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Imperialist Communication and Culture Wars |
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"As the U.S. promises to establish political transparency and freedom of speech in Iraq, they finance propaganda to mythologize their hated occupation."
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The Bush Administration’s neoconservative militarism in Iraq has led to a globe-spanning backlash against the U.S. Empire. The occupation of Iraq never had the ideological consent of Iraqis, nor much of the world. ‘Over the last 200 years’, writes Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘the United States acquired a considerable amount of ideological credit. But these days, the United States is running through its credit even faster than it ran through its gold surplus in the 1960s.’ [1] Ideologically bankrupt is the U.S. to Muslim populations, [2] especially those Muslims currently resisting occupation in Iraq. America’s historically hubristic self-imaging as a non-imperialist power, benevolent global cop, and beacon of freedom, democracy and justice, has been quickly turned inside out. Today, anger at the U.S. Empire grows in tandem with the transparent contradictions unleashed every time it attempts and fails to manufacture global consent to its foreign policy. As the truth of U.S. imperialism becomes clearer to the world, the U.S. Empire suffers (and is attempting to ideologically counter) an anti-American backlash with new propaganda campaigns. Following the early stages of the occupation of Iraq, the U.S. neoconservative intellectual class understood that the Empire was already suffering a crisis of international legitimacy. [3] For Joshua Muravchik anti-Americanism was on the rise because the U.S. state disarmed the ideological weapons it used to fight the Cold War in the 1990s: ‘USIA funding was slashed repeatedly as conservative isolationists and budget hawks teamed up with liberal relativists averse to American propaganda.’ Obscuring how global anti-Americanism has more to do with militarized foreign policy and the economic brutality of the Washington Consensus than it does with budget cuts to propaganda, Muravchik pontificated: ‘We must carry out a campaign of explanation aimed at Europe and the rest of the world about our view of the uses of American power.’ [4] U.S. intellectuals, the U.S. State Department and associated think-tanks have called for a strengthened cultural and informational strategy to overcome the U.S. Empire’s crisis of legitimacy in the Middle East. Finding America’s Voice: A Strategy for Reinvigorating US Public Diplomacy (composed by an independent task force sponsored by the Council for Foreign Relations), Strengthening US-Muslim Communications (drafted by the Centre for the Study of the Presidency), How to Reinvigorate US Public Diplomacy (written up by the neocon ideologues at the Heritage Foundation), The Youth Factor: The New Cultural Demographics of the Middle East and the Implications for US Policy (published by the Brookings Institute) and Changing Minds and Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for US Public Diplomacy in the Arab & Muslim World (an extensively researched U.S. government document) all recommend the re-organization and re-financing of the U.S. Empire’s international, cultural and informational state apparatuses to spark a pro-U.S. ideological change in regions of the Middle East where U.S. interests are at stake. Over the past five years, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and U.S.-based media and PR firms have synergistically waged an ideological war to repair the severely damaged global image of the U.S., to mobilize consent for U.S. foreign policy, and to universalize U.S. values. Brand Imperialism Doesn’t Sell Following the attacks of 9/11, the Bush Administration recruited Charlotte Beers, one of Madison Avenue’s top brand marketers, as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Beers, a former executive at both J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather advertising agencies, had the mission of re-branding and selling the ‘American Way of Life’ to the world. [5] Especially targeted were countries with large Muslim populations. Beers’ largest advertising campaign was entitled ‘Shared Values.’ Highlights included portable U.S. virtual reality rooms, a documentary called “Covering Catastrophes” and television clips with assimilated Muslim-Americans praising the (purported) religious tolerance and racial equality of the U.S. A booklet called Muslim Life in America reached approximately 288 million people in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. [6] Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared on MTV to tell more than 375 million young global viewers about the virtues of the U.S. war on terrorism. [7] A magazine called Hi, designed to appeal to Muslim teenagers, was sold for $2 dollars (ironically, in regions where per capita incomes are as low as $930 a year). [8] The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) established a few new ideological state television and radio apparatuses in hopes of winning Muslim hearts and minds to the American Dream. In 2001, the BBG imagined “Initiative 911,” a $750 million dollar state-sponsored Arabic language television network with broadcasts in 26 languages to 40 Muslim-populated countries. [9] Following this, Radio Farda - a Persian language service - was transmitted to Iran in 2002. [10] The BBG also launched Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language network that broadcasts 24-hours a day and seven-days-a-week, targeting Muslim youth with a mix of American and Arabic pop music. By 2004, a Middle Eastern Television Network called Al-Hurra, or “The Free One,’ was fully operational. Al-Hurra is a U.S.