How the public relations industry so... 
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How the public relations industry sold the Gulf War to the US
-- The mother of all clients
Part One
By John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton*
On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops led by dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-producing nation of Kuwait. Like Noriega in Panama, Hussein had been a US ally for nearly a decade. From 1980 to 1988, he had killed about 150,000 Iranians, in addition to at least 13,000 of his own citizens. Despite complaints from international human rights groups, however, the Reagan and Bush administrations had treated Hussein as a valuable ally in the US confrontation with Iran. As late as July 25 -- a week before the invasion of Kuwait -- US Ambassador April Glaspie commiserated with Hussein over a "cheap and unjust" profile by ABC's Diane Sawyer, and wished for an "appearance in the media, even for five minutes," by Hussein that "would help explain Iraq to the American people."1
Glaspie's ill-chosen comments may have helped convince the dictator that Washington would look the other way if he "annexed" a neighboring kingdom. The invasion of Kuwait, however, crossed a line that the Bush Administration could not tolerate. This time Hussein's crime was far more serious that simply gassing to death another brood of Kurdish refugees. This time oil was at stake.
Viewed in strictly moral terms, Kuwait hardly looked like the sort of country that deserved defending, even from a monster like Hussein. The tiny but super-rich state had been an independent nation for just a quarter century when in 1986 the ruling al-Sabah family tightened its dictatorial grip over the "black gold" fiefdom by disbanding the token National Assembly and firmly establishing all power in the be-jeweled hands of the ruling Emir. The, as now, Kuwait's ruling oligarchy brutally suppressed the country's small democracy movement, intimidated and censored journalists, and hired desperate foreigners to supply most of the nation's physical labor under conditions of indentured servitude and near-slavery. The wealthy young men of Kuwait's ruling class were know as spoiled party boys in university cities and national capitals from Cairo to Washington.2
Unlike Grenada and Panama, Iraq had a substantial army that could not be subdued in a mere weekend of fighting. Unlike the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Hussein was too far away from US soil, too rich with oil money, and too experienced in ruling through propaganda and terror to be dislodged through the psychologicalwarfare techniques of low-intensity conflict. Waging a war to push Iraq's invading army from Kuwait would cost billions of dollars and require massive US military mobilization. The American public was notoriously reluctant to send its young into foreign battles on behalf of any cause. Selling war in the Middle East to the American people would not be easy. Bush would need to convince Americans that former ally Saddam Hussein now embodied evil, and that the oil fiefdom of Kuwait was a struggling young democracy. How could the Bush Administration build US support for "liberating" a country so fundamentally opposed to democratic values? How could the war appear noble and necessary rather than a crass grab to save cheap oil?
"If and when a shooting war starts, reporters will begin to wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks," warned Hal Steward, a retired army public relations (PR) official. "The US military had better get cracking to come up with a public relations plan that will supply the answer the public can accept."3
Steward needn't have worried. A PR plan was already in place,
paid for almost entirely by the "oil-rich sheiks" themselves.
