Abu Aardvark

Public diplomacy and the long war

I've had the chance to read the transcript of Stan Correy's program for Australian radio on public diplomacy, "narrative and the long war", and I think it's really interesting - well worth your time to check out, and not just because he uses a couple of quotes from me.   

Information Operations: What Went Wrong?

Major Joseph Cox has just published a monograph called "Information Operations in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom -- What Went Wrong?" (available here - PDF file;  update - link fixed, and here's an alternative route via Secrecy News) for the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth.   While it's a fairly damning indictment of Information Operations, especially in Iraq, Cox is less concerned with pointing fingers than with learning lessons (and, of course, with calling for more funding:   "Currently, the Army is short almost forty percent of the required IO officers.")  The general tone is captured by this excerpt:  "The IO structure to support operations in Iraq for the remainder of the time the CPA was in charge remained totally inadequate for the task.  The CPA could not compete against the Iraqi rumor mill, partisan Iraqi media outlets, or even foreign satellite broadcasts such as al Jazeera."   

Cox is concerned about how the perceived need to massage American domestic public opinion contaminated the Information Operations military operation.    At one point he writes:  "In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the effort to inform Iraqis and the world of progress in Iraq consumed a large percentage of the IO staff's time and efforts."  Later, he warns against "the transformation of IO to a Public Relations (give the good news) mindset, especially in Iraq."   Later, he notes that information collection was hampered by a "tendency... to dismiss reporting that was repeatedly negative because it was based on the bias of an anti-US organization."  And he's quite critical of the Lincoln Group fiasco:  "Given the large number of public relations firms, it was surprising that the Department of Defense selected the Lincoln Group, an organization with NO public relations experience to spearhead an effort to publicize the good news events occuring in Iraq."   

While Cox never directly comes out and says so, he at least implies that the Bush administration and CPA's decision to prioritize domestic politics over the realities on the ground in Iraq - egged on by the incessant grumbling about the media's supposedly overly negative reporting - seems to have actively compromised Information Operations in theater. 

One of the big problems for Information Operations in Iraq was the absence of any nation-wide media during the period after the war:   "because Saddam used the radio and TV broadcasts to command his troops in the field and to continue to spread propaganda, USCENTCOM directed attacks on the radio and TV transmitters.  The side effect of these attacks was the destruction of the only nationwide radio and TV transmitters.  Because none of the assets in the JPOTF's inventory was capable of reaching the entire country, there was no way to broadcast instructions to the Iraqi people."  Without getting into another debate about the legitimacy and/or legality of targeting media during wartime, let me just ask:  who could possibly have foreseen that a nation-wide media transmitter might have been useful in the post-Saddam period?

Up to this point, the report has been interesting to the specialist such as myself, but not exactly full of juicy tidbits.   But here's where things suddenly get interesting.  Cox writes:  "A lack of media outlets in the divisions' areas limited the divisions' ability to reach their populace quickly and efficiently.  The divisions set out to create media in the areas of responsibility.  Their PSYOP units used PSYOP operational funds ... [and] by the end of 2003, every Division had created a number of newspapers, radios and TV stations."   Say what?!?  Later, he writes:  "As individual Iraqi media outlets became functional, primarily with PSYOP support, tactical PSYOP units would use those fledgling outlets to support their product dissemination." 

Is there any way to read this other than that some significant portion of the Iraqi media which emerged after Saddam's fall was in fact a fully funded and operational Psychological Operations campaign?   If that's the case, then this would seem to quite a revelation.  Which newspapers, radios and TV stations were actually PSYOP operations, one might want to know, and which exactly which PSYOP "products" were disseminated through them?  While I'd imagine that most enterprising journalists are either in Lebanon or on vacation, this still might be worth somebody following up on.

UPDATE:  in case it isn't clear what's at stake here, there are two issues. 

First, if you recall the Lincoln Group fiasco, the problem there wasn't that "good news" articles were being placed in the Iraqi press, or even that they were paying for play - it was that the origin of those articles was concealed to make it look like they came from Iraqis rather than from Americans.  That's a big no no.   If the PSYOPS newspapers, radio and television stations were not clearly identified as American military outlets, and were presented as genuine Iraqi outlets, then it would be the Lincoln Group fiasco on a much larger scale... and carried out by the military itself and not by an amateurish, unqualified contractor.  That's a big "if", and it is not clear from the report.

