The truth of any proposition has very little to do with its innate capacity to convince people to believe in it. This basic assumption has fueled both advertising – and its far older and more sophisticated sibling – political propaganda.
The Arab street’s media has had decades with which to shape the assumptions of their audiences and it is within this long-existing psychological structure that we have decided to inject ourselves. The West has long been demonized there and, at times, with good reason as the post-World War I period of European colonial rule drew to a bloody close in the 1950s. We must realize that we have simply taken on the traditional political role of the external enemy so very necessary to feed the carefully stoked fires of xenophobia.
This unreasoned fear and hatred of peoples who are “other” is what fuels much of the concerted efforts by all the stakeholders to maintain the status quo in the Middle East. But it is a fuel that makes that region’s oil reserves seem paltry by comparison.
Take, for instance, the recurrent theme of Saddam Hussein as a “Robin Hood” pitted against the evil, powerful Americans who are impotent to stop his taunts and raids. The latest attempts to kill this very astute survivor from the air have played as yet another bumbling misfire on Arab Street, while in the coalition’s media they are being touted with hope by the West. The fact that Saddam is a monster stands to no good effect against the Arab view of our vast technology as impotent.
Even if Saddam’s DNA is separated from a handful of goo scraped from the sides of that crater, he can still win in the arena of propaganda as he was never brought forth whimpering, to soil himself before his judges as the customs of the region require. In the never-never land of the Middle Eastern propagandist, he can be made to live forever as a martyr.
Another contemporary example of adroit Iraqi manipulation of situations and the media is to be found in the goading of an American tank crew into returning fire against the Palestine Hotel, one of two government-required chicken coops for foreign journalists. At the cost of a few dollars worth of ammunition – and keeping a restricted access to the hotel’s roof – the regime has provided the Arab press with classic themes of disinformation to further embroider upon and, as an added bonus, they got to further alienate a pool of already hostile European journalists from the goals of the coalition.
That wide, genuine smile plastered on the Iraqi information minister, reassuringly talking to the stunned reporters stumbling from the hotel in their flak vests, was because he knew that he had scored big. A great day for a propagandist is when you can get your carefully manipulated victims to come tearfully back to your grasp for understanding and comfort, while you plot their next sacrifices to the cause. Goebbels would be proud.
By frankly discussing this dilemma, it should not be construed that I endorse our adoption of the virulent methodology of our enemies. But neither do I favor the path of inaction.
But “we” don’t do that kind of thing you say. The Vietnamese Gen. Giap put it most succinctly when replying that it “was irrelevant” to the American postwar complaint that “We never lost a battle to you.” The caring that was never seen given has no wider effect. The battle for belief of the populace is just as important as who lives or dies on the battlefields.
The situation at present is one where we have virtually conceded the field to our detractors. We did not do this against the Soviet bloc – nor should we in this case. A liberated Iraq will provide us a location from which begin broadcasting a different view of world events and a populace from which to draw tales of the realities of how they endured and were helped to escape from oppression.
While propagandists of the Arab street have used the tenets within their classic ethnic tales of the struggle of good against evil against us, they have no copyright. We can employ people who also come from those regional cultures to build upon those subconscious core beliefs so that a more truthful version of events can be made acceptable to an audience long put upon and yearning for change.
How about bringing a “Media of the Free Iraq” into being? That approach took decades of doggedly worming the truth into the closed and intimately manipulated populaces of Eastern Europe, but nothing comes quickly in the Middle East either. Patience may not be our forte, but we aren’t exactly strangers to it as the newly independent Poles who stand with us can tell you.
In the propaganda wars in the Middle East, we are playing catch-up ball in such a manner so as to demonstrate to an aware, but disinterested observer that we must have convinced ourselves that “winning isn’t anything.”
This must change if we are to claim any lasting success. Giap had a point.
Tom Marzullo is a former Special Forces soldier and a veteran of submarine special operations. He resides in Colorado.