Packaging the Emir, Part 1
US Congressman Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana -- a conservative Democrat who supported the Gulf War -- later estimated that the government of Kuwait funded as many as 20 PR, law and lobby firms in its campaign to mobilize US opinion and force against Hussein.4 Participating firms included the Rendon Group, which received a retainer of $100,000 per month for media work, and Neill & Co., which received $50,000 per month for lobbying Congress. Sam Zakhem, a former US ambassador to the oil-rich gulf state of Bahrain, funneled $7.7 million in advertising and lobbying dollars through two front groups, the "Coalition for Americans at Risk" and the "Freedom Task Force. The Coalition, which began in the 1980s as a front for the contras in Nicaragua, prepared and placed TV and newspaper ads, and kept a stable of fifty speakers available for pro-war rallies and publicity events.5
Hill & Knowlton (H&K), then the world's largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. It's activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it. Nine days after Saddam's army marched into Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a contract under which Hill & Knowlton would represent "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" (CFK) a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the Bush administration. Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti government channeled $11.9 million dollars to Citizens for a Free Kuwait, whose only other funding totalled $17,862 from 78 individuals. Virtually all of CFK's budget -- $10.8 million -- went to Hill & Knowlton in the form of fees.6
The man running Hill & Knowlton's Washington office was Craig Fuller, one of Bush's closest friends and inside political advisors. The news media never bothered to examine Fuller's role until after the war had ended, but if American's editors had read the PR trade press, they might have noticed this announcement, published in O'Dwyer's PR Services before the fighting began: "Craig L. Fuller, chief of staff to Bush when he was vice-president, has been on the Kuwaiti account at Hill & Knowlton since the first day. He and [Bob] Dilenschneider at one point made a trip to Saudi Arabia, observing the production of some 20 videotapes, among other chores. The Wirthlin Group, research arm of H&K, was the pollster for the Reagan Administration . . . Wirthlin has reported receiving$1.1 million in fees for research assignments for the Kuwaitis. Robert K. Gray, Chairman of H&K/USA based in Washington, DC has leading roles in both Reagan campaigns. He has been involved in foreign nation accounts for many years . . . Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, account supervisor on the Kuwait account, is a former Foreign Service Officer at the US Information Agency who joined Gray when he set up his firm in 1982:"7
In addition to Republican notables like Gray and Fuller, Hill & Knowlton maintained a well-connected stable of in-house Democrats who helped develop the bipartisan support needed to support the war. Lauri Fitz-Pegado, who headed the Kuwait campaign, had previously worked with super-lobbyist Ron Brown representing Haiti's Duvalier dictatorship. Hill & Knowlton senior vicepresident Thomas Ross had been Pentagon spokesman during the Carter Administration. To manage the news media, H&K relied on vicechairman Frank Mankiewicz, whose background included service as press secretary and advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern, followed by a stint as president of National Public Radio. Under his direction, Hill & Knowlton arranged hundreds of meetings, briefings, calls and mailings directed toward the editors of daily newspapers and other media outlets.
Jack O'Dwyer had reported on the PR business for more than twenty years, but he was awed by the rapid and expansive work of H&K on behalf of Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "Hill & Knowlton . . . has assumed a role in world affairs unprecedented for a PR firm. H&K has employed a stunning variety of opinion-forming devices and techniques to help keep US opinion on the side of the Kuwaitis . . . The techniques range from full-scale press conferences showing torture and other abuses by the Iraqis to the distribution of tens of thousand of 'Free Kuwait" T-shirts and bumper stickers at colleges campuses across the US."8
Documents filed with the US Department of Justice showed that 119 H&K executives in 12 offices across the US were overseeing the Kuwait account. "The firm's activities, as listed in its report to the Justice Department, included arranging media interview for visiting Kuwaitis, setting up observances such as National Free Kuwait Day, National Prayer Day (for Kuwait), and National Student Information Day, organizing public rallies, releasing hostage letters to the media, distributing news releases and information kits, contacting politicians at all levels, and producing a nightly radio show in Arabic from Saudi Arabia, wrote Arthur Rowse in the Progressive after the war. Citizens for a Free Kuwait also capitalized on the publication of a quickie 154-page book about Iraqi atrocities titled The Rape of Kuwait, copies of which were stuffed into media kits and then featured on TV talk shows and the Wall Street Journal. The Kuwaiti embassy also bought 200,000 copies of the book for distribution to American troops.9
TO BE CONTINUED. Yet to come: "Packaging the Emir, Part 2,"
"Suffer the little children," and "Front-line flacks."
1. John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in
the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 1992),
pp. 51-53.
2. Ibid.
3. Hal D. Steward, "A Public Relations Plan for the US Military
in the Middle East," Public Relations Quarterly, Winter (1990-
91), p. 10.
4. "H&K leads PR charge in behalf of Kuwaiti cause," O'Dwyer's PR
Services Report, Vol. 5, No., Jan 1991, p. 8.
5. "Citizens for Free Kuwait Files with FARA after a Nine-month
Lag," O'Dwyers FARA Report, Vol. 1, No. 9, Oct. 1991, p. 2.
See also Arthur E. Rowse, "Flacking for the Emir," The
Progressive, May 1991, p. 22.