The second issue is that anyone who has followed the Iraq issue over the last few years knows how central the post-Saddam flourishing of a free press - usually presented in terms of the hundreds of newspapers which began publishing after Saddam's fall - was to the Bush administration's defense of the war.  Here are just the first few examples which came up high on a google search of the White House website:

"And for the first time in many years, a free press is at work in Iraq.  Across that country today, more than 150 newspapers are publishing regularly." -- Bush radio address, August 9, 2003

"More than 150 Iraqi newspapers are now in circulation, printing what they choose, not what they're ordered." - Bush at Whitehall Palace, November 19, 2003

"Hundreds of Iraqi newspapers are now in circulation, with no Baathist enforcers telling them what to print." - Cheney, World Economic Forum, January 24, 2004.

I could go on, ad infinitum:  "hundreds of Iraqi newspapers" was a major talking point for the United States at the highest levels. If it turns out that some significant portion of those hundreds of newspapers were actually American PSYOPS funded outlets designed to carry American PSYOPS products, it would shed rather a new light on this talking point. 

Again, everything turns on whether those PSYOPS-created, funded, and employed media outlets were identified as American military outlets or as real Iraqi newspapers, radio stations, and television stations.   If the former, then the question reverts to one of effectiveness - Cox's main concern in his report:  why were the information operations so ineffective?   If it's the latter, then an altogether different set of questions needs to be posed.   It shouldn't be that hard to find out which it is.

Information Operations and Embedded Journalists

Rod Nordland of Newsweek is getting a bit of attention for his frank evaluation of the evolution of embedded journalism in Iraq:

The military has started censoring many [embedded reporting] arrangements. Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously. They want to know your slant on a story—they use the word slant—what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don’t like what you have done before, they refuse to take you. There are cases where individual reporters have been blacklisted because the military wasn’t happy with the work they had done on embed.

Ken Silverstein chimes in that

Many embedded reporters have managed to do fine work from Iraq, but there are significant obstacles for even the best and most determined journalists. I recently spoke with a former senior TV producer for Reuters who worked in Iraq between 2003 and 2004. The producer, who asked to speak off the record, arrived in Tikrit soon after the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003, and was embedded with American troops for 45 days. She told me that, over the years, she has worked closely with the French army, NATO troops in the Balkans, and UN peacekeepers in covering war and conflict, but she said had never faced the sorts of restrictions imposed by the Pentagon on journalists in Iraq. “I was,” she said, “a mouthpiece for the American military.”

Some interesting perspective on this can be found in a remarkable essay by Col Ralph Baker, just published by Military Review.  Baker is currently the Division Chief,  J5, Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate-Middle East, under the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, and in Iraq he commanded the 2d Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad.  Baker offers a frank and insightful commentary on the role of Information Operations in Iraq overall.  On the subject of embedded journalists, he has this to say:

Everybody thinks embedded media is a great concept. I do. I had James Kitfield from the National Journal embedded  in my unit for 3 months during my tour in Iraq. That is an embed-somebody who stays with the unit long enough to understand the context of what is going on around them and to develop an informed opinion before printing a story. Unfortunately, as Phase IV of the operation in Iraq began, the definition of what an embed was for some reason  changed to mean hosting a reporter for 3 or 4 days or even just  1 day. That is risky business because a reporter cannot learn about or understand the context of the issues Soldiers face and, consequently  has a greater propensity to misinterpret events and draw inaccurate  conclusions. Realizing this, I made it a brigade policy that we would not allow reporters to live with us in the brigade unless they were going to come down for an extended period of time.

Reporters who wanted to visit us for a day or two were welcome, but they had to go home every night because I was not going to expose them to, or give them, the same kind of access a true embed received if they did not want to invest the time needed to develop a sophisticated understanding of the environment the Soldiers faced, the decisions we were making, and the context in which we were fighting. Therefore, my seventh IO observation  is that reporters must earn their access.

Unfortunately, it is also my experience that some reporters come with a predetermined agenda and only want to gather information to support some particular political or personal slant for a story they are already developing. However, I learned by experience who those reporters were and what to expect from them. No matter what we do, we are not going to change some reporters' or publications' mindsets. The best way to work around a biased and unprofessional journalist is by being more professional than  they are and by developing a plan to deal with them.

"Must earn their access"... "predetermined agenda"... "I learned by experience who those reporters were."   That sounds to me to be fairly consistent with Nordland and Silverstein's description - especially when paired with this remark of Baker's elsewhere in his essay:

Most news that Soldiers  typically received came from watching CNN, the BBC, or Fox news.  Soldiers were getting the same inaccurate, slanted news that the American public gets. With a significant amount of negative news being broadcast into their living quarters on a daily basis, it was difficult for Soldiers to realize they were having a positive  impact on our area of operations.

