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Bush’s Democracy call
rings hollow in Arab world: A poll carried out by the Arab American Institute in Lebanon, Egypt,
Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates found that the Arab
world's opinion of the U.S. seems to have hardened over the past year, due primarily to opposition to the Iraq war and perceptions of
U.S. treatment of Arabs and Muslims. AAI president James Zogby said, "Of the four percent in Egypt and nine
percent in Saudi Arabia who said that 'President Bush's promotion of democracy
and reform' was the most important factor determining their attitudes toward
the U.S., over 80 percent said this effort worsened their view of the
U.S." (American Progress 120905) Jeff Gerth: The Military’s Information
war is vast and often secretive Lincoln says it
planted more than 1,000 articles in the Iraqi and Arab press and placed
editorials on an Iraqi Web site, Pentagon documents show. For an expanded
stealth persuasion effort into neighboring countries, Lincoln presented plans,
since rejected, for an underground newspaper, television news shows and an
anti-terrorist comedy based on "The Three Stooges." Like the Lincoln
Group, Army psychological operations units sometimes pay to deliver their
message, offering television stations money to run unattributed segments or
contracting with writers of newspaper opinion pieces, military officials said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/politics/11propaganda.html The Real Price of
Propaganda Exporting a bunch of budding Jayson Blairs simply feeds the unhelpful
image of Americans as inept and hypocritical puppetmasters. By Jonathon Alter, Newsweek, Dec. Issue If
you wander into a venerable Washington men's club and glimpse the distinguished
older man in the corner, trying to avoid spilling soup on his Brooks Brothers
suit, chances are reasonably good that he was in the CIA back in the 1940s and
'50s. And if you inquired what he actually did for the CIA during the cold war,
and he was inclined to tell you, the answer would likely be that he planted
pro-American stories in the foreign press, often with the intention of making
sure that elections in places like Greece and Turkey and Indonesia didn't end
up with a victory for the communists. Until the mid-1970s, when all of this was
exposed, these covert press operations were viewed within the government as a
modest plus in the battle for the hearts and minds of the rest of the world. Is
the same true in today's Iraq? Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that
the Pentagon was using U.S. troops to write positive articles about Iraq (for
instance, heralding the opening of a school), hiring Washington-based
contractors to translate the articles into Arabic, then secretly planting them
in the Iraqi press with bribes. As long as the stories are accurate, says Mary
Matalin, the former aide to Vice President Cheney who often speaks for the Bush
administration, they are "absolutely appropriate" in the war of images. This outsourcing of covert propaganda (everything is outsourced these days) tells us a lot about the two biggest
stories around—the venality of Republican Washington and the colossal failure
in Iraq—and how they're connected by a shadowy world of global public relations. We got into the war with the help of
something called the Rendon Group, a secretive firm that won a huge government contract to
"create the conditions for the removal of [Saddam] Hussein from
power." (According to an article by James Bamford in last week's Rolling
Stone, Rendon invented the "Iraqi National Congress" and put Judith
Miller and other reporters in touch with their bum sources on WMD.) Now the PR
pork scandal is moving to a different level. This year, the Pentagon granted three
contractors $300 million over 5 years to offer "creative ideas" for
psychological operations aimed at what the PR experts call "international
perception management." That $300 million will buy a lot of Arabic press
releases, but it's unavailable for, say, body armor. The
contractor implicated in the planted Iraqi press story is the Lincoln Group,
formerly Iraqex,
which boasts to prospective clients that it provides services ranging from
"political campaign intelligence" (dirt on your opponents in American
elections) to "commercial real estate in Iraq" (so you can buy the
choicest properties and tick off the Iraqis even more). It's run by one
Christian Bailey, a 30-year-old Oxford-educated fop who helped run the 2004
Republican National Convention, and once cohosted parties in New York limited
to those who had graduated from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Yale (Princeton
was apparently beneath them). I tried to learn whether Bailey's British accent
reflected British citizenship or more "perception management," but no
one from the Lincoln Group would call me back. Other reporters were told that
everything about the firm's operations was "classified." Bailey has
put a bunch of Bush campaign hacks on the gravy train, finagled security
clearances, then assigned them to corrupt the Iraqi media. Democracy in action! My problem with all of this is less ethical than practical.
If it helped build Iraqi democracy or blunted anti-American propaganda, it
might even be worth it (though certainly not at those prices). But exporting a
bunch of budding Jayson Blairs simply feeds the perception of Americans as
inept and hypocritical puppetmasters. If we won't withdraw our troops, can't we
at least withdraw our ham-handed propaganda efforts? Can't we stop discrediting
the truly independent Iraqi reporters and editors that American journalists are
helping to train? Can't we grasp the elemental point that an entirely
pro-American Arab media is, on its face, not credible in the region and
therefore not helpful to the cause of Iraqi independence? Obviously the United States needs to do better in countering
Arab libels. But the cold war taught us that propaganda works best when it's served straight
up—by Radio Free
Europe (a hugely positive influence) or by the commercial broadcasters who hawked
capitalism behind the Iron Curtain. Some of that is going on in today's Middle
East. The beaming of American-produced Farsi programming into Iran, for
instance, is working well. It's the culture of secrecy, self-dealing
and subversion of truth that's killing us. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10313724/site/newsweek/ |
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