6. O'Dwyer's FARA Report, Vol. 1, No. 9, Oct. 1991, p.2.
7. O'Dwyer's FARA Report, Vol. 5, No. 1, Jan. 1991, pp 8, 10.
8. Ibid, p. 1.
9. Rowse, pp. 21-22.
*From: Toxic Sludge is Good for you! Lies, Damn Lies and the
Public Relations Industry (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press,
1995.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
** From Blazing Tattles (BT) May 1996. Email sent to Blazing
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This is a reply to # 144,984How the public relations industry sold the Gulf War to the U.S. --
The mother of all clients
Part Two
By John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton*,**
PACKAGING THE EMIR, Part 2
Hill & Knowlton produced dozens of video news releases (VNRs) at a cost of well over half a million dollars, but it was money well spent, resulting in tens of millions of dollars worth of "free" air time. The VNRs were shown by eager TV news directors around the world who rarely (if ever) identified Kuwait's public relations (PR) firm as the source of the footage and stories. TV stations and networks simply fed the carefully-crafted propaganda to unwitting viewers, who assumed they were watching "real" journal- ism. After the war Arthur Rowse asked Hill & Knowlton to show him some of the VNRs, but the PR company refused. Obviously the phony TV news reports had served their purpose and it would do H&K no good to help a reporter reveal the extent of deception. In Unreliable Sources, authors Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted that "when a research team from the communications department of the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about U.S. policy in the region, they drew some sobering conclusions. The more television people watched, the fewer facts they knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely they were to back the Bush administration.1
Throughout the campaign, the Wirthlin Group conducted daily opinion polls to help Hill & Knowlton take the emotional pulse of
key constituencies so it could identify the themes and slogans that would be most effective in promoting support for U.S. military action. After the war ended. the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced an Emmy award-winning TV documentary on the PR campaign titled "To Sell a War." The show featured an interview with Wirthlin executive Dee Alsop in which Alsop bragged of his work and demonstrated how audience surveys were even used to physically adapt the clothing and hairstyle of the Kuwait ambassador so he would seem more likeable to TV audiences. Wirthlin's job, Alsop explained, was "to identify the messages that really resonate emotionally with the American people." The theme that struck the deepest emotional chord, they discovered, was "the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped."2
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
Every big media event needs what journalist and flacks alike refer to as "the hook." An ideal hook becomes the central element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional response, and sticks in the memory. In the case of the Gulf War, the "hook" was invented by Hill & Knowlton. In style, substance and mode of delivery, it bore an uncanny resemblance to England's World War I hearings that accused German soldiers of killing babies.
On October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill which provided the first opportunity for formal presentations of Iraqi human rights violations. Outwardly, the hearing resembled an official congressional proceeding, but appearances were deceiving. In reality, the Human Rights Caucus, chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, was simply an association of politicians. Lantos and Porter were co-chairs of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a legally separate entity that occupied free office space valued at $3,000 a year in Hill & Knowlton's Washington, DC office. Notwithstanding its congressional trappings, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus served as another Hill & Knowlton front group, which -- like all front groups -- used a noble-sounding name to disguise its true purpose.3
Only a few astute observers noticed the hypocrisy in Hill & Knowlton's use of the term "human rights." One of those observers was John MacArthur, author of The Second Front, which remains the best book written about the manipulation of the news media during the Gulf War. In the fall of 1990, MacArthur reported, Hill & Knowlton's Washington switchboard was simultaneously fielding calls for the Human Rights Foundation and for "government representatives of Indonesia, another H&K client. Like H&K client Turkey, Indonesia is a practitioner of naked aggression, having seized . . . the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975. Since the annexation of East Timor, the Indonesian government was killed, by conservative estimate, about 100,000 inhabitants of the region.4
MacArthur also noticed another telling detail about the October 1990 hearings. "The Human Rights Caucus is not a committee of congress, and therefore it is unencumbered by the legal accouterments that would make a witness hesitate before he or she lied . . . Lying under oath in front of a congressional committee is a crime; lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations.5
In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."6
Three months passed between Nayirah's testimony and the start of the war. During those months, the story of the babies torn from their incubators was repeated over and over again. President Bush told the story. It was recited as fact in Congressional testimony, on TV and radio talk shows, and at the UN Security Council. "Of all the accusations made against the dictator," MacArthur observed, "none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies for their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City."8
At the Human Rights Caucus, however, Hill & Knowlton and Congressman Lantos had failed to reveal that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father, in fact, was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the U.S., who sat listening in the hearing room during her testimony. The Caucus also failed to reveal that H&K vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached Nayirah in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony.