-government run commercial-free Arabic-language satellite television channel; it broadcasts a mix of international American news, discussion programs, and current affairs. To build support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Beers recruited Ken Pollock (author of Threatening Storm, a book that rationalizes the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq) to give lectures across Europe. [11] A four-colour booklet translated in many languages entitled Iraq: From Fear to Freedom and a digital conference program called “Iraqi Voices for Freedom” were launched to make a moral (neo-imperialist) case for the invasion. However, any ideological credibility Beers’ public diplomacy accumulated for the U.S. Empire was quickly spent in 2003 with the unilateral and illegal invasion. [12] The shock and awe bombing raid incinerated the feel-good packaging of Beers’ brand, exposing the brutalizing social relations so-often concealed by its commodified fetishes and sophisticated technological designs. The attack revealed, along with dead bodies and oil contracts for U.S corporations, the disjuncture between what the U.S. Empire claims to be doing, and what it actually does. ‘Having witnessed the chaotic crisis unfolding in Baghdad, Arab public opinion [. . .] seems more convinced than ever that the Anglo-American slogan of “winning hearts and minds” is sheer cynicism, a strategy for mass deception.’ [13] After 17-months of failing to convince her Muslim target market to consume and become part of the U.S. imperialist brand (and widespread criticism of Brand America’s patronizing message), [14] Beers resigned from the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy. [15] The early failures of U.S. cultural imperialism in the Middle East led to the re-staffing of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy. On March 15, 2005, Condoleezza Rice announced the appointment of Karen Hughes (one of Bush’s old religious advisors and close friends) as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. [16] Rice exalted Hughes’ global mission to legitimize the U.S. Empire’s foreign policy: “Our nation must engage in a much stronger dialogue with the world [. . .]. Too few know of the protections that we provide for freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. And too few know of the value we place on international institutions and the rule of law. [. . .] The time has come to look anew at our institutions of public diplomacy. We must do much more to confront hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths and get out the truth. We must increase our exchanges with the rest of the world. [. . .] Our interaction with the rest of the world must not be a monologue. It must be a conversation.” Accepting the appointment from Rice, Hughes implied that the ideological mission of the U.S. to universalize American-style freedom, democracy, and individual liberty was God’s will: “This is a struggle for ideas [. . .]. Through greater use of today's technologies, the internet and satellite television, through our vital people-to-people exchanges, through more creative public diplomacy programs, we will partner in common cause with other countries to defeat propaganda with truth. [. . .] Freedom is the universal hope of the human heart, instilled not by any country or government but by the Creator, who cares for each of us and wants us to learn to care for one another.” Unsurprisingly the free-media principles espoused by Rice and Hughes’ public diplomacy speeches are shamed by the hard reality of U.S. psychological warfare and information operations. Psychological Warfare and Info-Ops in Iraq In Information Operations: Warfare and the Hard Reality of Soft Power, Leigh Armistead argues that the goal of U.S. information operations is to win ‘full spectrum dominance’ and ‘information superiority’ in information battles with rival states and groups. The U.S. Department of Defense must ‘collect, shape, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or destroying an adversary’s ability to do the same.’ [17] The U.S. ‘war on terrorism’ necessitates the fusion of state and capitalist power: ‘The full integration across government agencies with the private industry must occur.’ [18] Information operations ‘must also be led from the top-down, with full White House and National Security Council leadership to ensure full inter-agency participation.’ [19] Proposals for U.S. information operations coming from minds like Armistead’s were put into practice following 9/11, and specifically in Iraq. In October 2001, the Department of Defense (DOD) took part in re-working the U.S. Empire’s informational apparatuses. The Department of Defense issued a Report of the Defense Science Task Force on Managed Information Dissemination. For the Task Force, the global omnipresence of the U.S. commercial media was not alone capable of circulating U.S. propaganda. While CNN, AOL-Time Warner, and other global media ‘provide an abundance of credible information,’ noted the Task Force, they ‘cannot and should not be relied on to act as advocates for national security policies.’ [20] The Task Force advised the U.S. government to build and strategically coordinate an information warfare campaign, as ‘in the information age, influence and power go to those who can [. . .] mobilize publics to support interests, goals, and objectives.’ [21] The DOD established the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) to call ‘for aggressive campaigns that used not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations.’ Everything from black propaganda (official lies planted in the foreign press to embellish U.S. aims) to white propaganda (the manipulation of foreign journalists to bias their reporting to U.S. goals) would be employed. [22] After suffering widespread public outrage, the OSI was closed down. [23] The Office of Strategic Communication (OSC) and a host of other temporary information warfare apparatuses took its place. Throughout 2003, the bulk of U.S. psychological warfare capabilities were mobilized for ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom.’ The physical attack was accompanied by the psychological attack of Commando Solo, a giant psy-ops aircraft. The email servers, radios, and cell phones of Ba’athist leaders were electrocuted with U.S. demands to abandon Hussein. Hundreds of thousands of air-dropped leaflets psychologically terrorized soldiers and civilians, threatening them with extermination if they refused to surrender. Other leaflets advised Iraqi civilians to listen to a Commando Solo radio station that was modelled on a popular Iraqi radio program called ‘The Voice of Youth.’ There, civilians heard a hybrid combination of traditional Iraqi folk music, 1980s American rock n’ roll, and new wave Euro-pop. These songs were mixed with a U.S. message: ‘this war is not, in any way, against the Iraqi people, but to disarm Mr. Hussein and end his government.’ [24] What Iraqis didn’t hear - but what they likely knew - was that the U.S. military and informational invasion of Iraq was, by international standards, illegal. [25] When the bombing slowed down, the Department of Defense’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) moved in, took control of and then re-built the technological infrastructure of Hussein’s Ministry of Information. [26] The CPA renamed the Ministry of Information the Iraqi Media Network (IMN). As a result of the IMN between 100 and 200 independent newspapers and magazines emerged, however, freedom of the press was not tolerated. Paul Bremmer (the chief administrator of the CPA at the time) told the IMN’s managerial elite to drop Koran readings from its schedule, to avoid criticizing the U.S. invasion, and to run news-content past the wife of a U.S.-friendly Iraqi Kurdish leader before publishing it. [27] Iyad Allawi’s puppet regime established the Higher Media Council (HMC) to revoke broadcasting licenses if emerging Iraqi news organizations published anti-occupation material. [28] Bremmer’s media-content rulings were also enforced with violence. In June 2003, U.S. soldiers raided a distribution center for Sadda-al-Auma newspaper in Najaf; this newspaper was closed for purportedly encouraging the Iraqi resistance. [29] On March 24, 2004, Bremmer ordered the closure of Al-Awaza, a popular Baghdad newspaper that supported Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Padlocked chains were strewn across the newspaper’s doors after the imperial authorities accused it of lying and ‘publishing articles that prove an intention to disturb the general security and incite violence against the coalition and its employees.’ [30] On July 21, 2004, Iraqi military police and U.S. troops broke into Al-Mustaqilla’s newspaper office, confiscated printing equipment, and arrested the paper’s editor, Abdul Sattar Shalan, who has been missing since. Al-Mustaqilla was shut-down for printing an article that protested the CPA’s appointment of the Iraqi Governing Council. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera has also paid the price for attempting to operate a free press in the Middle East. The U.S. Empire demanded that Al-Jazeera censor images of dead Iraqis, but Al-Jazeera refused. [31] This refusal had human costs. U.S. fighter planes bombed Al-Jazeera’s Afghanistan and Baghdad offices in 2003. [32] One Al-Jazeera journalist (Tariq Ayoub) was killed. Others were harassed and jailed (Sami al-Hajj, for example, has been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay for the past four years). [33] In September 2003, Al-Jazeera was banned from covering the affairs of the Iraqi Governing Council for two weeks. They were accused of inciting violence, focusing too much on U.S. attacks, and providing airtime to anti-occupation forces. [34] Iyad Allawi’s Higher Media Council extended the domestic ban on Al-Jazeera broadcasts in September 2004. [35] Despite all these measures, by the late months of 2004, the Department of Defense recognized that its war for hearts and minds in Iraq and the broader ‘Muslim world’ was being lost. The war on terrorism and the invasion and occupation of Iraq increased support for al-Qaeda and made many ordinary Muslims hate the U.S. more than ever. [36] A Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication was released, perhaps as a response to the U.S. Empire’s ongoing crisis of legitimacy in the Middle East. [37] After meeting with representatives from the National Security Council (NSC), White House Office of Global Communications, Department of State (DOS), Department of Defense (DOD), Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), and the U.S. private sector, the Task Force concluded that ‘Strategic communication is a vital component of U.S. national security [that] is in crisis, and it must be transformed with a strength of purpose that matches our commitment to diplomacy, defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security.’ The Task Force recommended a Presidential directive to strengthen the U.S. Government’s ability to measure and manufacture global public opinion, coordinate all government agencies of strategic communication, and provide legislation to establish a new Center for Strategic Communication. This report sparked a deeper debate between U.S. government departments and military officials over the role of global psychological warfare campaigns and information operations in U.S. foreign policy. [38] In the early months of 2005, U.S. political officials in Congress were taking the Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication's recommendations very seriously. Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced a bill to establish the post of Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications. In April 2005, Representative William Thornberry introduced a measure to establish a non-profit Center for Strategic Communication. Senators Russel Feingold and Chuck Hagel submitted a resolution to promote international exchanges. The psychological and informational warfare campaign continued. Iraqex, a public relations firm set up by the Washington D.C. based Lincoln Alliance Corporation, hired Sunni religious scholars to persuade Sunnis in the Anbar Province to participate in Iraq’s national election, and retained the services of four Sunni religious scholars to help with U.S. propaganda campaigns. [39] Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena and her Iraqi cameraman were injured after being shot by U.S. troops, who ‘accidentally’ mistook the camera for an insurgent’s gun. [40] Journalists striving for independence from the Pentagon continued to be harassed and detained. [41] As U.S. psychological warfare becomes more transparent to its civilian and journalist targets, the Department of Defense designs more dubious propaganda campaigns with help from U.S.