I'm much less interested in the embedded journalism question, however, than I am in the bigger question of the military's conception of Information Operations, PSYOPS, and engagement with the Arab media. On those issues, Baker's essay is frank, fascinating, and must-reading for anyone concerned with those topics. 

Baker is a strong advocate of a field-based conception of Information Operations, relatively freed from central control or oversight, and has little use for Cold War era regulations or laws. Information Operations are a crucial part of his military mission (he estimates that IO is an astonishing 70% of the mission), and should be treated as such:

Good reasons exist for some central control over IO themes and products under some circumstances, but information operations are Operations, and in my opinion that means commander's business. IO is critical to successfully combating an insurgency.  It fights with words, symbols, and ideas, and it operates under  the same dynamics as all combat operations. An old army saw says  that the person who gets to the battle the "firstest" with the "mostest" usually wins, and this applies indisputably  to information operations. In contrast, a consistent shortcoming I experienced was that the enemy, at least initially, consistently  dominated the IO environment faster and more thoroughly than we  did. Our adversary therefore had considerable success in shaping and influencing the perceptions of the Iraqi public in his favor. The ponderous way in which centrally managed PSYOP products were developed, vetted, and approved through bureaucratic channels meant  they were simply not being produced quickly enough to do any good.  Just as important, they were not being tailored precisely enough to influence our diverse audiences' opinions about breaking events.

Faced with bureaucratic friction and cumbersome policy, and thrust into an IO arena quite different from that for which most of us had been trained, I had to make decisions concerning IO matters based on common sense and mission requirements. To this ion as we saw it, though in a manner such that those who wrote the original regulations and guidance probably had not intended. This was necessary because Cold War regulations and policies were holding us hostage to old ideas and old ways of doing business. They were simply no longer valid or relevant to the challenges we were facing in this extremely fluid, nonlinear, media-centric COIN environment that was Baghdad circa 2003-2004.

Of course, such an approach made some people  uncomfortable. As a rule, if our application of IO techniques was  perceived to violate a strict interpretation of policy or regulation,  I asked myself: is it necessary to accomplish our mission, and is our tactic, technique, or procedure morally and ethically sound?  If the answer was yes, I generally authorized the activity and informed my higher headquarters.

We were not a renegade operation, however.  If what we thought we had to do ran counter to written policies and guidance, I kept my division commander informed in detail of what, when, and why we were doing it.

Who was the target of these Information Operations?  Baker gives what may be an unintentionally revealing answer:

Although the international press is an integral component of our IO effort, they were not our top media priority. While higher headquarters viewed U.S. and international media as their main media targets, our priority was more parochial: We regarded the Iraqi and Arab media as our main targets.

Think about that for a moment:  "higher headquarters viewed U.S. and international media as their main media targets." As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, blowback - the entry of foreign propaganda back into the American public realm - really was policy, not an unintended outcome.   That Baker was more focused on the Iraqi realm is to his credit.  That his superiors were not should be deeply troubling.

On the subject of engaging with al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, and the Arab media in general, Baker might as well be channeling Abu Aardvark:

you have no influence with the press if you do not talk to them. Moreover, trying  to ignore the media by denying them access or refusing to talk can result in the press reporting news that is inaccurate, biased, and frankly counterproductive to the mission. Not talking to the press is the equivalent of ceding the initiative to the insurgents, who are quite adept at spinning information in adverse ways to further their objectives.
....

What most people were viewing on their new satellite TV dishes was al Arabiya and Al Jazeera, not CNN, the BBC, NBC, or FOX. From my perspective, I was competing with the insurgents for the opinion of the silent majority, the wavering mass of Iraqi citizens who were undecided in who they supported and who constituted the most important audience we needed to influence.

....

To focus our efforts and to determine which venues the Iraqis received their news from, we conducted surveys and ascertained which newspapers were read and which TV programs  were watched in our battlespace. We then hired two Iraqis to be  brigade press agents. Their main jobs were to facilitate attendance at our press roundtables and to promote the publication of our messages. They would go out, visit with various newspapers, and invite reporters to our press conferences.....

It was not unusual to have anywhere from 8 to 10 newspaper reporters attend these meetings, among them representatives from Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and one of the Lebanese satellite TV  stations. After the press huddle I usually did offline interviews with the Arab satellite stations.

