-fires in the Balkans, Africa, or theEuropean Union. We lost sight of a coherent message, and we even had to curb our tone in order tosound less gloating or triumphalist,even under Bush Senior. It was atime of fragmentation and uncer-tainty for us, but not for our oppo-nents. We were still dealing withanti-American ideas in the form ofanti-globalism, Islamism, third-worldism, the Green movement,EU-ism and the like. All of whichwas allowed to congeal and achievecohesion. Because we had no clearstrategic vision, the U.S. withdrewfrom the global debate, and the opposite side had a clear field.

Career bureaucrats hate partisanship andalmost all found equal fault with the Bush-

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era focus on the Pentagon and war machin-ery, rather than on diplomacy and ideas.Many talked only on background, but mostfound plenty of blame to go around. No oneknows what the Clinton administrationwould have done but for the relentless pres-sure from the Gingrich Congress to down-size. In the end, President Clinton had littlechoice. He had to pick his battles against ahostile legislature, and he had never, in anycase, been a foreign policy enthusiast. ArchPuddington, who reluctantly shepherdedthe downsizing of RL/RFE, argues that short-wave radio broadcasting would have been irrelevant to a Middle East now saturatedwith satellite TV and FM radio. Meanwhile,anti-Soviet experts, like himself, also be-came redundant. (Though, of course, he ad-mits it all could have evolved organically.)There is also the argument that policies, not diplomacy, are the real cause of enmityabroad, especially in the Arab world, whereAmerican support for Israel inflames pas-sions. Other experts in the field blame thecurrent president for losing faith in diplo-macy entirely, for broadening the Pentagon’spower and role while diminishing the StateDepartment’s. In conversation, Richard Hol-brooke worries that we are now too focusedon building the hardware and mechanics ofpropaganda without building a message.Penn Kemble feels that we still “have nowar of ideas, only a war...propaganda of thedeed, not of the word.”

Most interviewees, to be fair, tread light-ly in this complex terrain. But this muchshould be said (and was, by a source whoasked for anonymity): The United Statessupports Israel on principle, not at the costof Islam, and that principle can be explainedwithout the appearance of bad faith or bias.Some talked about listening “more closely toour critics,” which was often another, less ex-plicit way of criticizing policy, though notnecessarily so—listening well can be a prel-ude to a better counter-response.

One surmises that this is what happensin a confused and haphazardly disassembled

bureaucracy—an instrument no longer inharmony has decayed into a babble of voices. All agree that it will take years to rebuild and retune. In the meantime, somehighly authoritative reports have appeared.In addition to the Djerejian report, theCouncil on Foreign Relations, the GeneralAccounting Office, and the Heritage Foun-dation have weighed in. They all agree thatmore funding is needed, that there is a se-vere dearth of Arab speakers, that PAOs needbetter training (especially in Muslim lan-guages), and that we need a Cabinet-levelczar with direct presidential access to en-hance the input of public diplomacy on policymaking. The picture that emerges isone of leadership, organization, a coherentmessage, and effective means of delivery. All commission reports were roundly ig-nored—until, that is, they could not be ignored any longer. By the end of 2006, the Iraq Study Group, under the leadershipof former secretary of state James Baker, issued its report. Perhaps more significantthan its content was the tremendous atten-tion it received in the media and, rather vis-ibly, in the White House. It was an implicitadmission that the strategy at all levels upto now had failed, not least in getting theAmerican position across to critics and ene-mies worldwide.

Where to Go From HereIn the leadership category, former Bush aideMargaret Tutweiler was appointed to under-secretary for public diplomacy after the uni-versally acknowledged failure of her prede-cessor, Charlotte Beers, a Madison Avenueadvertising veteran who was generally con-sidered out of her depth. Although more de-termined and more professionally compe-tent, Margaret Tutweiler suffered from thefamiliar Bush-era shortcoming of a cloudymission undertaken with too little knowl-edge. The notion that she or anyone couldsell America to the world “like some kind of toothpaste” simply underestimated thescale of the task. Ultimately, too, she never

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Losing the Propaganda Wars 23

adequately upgraded the machinery at herdisposal to meet the challenge. To a degree,especially in broadcasting, organization andmeans of delivery fall under the same cate-gory. The Broadcasting Board of Governors(of which VOA is a part) runs broadcasts intothe Arab world, though the Department ofDefense runs services within Iraq itself. AtBBG there does seem to be, at least, a clearpolicy of change and reconstruction, thougha controversial one. One of the Board’s lead-ing figures, perhaps its driving force untilhe resigned in January 2006, was NormPattiz, founder and chairman of WestwoodOne, the country’s largest commercial radionetwork. As VOA and its affiliates dwindled,market research showed that their broad-casts had less than 2 percent audience sharein the Arab world. This was, as Pattizpoints out, as good as zero, considering themargin of error. He advocated a radical free-market approach for capturing andmeasuring audience share, though its tech-niques were hardly new in commercialbroadcasting. He helped establish the Arabic-language Radio Sawa, transmittedon both FM and AM, with content consistingof mostly pop music interspersed with newsspots and short audience discussions. Hepresided over the building of transmitters in friendly countries close to the MiddleEast and used Nielsen ratings for the firsttime. In 2004, he also launched the satelliteTV station Al Hurra.