If Nayirah's outrageous lie had been exposed at the time it was told, it might have at least caused some in Congress and the news media to soberly reevaluate the extent to which they were being skillfully manipulated to support military action. Public opinion was deeply divided on Bush's Gulf policy. As late as December 1990, a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that 48 percent of the American people wanted Bush to wait before taking any action if Iraq failed to withdraw from Kuwait by Bush's January 15 deadline.8 On January 12, the US Senate voted by a narrow, five-vote margin to support the Bush administration in a declaration of war. Given the narrowness of the vote, the babies- thrown-from-incubators story may have turned the tide in Bush's favor.
Following the war, human rights investigators attempted to confirm Nayirah's story and could find no witnesses or other evidence to support it. Amnesty International, which had fallen for the story, was forced to issue an embarrassing retraction. Nayirah herself was unavailable for comment. "This is the first allegation I've had that she was the ambassador's daughter," said Human Rights Caucus co-chair John Porter. "Yes, I think people . . . were entitled to know the source of her testimony." When journalists asked Nasir al-Sabah for permission to question Nayirah about her story, the ambassador angrily refused.9
FRONT-LINE FLACKS
The military build-up in the Persian Gulf began by flying and shipping hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, armaments and supplies to staging areas in Saudi Arabia, yet another nation with no tolerance for a free press, democratic rights and most western customs. In a secret strategy memo, the Pentagon outlined a tightly woven plan to constrain and control journalists. A massive baby-sitting operation would ensure that no truly independent or uncensored reporting reached back to the U.S. public. "News media representatives will be escorted at all times," the memo stated. "Repeat, at all times."10
Deputy Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Pete Williams served as the Pentagon's top flack for the Gulf War. Using the perennial PR strategy of "good cop/bad cop," the government of Saudi Arabia play the "heavy," denying visas and access to the U.S. press, while Williams, the reporters' friend, appeared to intercede repeatedly on their behalf. This strategy kept news organization competing with each other for favors from Williams, and kept them from questioning the fundamental fact that journalistic indepen- dence was impossible under military escort and censorship.
The overwhelming technological superiority of the U.S. forces won a decisive victory in the brief and brutal war known as Desert Storm. Afterwards, some in the media quietly admitted that they'd been manipulated to produce sanitized coverage which almost entirely ignored the war's human costs -- today estimated at over 100,000 civilian deaths. The American public's single most lasting memory of the war will probably be the ridiculously successful video stunts supplied by the Pentagon showing robot "smart bombs" striking only their intended military targets, without much "collateral" (civilian) damage.
"Although influential media such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal kept promoting the illusion of the `clean war,' a different picture began to emerge after the U.S. stopped carpet-bombing Iraq," note Lee and Solomon. "The pattern underscored what Napoleon meant when he said that it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered."11
POSTSCRIPT
For Hill & Knowlton, the Kuwaiti account was a sorely-needed cash cow, appearing at a time that the PR giant was suffering from low employee morale amid controversies surrounding some of its sleazier clients. When the Kuwait money dried up at the end of the war, Hill & Knowlton went into a precipitous decline. A series of layoffs and resignations at its Washington office, including a mass walkout of two dozen employees, reduced that staff from 250 to about 90. Clients began deserting the company, and rival PR firm Burson-Marsteller stepped in to take its place as the world's largest PR firm.
NOTES
1. Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A
Guide to Detecting Bias in New Media (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1991).
p. xvii.
2. Transcript, "To Sell a War," pp. 3-4.
3. John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda
in the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 1992),
p. 60.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 58.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 54.
8. New York Times/CBS News poll, as reported in O'Dwyer's PR
Services Report, Jan. 1991, p. 10
9. "To Sell a War," pp. 4-5,
10. MacArthur, p. 7.
11. Lee & Solomon, p. xix
*Toxic Sludge is Good for You, Lies, Damn Lies and the Public
Relations, 1995.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
**Blazing Tattles, June 96. No part of this may be reproduced
in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the
publisher. Responses to the above article may be quoted in future
issues unless writer explicitly requests otherwise. For informa-
tion about Blazing Tattles send inquiry to .