Note what isn't mentioned here, or engaged with, after Baker's team conducted their intensive study of what sources Iraqis watched and trusted - the American al-Hurra.  Wonder why?

Al Jazeera  and Al Arabiya, for the most part, enjoy a justifiably bad reputation  in the West because of their biased reporting style. But the fact is they report to the audience we need to influence, so why not develop a rapport with them so that maybe we can get some of our messages across to the Iraqi public?

When Al Jazeera reporters first came to one  of our press huddles, they were distant. However, after three or four meetings they began warming up to us and later, they became  just as friendly as any of the other reporters attending. We can, if we put enough effort into it, develop a good working relationship with almost any reporter as long as we are truthful and honest. They cannot help but respect us for that and, much of the time, respect is rewarded with fairer and more balanced news accounts because reporters know they can trust what we are saying.

It is a mistake not to allow Al Jazeera and other Arab media access simply because we do not like much of what they report. We need to work with them specifically if we want more accuracy and balance. We cannot just censor them, deny them access, or fail to respect them because, ultimately, they talk to Arab peoples in their own language and are the most likely to be believed. Not to engage them or work with them is to miss tactical and strategic opportunities.

Baker's essay is a must-read for those interested in the evolution of military thinking and practice on information operations, as well as for how that played out in Iraq over the last few years.  It helps explain the need for prior skepticism about all sorts of information coming out of the Iraqi theater.  Written by a professional for other professionals, it should give food for thought for people on all sides of the various partisan debates on the issue.

Egypt's press and the end of Arab reform

Egypt's journalists are going on strike Sunday in protest over the upcoming draft press and publications law, and the Kefaya movement is calling for a boycott of those papers which do publish.   Even though it formally bans the imprisonment of journalists under some conditions, it fails to deliver on the broader range of reforms Mubarak promised, and fails to abolish imprisonment for "libel".  The latter is particularly relevant after the sentencing of al-Dustour editor Ibrahim Eissa to a year in prison for publishing a story about a lawsuit alleging corruption by the Mubarak family - on the grounds that this insulted the President and harmed the nation - has sent chills through the press corps and the activist community. (update - the story was featured on July 3's al-Jazeera episode of Behind the News, giving it even wider regional play)

Egyptian political society has every reason to worry that the letter and the spirit of the new law will be draconian, anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and repressive.  The Press Syndicate says that it was not allowed to read the bill in advance or offer amendments (though given the fate of the hotly contentious judicial bill, in which none of the reformists' amendments were adopted, that might not actually matter).  One Islamist newspaper describes the bill as "defending corrupt people and punishing instead journalists" - which could lead to jail for members of the Kefaya movement who just released a potentially explosive report on corruption which named names.  Whatever the case, it's part and parcel of an institutionalized retrenchment by an authoritarian Egyptian regime which clearly feels that it has taken the opposition's best shot, and doesn't need to worry about its American flank.   

Americans who don't much mind fierce crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood should recognize that, as in Jordan and most other Arab countries, the problems of popular Islamist movements and democratic reform are indivisible.  Authoritarian Arab regimes will use their brutal methods against Islamist and liberal foes alike, and it's foolish to think that the United States can tolerate the one and not expect the other.  Huwayda Taha, in al-Quds al-Arabi, describes a Cairo which away from the press conferences and television screens is sinking into despair and political apathy.  This matches what I've been hearing privately from those involved in Egyptian political activist circles.   

I guess it's not a secret that America under the Bush administration has effectively given up on democracy promotion and reform in the region.  Arab leaders and activists know it, at least.  Tunisia is currently escalating its already extremely harsh repression of its media.  Jordan is sinking deeper into a dangerous confrontation with the Muslim Brotherhood, triggered by its arrest of four MPs for publicly expressing their opinions.  The elected Hamas government has been shattered by the ongoing crisis, with a sizable portion of its ministers and Parliamentarians now in Israeli jails.   Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh has recanted on his pledge to not stand for re-election.  Algeria's President Abd al-Aziz Bouteflika is seeking a referendum to amend the Constitution to allow him to stand for a third term (Faisal al-Qassem's popular al-Jazeera talk show the other day was dedicated to the question "will Arab leaders ever step down?"  The answer seems to be no, but at least he's asking the question.)  And so on, across the board. Kuwait's election is at least one small positive sign, a victory for the reformists in that country - though it was Islamists who scored the strongest in those elections as well. 