The audience was constantly polled,canvassed, and asked to comment, even onthe air. Sawa went for, and won, large fol-lowings in the under-30 age group, which,in the Middle East, comprises 60 percent of the total population. Says Pattiz, “UntilSawa, we didn’t have a real horse in thisrace—now we have solid audience share in almost all Arab countries: in Egypt 11percent, in Jordan 30 percent, in Qatar 41 percent, and so on. In all, we have a 31.6 percent share of the over-15 age groupin the entire Arab world’s listening audi-ence.” Pattiz adds that overwhelming num-

bers of listeners consider Sawa their most reliable source of information, and “in a ratio of three to two have a better opinion of the U.S. as a result.” All this was man-aged, as he says, on a startup budget of $30 million with an operating budget of$20 million a year.

There are critics aplenty of the Pattizapproach, not least in the Djeridjian reportitself and among elements of the old ColdWar broadcast community. They argue thatSawa may be popular but won’t reach theright people, won’t affect anyone at the levelof ideas, and doesn’t even pretend to addressthe intelligensia or political elites—a groupthat Cold War transmissions focused onwith great success. The issue, says, JimCritchlow, the now retired cofounder of RL,“is whether you believe ideas are importantto that particular audience,” adding, “con-sidering the British BBC is highly respectedand listened to in that market, the evidenceis, yes, ideas do matter and a more high-brow approach would work.” To which Pat-tiz replies, “Fine, and we have that dimen-sion with Al Hurra, which in part followsthe CNN or Al-Jazeera model with entertain-ment programs added.” Sadly, it has been aratings failure. But Pattiz stresses that hismission is not propaganda and that impar-tiality and credibility are important. “Ourgoal,” he says, “is to embody free speech,and the free market of ideas. That’s the bestadvertisement of our society.”

Which leaves open the question of whowill do the necessary bottom-line propagan-da. The Council on Foreign Relations re-port, for example, suggests that NPR-styledocumentaries should be produced and runon existing independent outlets such as Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya. There is a consensusthat such vehicles are necessary. As to theircontent, a simple example will do. Much ofthe Middle East still believes the variousconspiracy theories about 9/11—that Jewsknew about it ahead of time; that Israel wasin some way responsible (despite bin Laden’striumphant crowing); that the United States

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allowed it to happen as a casus belli for at-tacking the Muslim world. And so on.There has not yet been, to anyone’s knowl-edge, a full and detailed repudiation, ad-dressing the particulars of each theory,broadcast to the Arab world. There’s no ob-vious outlet for it, except perhaps in Iraqwhen the Coalition Provisional Authorityran its own television and radio stations,funded by the Defense Department and subcontracted to a company called ScienceApplications International Corporation(SAIC), based in California. The company has a number of former military and intelli-gence bigwigs on its board, but has virtu-ally no previous expertise in media. Accord-ing to any and every source familiar withSAIC’s work (outside the Pentagon), it did asingularly incomplete and inadequate job ofbroadcasting “Voice of Iraq” radio, and ofrunning a national Iraqi newspaper. Indeed,SAIC was slapped with a “stop-work” orderand, ultimately, Iraqi-owned newspaperstook up the slack. The consensus is that themilitary is not good at managing media—itis not their job.

In the old days of the British Empire,the “Political Agent,” an official figure in acolonial backwater, would address matters ofdisinformation in his zone, such as ugly ru-mors in the bazaar spread by insurrectionaryelements. In today’s version, Al-Jazeera doesthe spreading, but the United States has notfor now evolved its equivalent. There are approximations. There is a rather splendidlonely office in the State Department enti-tled the International Information Bureau,once part of USIA, whose chief of counterin-formation/disinformation is Tod Leventhal, alongstanding career officer. The bureau hasdwindled from 400 employees to a handful.Leventhal goes back to the days when hehad to counter Soviet rumors that Ameri-cans were kidnapping babies for their bodyparts. His recent brief has been to countersuch rumors as a French journalist ThierryMeysan’s theory, as expounded in a best-selling book, that the Pentagon was not hit

by a plane but by missiles. He was also in-volved in quelling rumors that a mosquevenerated by Indonesian Muslims had beenhit during the “Shock and Awe” bombingcampaign in Baghdad. Leventhal’s work,however, is not accessible to the public andis only prepared for the embassies to dissem-inate. Hence, much of the Middle East nev-er hears it. His work should be put on aState Department website and be availablefor Middle Eastern consumption.