Blazing Tattles is at P.O. Box 1073, Half Moon Bay, CA 94019.
http://www.io.com/~patrik/gulfwar2.htm
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- War Needs Good Public Relations #166516
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This is a reply to # 144,985
October 25, 2001
War Needs Good Public Relations
By Norman Solomon
For some people, war is terror, disaster and death. For others, it's a PR problem.
At the Rendon Group, a public-relations firm with offices in Boston and Washington, pleasant news arrived the other day with a $397,000 contract to help the Pentagon look good while bombing Afghanistan. The four-month deal includes an option to renew through most of 2002.
This is a job for savvy PR pros who know how to sound humanistic. "At the Rendon Group, we believe in people," says the company's mission statement, which expresses "our admiration and respect for cultural diversity" and proclaims a commitment to "helping people win in the global marketplace."
A media officer at the Pentagon explained why Rendon got the contract. "We needed a firm that could provide strategic counsel immediately," Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan said. "We were interested in someone that we knew could come in quickly and help us orient to the challenge of communicating to a wide range of groups around the world."
As a PR outfit, Rendon has moved in some powerful economic circles, with clients including official trade agencies of the United States, Bulgaria, Russia and Uzbekistan. In Washington, the firm helped organize a series of conferences on "post-privatization management in the global telecommunications, electric power, oil and gas, banking and finance, and transportation sectors." Some of the clientele has been more liberal or touchy-feely: Handgun Control Inc. and the American Massage Therapy Association.
Rendon proudly notes that it provided "community and media relations counsel to the Monsanto Chemical Company in its effort to clean up several contaminated sites." Overseas, Rendon helped the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation to cope with labor strife and bad press when closing a refinery in Naples, Italy.
Some clients have been more shadowy. Rendon worked for the government of Kuwait in the early 1990s. And the firm made a lot of money by contracting with the CIA to do media work for the Iraqi National Congress, an organization seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Now, the Rendon Group is facing what is perhaps its most challenging project yet -- spinning for a war in Afghanistan. With its sights set on media content in 79 countries, Rendon will use standard tools of the PR trade, such as focus groups, websites and rigorous analysis of news coverage.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that "we need to do a better job to make sure that people are not confused as to what this is about." It's typical of warmakers to claim that the biggest problems lie with others' faulty perceptions rather than their own deadly orders. But no amount of PR wizardry can change the cold facts: when a bomb hits a home for the elderly or a hospital or a residential neighborhood, or when a bombing campaign sets in motion a cataclysm of mass starvation.
If some people are "confused" about this war, it may be because they remember the rationale for it: Killing thousands of civilians is unconscionable.
Though you wouldn't know much about it from watching TV news or skimming the front pages, large numbers of Afghans -- many of them children and elderly -- are facing the likelihood of starvation because the bombing has forced recurrent halts to the movement of food-aid trucks from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Concern is growing among humanitarian aid workers that about 100,000 people are now in imminent peril. By winter, the number could be in the millions.
Meanwhile, on television, we see footage of air-dropped meals that amount to no more than 1 percent of what's needed to prevent people from starving. That's called good PR.
At this point, the playbook for the Pentagon's media game is a familiar one. Consider the words of Eugene Secunda, a professor of marketing and former senior vice president of the J. Walter Thompson firm. "Operation Desert Storm allowed only one view of the battle: the one authorized by the military," he observed in 1991. "Like travelers led from their buses by tour guides, the TV crews were given an opportunity to videotape the 'panoramic vista' before them, and then were whisked to the next officially authorized destination."
Writing a decade ago, Secunda foreshadowed the kind of coverage we're now seeing. "In the aftermath of the war with Iraq, strategic planners, preparing for future wars, are unquestionably examining the lessons gleaned from this triumphant experience. One of the most important lessons learned is the necessity of mobilizing strong public support, through the projection of a powerful and tightly controlled PR program, with particular effort directed toward the realization of positive news coverage."
As bombs routinely fall on Afghanistan, that's the kind of coverage that dominates television screens in the United States. For now, anyway, the Pentagon is winning its PR war at home.
Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media."
*** Note to readers of "Media Beat": If you'd like to see Norman Solomon's syndicated column appear in a local daily newspaper, you can help-- by contacting the opinion-page editors of papers in your area and urging that they give the column a try. Editors can make arrangements by phoning Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles or by sending an email note to mediabeat@igc.org.
- Why Bush Needs to Spin the War #166516
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This is a reply to # 144,996
Why Bush Needs to Spin the War
By David Corn, AlterNet
November 9, 2001
"Don't worry. You'll be safe. We know how to take care of terrorists here."
So said the chuckling immigration officer at Port of Spain the other day. I had been dispatched to Trinidad by the U.S. State Department to conduct a two-day seminar on investigative reporting for local journalists (your tax dollars at work!), and the first Trini I encountered could not resist needling the Americans.
The next day, amid talk of the Freedom of Information Act, finding sources, and Internet-assisted-reporting, one of the fifteen island journalists asked me and my colleague, Bonnie Goldstein, a former investigative producer for ABC News, what we thought of the U.S. media's coverage of the September 11 attacks. Before we could respond, several participants volunteered their opinions.
"The first day was fine, then it was too much, too much."
"Hysterical."
"It was, 'oh, poor, poor us.'"
"Like the United States was the only country ever to be hit by terrorism."
"Self-pity, plenty of self-pity."
A consensus formed: a self-indulgent America was excessively obsessed with its own suffering.
And this was coming from our friends – reporters who live in a city overflowing with KFC restaurants and who had, on their own accord, come to the information office of the U.S. embassy desperately seeking pointers from American journalists. They were not insensitive to the horror of September 11, but neither were they overly sympathetic to America's pain and fear or deferential to U.S. concerns.
This exchange might have served as a focus group for the White House, as Bush presses his (latest) new initiative to sell overseas the war against terrorism. After a month of bombing, the Administration seemed to conclude it was, as the media cliche went, "losing the PR battle." The Bush White House was not admitting this in public. But others were saying so. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a newspaper he saw "danger signs" the West was falling behind in this part of the struggle. Various commentators issued similar warnings. The war-worriers cried that Bush was not only losing ground in the Muslim world but that he also was slipping in Europe.
Bush's actions showed he agreed. In speeches he started comparing the Taliban and al Qaeda – the "evildoers" – to the "fascist totalitarians" of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The goal was, as several White House reporters put it, to "demonize" Osama bin Laden. Bush opened rapid-response centers in Washington, London and Pakistan to counter Taliban reports. He sent Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, to Hollywood to take a meeting with studio execs and discuss what the flix-folks can do to bolster America's wartime image. And he hired Charlotte Beers, an advertising honcho once dubbed the Queen of Madison Avenue, to pull together a message operation to pitch the war – partly via a television and advertising campaign to influence Islamic opinion.
Beers, famous within advertising circles for having handled the Uncle Ben's rice account, serves as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. She told Andrea Mitchell, "I dislike that phrase selling because that's way too arrogant for where we are now. I think the best we can do is open a dialogue of mutual respect and understanding. I'd actually be very satisfied with that."
A dialogue? That's not a very high standard for an ad exec. In another interview, she noted, "What we haven't felt the need to communicate is what is the value system [of the United States] ... What are our beliefs? What do the words 'freedom' and 'tolerance' mean? We are having people who are not our friends define America in negative terms. It is time for us to reignite the understanding of America."
In other words, people elsewhere have America pegged wrong. And that is the fault of the foes of the United States. What does the Administration have in mind to turn this situation around? A Bombing for Tolerance campaign? Ads with Michael Jordan attesting to the goodness of America? (The slogan: "Be like us.") Will Bush intensify Operation Demonization and start referring to bin Laden as the anti-Christ? Movies that show Middle Eastern terrorists plotting mass murder against the decent civilians of the West? (That base has been covered.)
This is not to make light of the seriousness of the massacre committed on September 11 by people who are indeed evil or to diminish the threat of further violence that still exists. But talk of reselling the war kicks up a question Bush and his advisers have not addressed in public: why have they had such a tough time closing the sale?