Two recent Arab talk shows capture the new Arab mood well.   On al-Arabiya last week, Hisham Milhem led a discussion on "Bush and democracy in the Arab world."  While the show included Joshua Moravcik, Mark Tushnet, Nagib al-Ghadiban, and Salameh Nimaat, I was most struck by a remark by   Amr Hamzawy.  He pointed that the fact that most of the Arab media and political class were now discussing the "retreat" of American commitment to democracy demonstrates that at least at one point they were prepared to entertain the thought that there had been some credibility to that campaign.   No longer, Hamzawy argued - America's turn away from democracy and reform had badly hurt its image and its credibility with this Arab political class (by which I think he means something very similar to my "new Arab public").   This seemed to be a well-received notion. 

Meanwhile, on al-Jazeera Ghassan bin Jidu hosted a fascinating discussion on the margins of the Sanaa Conference on Democracy and Reform.  Bin Jidu invited former Sudanese Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, former Bahraini minister Ali Fakhru, Abd al-Malik Khalafi of the Arab Nationalist Conference, and Scott Carpenter from the State Department (along with an impressive audience of conference participants) to talk about "Reform and freedom of expression in the Arab world."   Once again, the discussion revolved around lost American credibility, and the harm to America's image in the Arab world by its claims to support democracy and subsequent failures to do so.   As is typical, virtually nobody in this hour long program questioned the value of democracy or the need for reform - their complaints were about its failures.   Carpenter tried his best, and it's good that an American voice took part in the discussion, but the overall sense of an America which had lost all credibility in its talk of promoting democracy in the region was clear. 

This is a hidden cost of public diplomacy.  Raising expectation with popular talk about promoting democracy and reform and then disappointing them has immeasurable costs.  Credibility, once lost, is hard to regain.   In an eloquent statement, Fakhru warned the American officials in the room that "their words are not heard" and their efforts at public diplomacy are wasted because they are contradicted by the practices in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and so forth.  There's still a very strong current in Arab political debate today which demands democratic reform and change - indeed, Fakhro denounced the idea that democratic change in the region had anything to do with American efforts as "empty talk".  But the moment for America to be able to benefit from that impulse may well be past, at least for this administration. 

Pew: Arabs and Iran

The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes report is out - I had seen some of these numbers a little bit ago, but they were embargoed until now.   Lots of interesting stuff in there, as usual - I'll focus here on the two Arab countries were surveyed this time, Jordan and Egypt.   

All in all, the Pew surveys aren't showing much evidence of greater success in public diplomacy - if you think that these surveys should be such a metric (I don't think they should be but inevitably will be... kind of like the US News college rankings.  I'll elaborate on that in a forthcoming paper, not now.)  Favorable opinions of the US in Jordan have dropped back to 15% (from 21% last year), while 30% of Egyptians expressed favorably opinions of the US - which seems a bit high to me, but who am I to argue with the gold standard of international survey research?   Well, it seems a bit high to me.  16% of Jordanians "support the US war on terror" - up from 12% in 2005, suggesting a 4% "Zarqawi bump" after the Amman hotel bombings.  Only 10% of Egyptians support the US war on terror - which again makes that 30% favorable rating look odd.   Only 10% of Egyptians and 16% of Jordanians (familiar numbers, no?) think that the war in Iraq made the world safer.   

There's a lengthy section of the report about the Iran question which is quite relevant to my research into Arab attitudes towards Iran.  42% of Jordanians and Egyptians alike support Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. 39% of Egyptians and 51% of Jordanians have favorable views of Iran in general.  And only 26% of Egyptians and 22% of Jordanians express some or a lot of confidence in Ahmednejad personally - better than Bush, but rather lower than their confidence in Chirac or Haifa Wehbi.  Those numbers suggest real limits to the allegedly great enthusiasm for Ahmednejad among the Arab public.  On the other hand, only 14% of Egyptians and 19% of Jordanians see Iran as a threat to world peace (the US in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rate far higher).  57% of Egyptians and 67% of Jordanians think that Iran would only use nuclear weapons defensively... but at the same time 65% of Jordanians and 61% of Egyptians think that Iran would use them to attack Israel. 

Public diplomacy: a status report

I spent Friday at West Point for a really fascinating conference on public diplomacy. It brought together a remarkable group of people, including a lot more people from the military side of public diplomacy and strategic communications than usually appear at these public diplomacy workshops.  The conference worked on Chatham House rules, meaning that conference remarks were not for attribution and I can't directly quote anyone except for myself.   But I think I can say a few things without breaking the rules (if not, I'm sure this post will disappear with extreme prejudice, or whatever the appropriate term is!).

