Odds are even in the 'information'
war By Ehsan Ahrari
In this
information age, the American occupying forces in Iraq
have come face to face with a terrible reality:
insurgents of that country have become at least as savvy
in conducting information warfare - which includes
"perception management" through disinformation,
propaganda, and even deception - as the US military in
the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of the
Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims.
For the uninitiated,
the US military prides itself in being quite
sophisticated - in terms of developing both new
technologies and new tactics - at information warfare.
Now the Pentagon is considering a new strategy to
enhance its effectiveness. The essence of that strategy
is to combine public-affairs activities with those of
information warfare. However, this situation is causing
considerable angst in Washington, for the US military is
not supposed to conduct information operations if
information contained therein is also available to the
American people. A basic rule of the game thus far has
been that only foreign audiences can be targeted for
perception management.
But in an increasingly
shrinking and highly interconnected infosphere, such
distinctions are fast disappearing. A housewife in Ames,
Iowa, or Hoboken, New Jersey, with a few clicks of a
mouse, can reach the website of any newspaper in the
Middle East that might be carrying a story planted by
the US military as part of its information operations.
American politicians are likely to get quite upset at
the prospects of the military conducting propaganda
campaigns that would also wrongly influence the thinking
of the American people. The concern inside Washington is
how to remain believable at home and abroad at the same
time. A paradox here is that the requirements of
believability for the domestic and foreign audiences are
markedly different.
The Pentagon is currently
conducting a high-level debate about how far it can and
should go in managing or manipulating information to
sway public opinion abroad. Whatever it decides to do,
the fact that such a development is given high
visibility inside the United States places the
credibility of the government on shaky ground.
To be sure, there is nothing new about the US
government conducting information campaigns or planting
false stories in the international media, or
distributing lies. In the Cold War years, such practices
were frequent, though as a totalitarian system, the
Soviet Union practiced it more frequently than the
democratic United States. What is different now is that
the information age has leveled the playing field and
intensified the competition to win the hearts and minds
of a whole lot of people. What also dismays the United
States is that the number of Arab and Muslim
participants in this information warfare is rising. It
is also important to note that even the ability of the
US military to come up with new technologies or develop
new techniques to conduct information warfare does not
seem to matter much anymore. The Iraqi insurgents and
other Islamists quickly maneuver not only to acquire
cutting-edge technology, but also to copycat the latest
information-warfare-related tactics of the US military
in Iraq and elsewhere.
As if the presence of the
Arab television network al-Jazeera was not enough of a
headache for the US, there emerged al-Manar, a
television channel that broadcasts the perspectives of
the Lebanese Hezbollah, a Muslim militant group.
Al-Manar's website contains the following statement:
"Al-Manar is the first Arab establishment to stage an
effective psychological warfare [emphasis added]
against the Zionist enemy. Political, cultural and
social affairs are of special importance to the
station's programs. Most important is the struggle with
the Zionist enemy. In its course of work, al-Manar
focuses on live talk shows and dialogue programs in
which it makes sure to bring out different thoughts and
beliefs, in addition to the participation of the viewers
in the dialogues." Al-Manar was given world-class
publicity last week when French Prime Minister Jean
Pierre Raffarin labeled it "anti-Semitic" and
incompatible with French values. He announced that he
would seek to suspend it legally. Then, this Monday,
militant Palestinian group Hamas released a video
showing the actual digging of a tunnel in
Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory. Hamas later blew
up that tunnel, killing four Israeli soldiers and
injuring others. The video also contained scenes of the
actual explosion and the last handshake of two suicide
bombers who blew themselves up in that explosion. The
Musab al-Zarqawi group of insurgents has also been
releasing videos showing the slaughter of hostages and a
number of other terrorist acts in Iraq.
The
problem for the US military is how to keep separate
public-affairs campaigns, which are based on nothing but
truth, and information operations, which are in essence
propaganda campaigns. In fact, the crossing of the
Rubicon has already taken place, when General George W
Casey Jr, the ranking US commander in Iraq, last summer
approved the combining of the command's day-to-day
public-affairs operations with combat psychological and
information operations into a "single communication
office". That development is still not free of
controversy and concern, however. General Richard B
Myers, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed
his unease about "the risks of mingling the military
public affairs too closely with information operations",
since it has the potential of compromising the
credibility of the US force commanders. However, the
driving force on this issue in Iraq is the need for
flexibility to combat the insurgency, whose strength and
potency do not seem to be subsiding.
More
evidence of Iraqi insurgents' capabilities to conduct
nuanced and frequent propaganda campaigns is that
pressure at the top levels in the Pentagon is increasing
to create a "director of central information". The
director of this proposed organization "would have the
responsibility for budgeting and 'authoritative control
of messages' across all government that deal with
national security and foreign policy".
So the
battle is on for the swaying of hearts and minds of the
Muslim masses. Its chief focus for now is the Middle
East, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are very much on the
radar screen of the Pentagon, since al-Qaeda has
remained quite busy in conducting its own information
operations against the US presence in Afghanistan and
deriding the pro-American activities of the regime of
President General Pervez Musharraf, and even making two
attempts to assassinate him last December.
In
this continuing battle of propaganda, the greatest
disadvantage for the United States is that the intended
targets - the masses in the world of Islam - are
becoming increasingly sophisticated. They also are aware
that the United States as well as the Islamists are
dishing out information that contains only elements of
truth. But they are likely to be more receptive to the
propaganda from the Islamist side than to that coming
from the Americans. That standard statement about how
human beings process information helps to explain the
situation here. We believe or reject "fact" or "fiction"
on the basis of whether it fits or does not fit into our
own respective frames of reference; whether such
information/disinformation complements or contradicts
our fears, fancies, aspirations and nightmares.
Regarding all these variables, the United States
continues to face an uphill battle in the world of
Islam, its technological sophistication and its
psychological prolificacy about inventing new
psychological-warfare techniques notwithstanding.
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