Gerecht on Iraqi payola

Reuel Gerecht is one of the people on the AEI side of things that I genuinely respect - he knows Arabic, he knows the region, and he thinks pragmatically rather than ideologically.  That said, I think he's dead wrong in today's Washington Post:

The United States ran enormous covert and not-so-covert operations known as "CA" activities throughout the Cold War. With the CIA usually in the lead, Washington spent hundreds of millions of dollars on book publishing, magazines, newspapers, radios, union organizing, women's and youth groups, scholarships, academic foundations, intellectual salons and societies, and direct cash payments to individuals (usually scholars, public intellectuals and journalists) who believed in ideas that America thought worthy of support.

It's difficult to assess the influence of these covert-action programs. But when an important Third World political leader writes that a well-known liberal Western book had an enormous impact on his intellectual evolution -- a book that, unbeknownst to him was translated and distributed in his country at CIA expense -- then it's clear that the program had value. It shouldn't be that hard for educated Americans to support such activity, even though one often can't gauge its effectiveness.

Nor should it be so hard to support even more aggressive clandestine action in developing democracies such as Iraq. Let us make a Cold War parallel. As is well known, the CIA for years financially maintained the British journal Encounter. This magazine, which was perhaps the most important English-language outlet for anti-communist U.S. and European writers, influenced debates among the Western intelligentsia from the 1950s through the '70s. By bang-for-the-buck calculation, it may be the most effective nonmilitary highbrow covert action the United States has funded.
...
The Bush administration shouldn't flinch from increasing its covert "propaganda" efforts in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The history in the last great war of ideas is firmly on its side.

The problem with his argument is that the entire position rests on an historical analogy with the early Cold War which simply doesn't hold up in today's information environment.  Those information activities worked largely because they were cover and kept secret for decades.  Neither the consumers of those media nor (often) the producers of the content knew that it was CIA backed.  Whatever the morality or strategic utiltity of such covert efforts, such secrecy simply can't be maintained today.  Gerecht makes a nod at this by saying that

"The real complaint that ought to be made against the Bush administration is that it has allowed such important work to be contracted to a public relations firm (in the case cited above, the Lincoln Group) that has done a poor job of protecting anonymity."

But it isn't just that the Lincoln Group was a bunch of rank amateurs (though they were).  It's that in today's media and information environment, exposure is inevitable.   The time frame for revealing this sort of thing is no longer decades - it's months.  If the New York Times didn't break the story, then al-Jazeera would, or the BBC, or maybe even one of those independent Iraqi newspapers of TV stations that we should fervently hope develop if we seriously want an Iraqi democracy. The kind of covert work that Gerecht defends here might give a small boost for a few months.. followed by a precipitous collapse once the subterfuge is revealed, as it inevitably will be.   You end up far worse off than when you started, credibility shot and your allies discredited,  humiliated, and politically weakened (not to mention extremely pissed off at you, if they hadn't realized that they were being used).   

As I argued last month,

Compared to the early Cold War, today it is almost impossible to keep something like this a secret.  The time-frame for exposure is incredibly compressed, and once exposed the information circulates back to the targetted region virtually immediately.    In other words, it isn't just a normative claim for the superiority of transparency and media freedom - it's based on the new strategic reality created by today's information environment.  Any policy which does not take into account the inevitability of early public exposure is by definition a flawed policy.  That applies to extraordinary renditions, torture, domestic spying, and Iraqi payola schemes alike.  This should be a key concept for all policy making today, and a key way in which public diplomacy should be integrated into the policy process.

Gerecht makes the case for the Iraqi payola scheme about as well as it can be made, but I think that his argument is fatally undermined by this transformed information environment.   If, as he admits, secrecy is necessary for it to work, then he's already given away the game. 

Comments

[Carlos]

Even during the Cold War, it was not rare to see such programs backfire. In my country (Uruguay) during the sixties, it was widely known that some mainstream newspapers published editorial comments straight out of the CIA local station. Imagine the credibility of said newspapers.

[praktike]

I would also point out that you didn't see the type of anti-Americanism in Eastern Europe that we do in the Middle East, though I suppose you had something comparable in parts of Latin America.

In any case, I don't see why some of these things need to be covertly funded at all. Why not have this new ME foundation, which is taking money from ME countries themselves as well as the EU, sponsor magazines and the like?