My presentation at the workshop wouldn't surprise regular Abu Aardvark readers (an amusingly disconcerting number of whom seem to show up at workshops like this).  I laid out the rapid transformation of the Arab media, especially satellite TV, and said something about the causes of anti-American attitudes.  But mostly I argued for taking the "public" in "public diplomacy" seriously, thinking about it as an environment rather than as an instrument:  an environment which isn't amenable to centralized control, where information can't be compartmentalized, where messages can't be tailored for a domestic or international audience without the other listening in, and where the game rewards argument and engagement rather than message control and spin.

I got some pushback on my argument that this growing "publicity" means that PsyOps and strategic deception should be avoided because of the devastating effects of their inevitable exposure on the credibility of America and America's would-be defenders in the Arab political realm.   Several military and psyops folks objected, pointing out that I don't know how many PsyOps have not been exposed, and expressing great confidence that their operations would never be exposed.  Maybe - they're the experts.  But I still urged them to take seriously the implications of the transforming Arab and global media environment, where the the odds of eventual exposure of secret programs is high and increasing.  Look at the wiretapping or the CIA flights or Abu Ghraib or the Lincoln Group payola scheme - the planners of all of those policies must have assumed they would never be exposed, and here we are. Exposure should be assumed, and its implications worked in to the operational plan, even if it doesn't happen.  Even if 19 out of 20 of the operations remain secret, the one that gets exposed is enough to devastate credibility.   

Credibility is a major issue in all of this, and I would like to see more serious thought put into America's failure there.  It's a heck of a lot easier to lose credibility than to get it back, and "partially credible" is like "partially pregnant" - no such creature.  American credibility in and about Iraq is so low now that everything it says is met with skepticism, even if it's true.   Somebody should take responsibility for that lost credibility, and learn some lessons from it beyond just blaming the media.  I'll write more about that later, I think.      

At the end of my presentation I talked about Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt's appearance on al-Jazeera  back in April as a good example of what to do.  Ahmed Mansour's program was a hostile, tough environment, and Kimmitt took his lumps.  Mansour pummeled him with documents drawn from the Western media (a good example of the imposibility of cordoning off the Arab media as a target for manipulation, since Arab journalists are perfectly capable of reading the American media too).   But by engaging in the argument, no matter how uncomfortable, Kimmitt helped establish an American voice in the debate, and to maintain a respectful zone of contention where disagreements could be hashed out.  Afterwards Kimmitt (who was at the conference) told me that he had enjoyed being on al-Jazeera, and recognizes the importance of a new approach to the Arab media.  He thought that he had won that particular debate on style points, because Mansour got flustered and he kept his cool - and the visual mattered more since most people who aren't aardvarkian freaks don't actually read the transcripts!  That's probably a good point, at least about the freakish aardvarks.

I've taken part in quite a few of these policy workshops on public diplomacy in the last few months.  Taking stock of those, and not just of the West Point event, I'd say that there seems to be a growing convergence across the military, intelligence, and diplomatic community about the importance of public diplomacy.   Everyone now seems to agree that getting on al-Jazeera and other Arab media is an important, necessary thing to do, which is a big change from when I first started writing about the need to engage the Arab media back in 2002-2003, when the demonization of al-Jazeera was the order of the day, and the military's attitude was openly hostile.   Most people now seem to recognize the essential irrelevance of al-Hurra (I wish I could quote some of the more colorful remarks made about it, but I can't).   Most people seem to understand (in their rhetoric at least) that public diplomacy can't just be about better spin for existing policies - lipstick on a pig, as it were.  There's been a progress on other fronts - rapid reaction teams based in the region, more careful attention to the content of the Arab media, exchange programs, that sort of thing. 

But there still seems to be a long way to go in terms of really integrating public diplomacy into the policy process.  Too many mistakes still get made, and too many opportunities missed.  Public diplomacy in the national interest can too often get subordinated to public diplomacy in the Bush administration's interest, with too much of an eye on the domestic political audience rather than on the international audience.  A lot of people do still want to put lipstick on a pig, or to use public diplomacy as some kind of magic wand to make target audiences somehow embrace things they used to hate.  There are still deep unresolved differences over whether public diplomacy should be about message control and spin or about open engagement.   There's still way too much griping about the press being "on the other side" or complaints about the media "ignoring good news from Iraq" - stuff you wouldn't expect to hear from serious people.  There still aren't many useful metrics for judging whether public diplomacy is succeeding, or determining empirically what works and what doesn't.   Agreeing on the existence and importance of the problem is a start, but only a start - there's a lot of work to be done. 