Bush could not have had an easier set-up. A villain out of a James Bond film unleashes murder and mayhem against thousands of civilians – including many from countries other than the United States. He essentially acknowledges his culpability and threatens more of the same. He calls for uprisings against various Arab states. He is protected by a regime of totalitarian, misogynistic, extremists who maintain official relations with only three other nations in the world.
How could Bush be outflanked by this foul individual? How much more can bin Laden be demonized? (He's Lucifer and he has nuclear weapons!) Shouldn't a just war, a good war, be largely self-evident? No spinning required? In recent days, pundits, commentators, and administration officials (the latter speaking off the record) have asserted that Washington needs to find and promote Islamic voices that can present the case for the war. As former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke said, "We need to use authentic and credible Muslims, clerics and religious leaders and political speakers ... speaking in their own terms, not just President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, to make clear to the people in the Middle East and the whole Muslim world ... to make clear to them what's going on." But this advice ignores a sad reality: such persons have not felt compelled to spout ringing endorsements of Bush's war. What might be the reasons for this?
Here's a partial answer with two pieces: throughout much of the world, America has no credit to draw upon, and, beyond that, Bush has so bungled the meta-framework of this war that PR efforts may be useless at this point. When you're the only superpower left standing, large portions of the rest of the world may feel resentment and not possess a charitable attitude toward you. But the United States's decision to share only a meager slice of its tremendous wealth with other nations, its my-way-or-the-highway approach to certain international matters, its rapacious consumption of a disproportionate amount of global resources (see SUVs), its occasional heavy-handed interventions on behalf of less-than-exemplary regimes – all of this has left it little good will in the bank of international sentiment. It rescued Europe six decades ago. But there's been a lot of oil under the bridge since then.
Among my new friends in Trinidad, I sensed a bit of satisfaction that America received a dose of comeuppance. We're sorry, of course we are, yes, but why did you believe you were entitled to protection from the dangers of the world order that you have helped shape, that you benefit from so greatly, and that you claim to lead? So when the United States requests help from others, many are not eager to fall in.
Moreover, Bush has presented his war in a manner that exacerbates rather than ameliorates ambivalence (or antagonism) toward America. He and his aides keep saying either you're with us or against us. In other parts of the world, this sort of talk might sound bullying, which can reinforce perceptions of U.S. arrogance. The notion that the United States is fighting for freedom, as Bush continually insists, ought to come across as laughable to anyone abroad with a sense of history. Washington has a long record of supporting governments that opposed freedom (Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, South Africa, Greece, Iran, among others). Now it makes common cause with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, nations that do not offer freedom to all their citizens. And it maintains a close relationship with Israel, which denies freedoms to non-Jews within its borders. The United States is not fighting for freedom. It is not fighting for tolerance. (If so, it would send troops into Saudi Arabia). It is fighting to protect itself and to destroy a small group of barbaric individuals who also threaten other nations. That's not a minor thing. But a honest depiction of what was under way might carry more resonance than the phony rhetoric Bush pushes – and which will be enshrined in sophisticated, celebrity-laden commercials.
As for the civilian casualties in Afghanistan, they indeed are a PR nightmare, and they should be. But is it possible that civilian deaths are even more upsetting when they occur under a false flag?
The problem is not just message. It's deeds – past and present. This is hardly a radical view. As the subversive Wall Street Journal reported this past week, the Administration's call "for a united front against terrorism" is "gaining little credence" in the Muslim world because U.S. policies "are perceived as biased" and "anger at America serves as a lightning rod for social, economic and political dissatisfaction." The paper quoted a diplomat from a pro-U.S. country, who observed, "So far, the United States is treating this as an advertising and public-relations campaign. To capture the hearts and minds of people, one has to tackle those issues closest to their heart. The U.S. has to convince people of the integrity and fairness of its policies." The diplomat noted that "the kinds of things Arabs and Muslims are looking for" include "a demonstrated willingness to pressure Israel to moderate its policies toward the Palestinians ... and a policy toward Iraq that targets" Saddam Hussein "without penalizing the Iraqi people."
Holbrooke gripes that "our message isn't getting through because we have bad messages and bad messengers." No doubt. Yet how effective can the policy be, if it is so difficult to explain?
David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11893
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