Nabil Khouri is another rare, not to saysolitary, information warrior who operateson the front line. Originally a Lebanese academic, now a career diplomat at USIA, he is deputy director of the Media OutreachCenter in London. Khouri connects with the Arab media there and regularly appearson Al-Jazeera to argue an American view-point. He befriends journalists, appears atcommunity meetings in Iraq (at some riskto his life), and debates Islamists around the world. Khouri does his share of rumor-quelling too. He was involved in counteringrepeated rumors by a hostile Iraqi Shiitecleric who claimed that American soldiershad placed him under house arrest in Najaf.The first rumor resulted in a 10,000-strongdemonstration in Badhdad. Khouri defusedit the next time—he arranged for Al-Jazeerato video the cleric’s house, and to double-check such rumors in the future.

The interdepartmental coordinator of all this effort seems to have been Tucker Eskew, director of the White House Officeof Global Communication, a body launchedin tandem with the Afghan offensive to co-ordinate America’s message abroad. Eskew,who calls himself “an old Reagan-Bushhand,” after a hiatus from Washington run-ning political campaigns in his native NorthCarolina, came back to liaise with TonyBlair over Afghanistan. The job evolved and his improvised post became probablythe most critical leadership position in theinformation wars, until he retired to privatelife as a lobbyist in Washington, DC. Hisoffice launched a daily bulletin entitled the

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“Global Messenger” to outline the day’shigh-priority talking points to top U.S.communicators around the world. He craft-ed myriad message-bearing events for topofficials, arranging for the president to visitmosques and attend Ramadan dinners inpublic, and he gave moral support to long-term initiatives such as radio Sawa. Hisshortcoming, say USIA veterans, was that helacked the clout and seniority to make poli-cy and direct the president—after all, heheads no agency—but instead worked to re-flect the decisions of others. Eskew’s low-profile, experimenting, try-anything ap-proach simply illustrates the Bush approachto propaganda as a trial-and-error activity.

The Message VoidSo much for leadership and organization. To old USIA stalwarts, those successful andsolid Cold Warriors with a literate knowl-edge of their trade, the greatest single shortfall is the message—the absence of it,or its coarseness and inchoateness. They areconcerned that it needs conceiving from theground up or it cannot be conveyed, how-ever rich the means. Walter Roberts, a for-mer top USIA officer with 59 years in thejob, remembers Sen. William Fulbright’sold adage that if people knew us better, theywould like us more. Roberts wonders if thatis indeed true in the Middle East. He pointsout that the Iron Curtain countries did not,indeed could not, know us and respondedmost to broadcasts about themselves. “TheArab countries,” he says, “have been exposedto us, to consumerism, to our media, to thebenefits of our culture, and they are betterable to reject it.”

For him and other veteran colleagues,American arguments must go much deeperto overcome informed skepticism. One won-ders if anyone at the top has a realistic senseof the challenge. The temporary and ill-considered solution of paying for pro-Amer-ican opinions to be aired on Arab broadcast-ing outlets turned into a debacle the mo-ment it became public knowledge—an all-

too-visible symbol of American clandestineinterference. This was more an instance of incompetence than deviousness, since the practice is well established by Arab governments in their own media. Still, thecore issue remains: the evolution of solid arguments against negative propaganda.“What,” says one veteran, “is the answer toan Islamist who opines that American-styledemocracy and pluralism leads to gay par-enting, that Muslims can find a better ver-sion for themselves?” Another veteran, BillZorthian, now 83, who toiled as the chiefmission spokesman in Vietnam, says, “It only works if we talk in terms of their aspi-rations, as we did in the Cold War.” He isechoed by Jim Critchlow: “The way we beatSoviet ideology was to go back to the rootsof their ethnic traditions, to tell the Uzbeks,for example, that they once had a higherculture, that we knew and respected it. Thatwe would encourage its revival. But it in-volves research and scholarship. It’s expen-sive and takes time. Mr. Pattiz’s approach isquicker and cheaper, but how effective?”

Another expert, a vocal anti-Wahhabistwho asked for anonymity, agreed: “We haveto show we know them better. We don’tneed to appear nice—just smart and tough.Under Charlotte Beers, the State Depart-ment ran a PR campaign showing that Muslim women can wear chaddors in theUnited States. They bought the Saudi line.Most Muslim women don’t wear chaddors.It was ignorant and foolish, showed us try-ing too hard and badly.” Nabil Khouriknows the challenges in the Arab world ar-guably better than anyone. He says, “Mus-lim-to-Muslim debate should be fosteredand the old indigenous pluralism of Islamshould be encouraged. A democratic tradi-tion of Islamic thought exists, but it hasbeen repressed in recent decades by funda-mentalist threats. In the current Islamic climate, Muslims are afraid to ask questions.Liberal Islamists are on the retreat andthere’s no safe outlet for them. We shouldoffer that outlet.”

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For seasoned propaganda professionals,historic missteps under President Bill Clin-ton and the Republican Gingrich Congressled to this catastrophe, through lack of willand vision. The vulnerability is still thereand is being compounded by Bush-era in-

competence. Worse, the stripping of accruedexperience presents its own dangers. But,“worst of all,” says Bill Zorthian, “is if we’veforgotten how much we need to know to dothis job properly.”•

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