Speaking of work to be done, I think I'd better stop blogging and go do some...

GAO US Public Diplomacy

The GAO released a follow up report on US public diplomacy today (the earlier report was from April 2005).  While the report does not assess the BBG projects al-Hurra and Radio Sawa (it says that these are the subject of another investigation), it does offer a somewhat disheartening picture of how official rhetoric on improving public diplomacy has translated into practice. 

Some of the key findings of the GAO report:

• the State Department has significantly increased funds for public diplomacy aimed at the Muslim world.  The Arab world only ranks third among increased regional bureau budgets, though:  the Near East increased by 25% between 2004 and 2006, compared to 39% for South Asia and 28% for East Asia and the Pacific.  And despite Condi's "transformation diplomacy", public diplomacy efforts are still concentrated in Europe and Eurasia:  $198 million in funding for 2004 and $229 million for 2006, with 192 "authorized officers";  compared to $69 million (2004) and $86 million (2006), and 66 "authorized officers" (increased to 68 for 2006) for the Near East.  The GAO says that State officials expect about 75 Foreign Service officials, including about 25 Public Affairs Officers, to be transferred from Europe to other regions... but it hadn't happened yet as of this report:  over the last three years, it reports, "the number of authorized overseas positions in all regional bureaus increased slightly or not at all."
• security fears seriously complicate the efforts of Public Affairs Officers in many Muslim countries:  "security and budgetary concerns have forced embassies to close publicly accessible facilities and curtail certain public outreach efforts, sending foreign publics the unintended message that the United States is unapproachable."   Hard to know exactly what to do about that, because the security risks are all too real - but it's important to note, particularly for those who believe that the face to face level is the key to successful public diplomacy.
• and even if they did get out into the field, "State's data show that as many as 30 percent of public diplomacy positions in countries with significant Muslim populations are filled by officers with insufficient language skills."   The number was 36% in Arabic speaking posts. 
• The Shared Values Initiative launched in 2002 is now defunct.
• Hi Magazine launched in 2003 is now defunct.  The report quotes an official in Egypt reporting that "of the 2,500 copies the embassy distributed monthly to newsstands in Cairo, often as many as 2,000 were returned unsold." 
• "American Corners", an attempt to re-establish some kind of open space for locals to come visit and interact by placing them in non-embassy space and staffing them with locals, are a decent idea, though no panacea.  Number opened in Egypt, according to the report:   0.  (2 are planned).   A more official American-run office in Alexandria gets higher marks.   But again the security fears - and the intimidation and resentment created by the measures taken to protect the Embassies - make it hard to figure out good solutions. 
• The GAO report revisits a long series of such criticisms that public diplomacy fails to live up to private sector best practices.  I'm always a bit skeptical of recommendations which involve upping the jargon and bureaucracy quotient, but that's what the GAO says.   Some of its components seem like good sense, others, well... MEGO. 

While the report notes that initiatives by Condoleeza Rice and Karen Hughes are in their early stages and can't yet be evaluated, this sums up its frank look at what existed as of February of this year.  In its response to the GAO report, the State Department notes the recent Hughes-driven changes and claims to be well on the way to meeting some of the critiques.  We'll see if the next GAO report reveals payoffs on these changes. 

Even though it doesn't investigate its effectiveness, the GAO report does offer some hints as to the extent to which al-Hurra has in fact become a white elephant, sucking up scarce resources.   In the 2004-2006 period, it estimates the amount spent by the Broadcasting Board of Governors on al-Hurra and Radio Sawa at $240 million.  For comparison's sake, the total State Department public diplomacy budget for FY2005 was $597 million, with $356 million of that going to fund exchange programs - which is great, since exchange programs are an extremely valuable public diplomacy tool - leaving $241 million for everything else.   At another point (p.20), inadequacies in the strategic communication dimension of public diplomacy are explained in part by the fact that "research and evaluation efforts to inform all facets of strategic communications are limited by the relatively small budget in Washington DC allocated to such efforts."   

Budgets like that go a long way to explaining (a) why al-Hurra isn't just something which all else equal we might as well have (because all else isn't equal; and I'm looking forward with some interest to the GAO report on al-Hurra);  and (b) why the Pentagon, with its vast budgets, is muscling into the public diplomacy territory which should clearly be the State Department's responsibility (with particularly and predictably bad results given the Pentagon's evident inability to distinguish between public diplomacy and PsyOps.)