-based PR corporations. $300 million dollars worth of Department of Defense contracts were recently given to three U.S. public relations firms: The Lincoln Group, Science Applications International Corporation, and SyColeman. [42] With this cash, these spin doctors produced fake news stories, TV commercials, and Internet advertisements that are translated from English into Arabic and circulated by way of Iraq’s burgeoning print and electronic media. U.S. public relations officers, disguised as freelance reporters or advertising executives, pay the editors of Iraqi newspapers to run their pro-occupation and American-made news. [43] With headlines like ‘Iraq Insists on Living Despite Terrorism’ and ‘More Money Goes to Iraq’s Development,’ these fake news clips laud the hard work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, demonize resistance fighters, and overstate Iraq’s progress toward freedom and democracy. Forget Rice and Hughes’ contention that the U.S. will ‘confront hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths and get out the truth.’ Just as the U.S. promises to establish political transparency and freedom of speech in Iraq, they finance propaganda to mythologize their hated occupation. The Contradictions of the U.S. Cultural and Informational Warfare Read with the informational warfare of the Department of Defense, Rice and Hughes’ cultural diplomacy speeches about the U.S.’s desire to globalize the principles of a free press, facilitate a two-way cultural dialogue between Americans and Muslims, and counter propaganda with the truth appear to be dubious ideological compensation for the contradictions of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East today. Domestic U.S. ideals and the militaristic and capitalist imperatives of U.S. foreign policy conflict and cannot be resolved. Rice and Hughes talk about spreading the values of the free-market while the Department of Defense gives away billion dollar development contracts to the U.S. military-industrial-entertainment complex. Rice and Hughes claim that the U.S. is bringing peace and order to the Middle East while U.S. militarism causes more death and chaos. Rice and Hughes promote the establishment of an ‘American-style’ free-press in Iraq while independent journalists and Al-Jazeera are coerced and censored for questioning the U.S. Empire’s common-sense. Rice and Hughes say that the U.S. is interested in revealing ‘the truth’ just as the Department of Defense fills the pockets of capitalist PR-firms to covertly circulate pro-occupation propaganda. Rice and Hughes celebrate the culture-bridging and peace-making potential of new communication technologies while the Department of Defense uses communication technology to destroy alternative viewpoints. If the U.S. Empire was committed to a two-way flow of information, the perspectives of embedded military journalists would be balanced with grief-stricken statements made by the families of dead Iraqi children, the patriotic ramblings of pro-war journalists on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox-TV news would be countered with analysis provided by millions of educated anti-war demonstrators in alternative media forums, and all the war-related information currently being filtered to global media correspondents through the Pentagon would be challenged by the Iraqis currently struggling for sovereignty. If the U.S. Empire was genuinely interested in an equal cultural exchange, Iraqis might speak by and for themselves about their idea of what a sovereign post-Hussein Iraq could be, the word ‘terrorist’ wouldn’t only apply to Arab-looking suicide bombers, and Rice and Hughes would think twice before parading their nation’s God-Given “exceptionalism.” An imperialist cultural and informational war is being waged in the Middle East and in the United States as well. The time and space annihilating travel of information through cyberspace makes U.S. workers open targets of psychological warfare campaigns made for Iraqis. Propaganda stories made by Department of Defense contractors and sold to Middle Eastern news media can just as easily be picked up and circulated by American news media. No wonder that Rumsfeld publicly announced in a 2005 edition of the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. was engaged in a ‘War of Words.’ And given that the Smith-Mundt Act has, since the period following World War II, legally prohibited the U.S. state from directly propagandizing its own citizens, it is no surprise that the neoconservative Heritage Foundation wants to repeal it and thereby do away with this pesky Cold War legislation. [44] Religico-political state propaganda structures (Islamic or Republican) are intolerable. So are neo-liberal sermons about the moral necessity of enlightening the Middle East with an American-style capitalist press. As Middle Eastern journalists and progressive American ones tired of being used by their state’s ruling classes recognize the contradictions of the global capitalist media system, perhaps they will begin to imagine an internationalist informational alternative that builds on and sweeps away the rubble of the old. Tanner Mirrlees is currently a doctoral candidate at York and Ryerson University's Joint Program of Communication and Culture, Toronto, Canada. There, he is working on the history of U.S. cultural foreign policy, the military-industrial-entertainment complex, and empire, communications, and media. He is also the editor of the 'cultural front' section of Relay: A Socialist Project Review.
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