CENTCOM and the Arab media

Over the last week I've written several times about what appears to be a shift in Pentagon thinking about the Arab media, away from confrontation and demonization towards engagement.  Today, Jim Krane of the AP has a fascinating piece on CENTCOM and the Arab media which largely confirms what I had been speculating about.

Krane features Captain Eric Clark, part of the CENTCOM media team, who I have seen on al-Jazeera several times. 

“We were essentially allowing al-Qaeda and other terrorists to run rampant with lies and propaganda,” said Army Capt. Eric Clark, one of two U.S. Central Command officers based in Dubai. “We're late in this fight. We're filling this huge vacuum that's existed in Arab countries for years.”
...

Influencing Arab opinion is a component of the Pentagon's new “long war” strategy, which says that America's conflict with Islamic extremists requires more diplomacy and less bombing.

Krane argues that the State Department is copying the Pentagon by setting up an Arab media team in Dubai.  From what I've seen, this is incorrect - the State Department, especially since Hughes took over public diplomacy, has been driving the action here, not Defense.   Look at Condi Rice's thirteen appearances on Arab TV in the last year to Don Rumsfeld's one, for instance.  But the more that the Pentagon signs on to the engagement approach the better, as far as I'm concerned. 

But.... this comment from Nakhle Elhage, news director at Al-Arabiya, caught my eye:

Elhage said the U.S. military has won more airtime since the Central Command team arrived. But... Elhage spoke of his frustrations at a Centcom conference in January, where he said U.S. delegates displayed little understanding of Arab views. “They want one-way traffic,” he said. “They want to give their message, but they don't want to listen.”

Yup.  As far back as my 2003 Foreign Affairs piece, and in a more sustained way in Voices of the New Arab Public,  I argued that American officials need to understand that these Arab TV stations thrive on open, contentious, free-wheeling debate.  American officials who go on them just trying to spin, stay on message, and control the agenda are going to flop.   Arab audiences will be predisposed to distrust American officials, and are carefully attuned to signs of disrespect or attempts at manipulation.  When Americans go on, they need to be ready to debate, not just to lecture.   

Regular, sustained engagement in these public Arab arguments (not just a single appearance by Rumsfeld) could hopefully create a kind of anticipatory feedback on both sides.  It isn't only that Arab TV producers should anticipate the American reaction, and how they are going to respond to CENTCOM complaints (which is what Clark, via Krane, highlights).  It's also that these American officials should anticipate how their policies are going to be play in Arab political discourse, and take that into account in the policy-formation process.   That's how public diplomacy can be integrated into the foreign policy process in a useful way - if people like Clark or his counterparts in the State Department, or senior officials, know that they are going to be engaged in these open arguments on Arab TV they might be able to avoid some glaringly stupid policy mistakes and improve other policies on the margins.  In other words, not just spinning already taken decisions but anticipating the reception of the decisions in advance and working with that knowledge of what Arabs (as opposed to Washington insiders) are really arguing about.

 

Rumsfeld on al-Arabiya

Donald Rumsfeld went on al-Arabiya a few days ago, with his appearance - as Asad AbuKhalil points out - heavily advertised as his first appearance on Arab TV in three years.  With that alongside Mark Kimmett's appearance on al-Jazeera the week before, I'm thinking we've got a solid trend:  the DoD coming over to the Aardvark/Karen Hughes line of engaging with the Arab media instead of demonizing it.  And about time, too - if only they had been willing to do this sort of thing two or three years ago back when the US really needed it....

To put Rumsfeld's al-Arabiya appearance into some context, what have other senior administration officials done with Arab TV?  I went to the State Department, Defense Department, and White House websites to find all appearances by the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, President and Vice President in the last year (May 2005-April 2006).    I found 16:  13 by Condoleeza Rice, 2 by President Bush, this one by Rumsfeld, and none by the notoriously anti-Arab TV Cheney.

What about the TV stations?  Which ones are most graced, if that's the word, with appearances by the big four?  Al-Arabiya has featured 6 appearances  in the last year (Rice 4, Bush 1, Rumsfeld 1), and   Bush also did al-Arabiya in January 2005 and April 2004.  The official Iraqi TV station al-Iraqiya has 3  appearances in the last year, all by Rice.  Then a bunch of others with one or two appearances, including Jordan TV, Egypt TV, LBC, and Nile TV.  Hariri's station al-Mustaqbal can claim the distinction of an interview with Bush (who otherwise has stuck with al-Arabiya). 

What does all this say?   Some quick thoughts:

First, Rice has been doing quite a bit of Arab TV lately.  She did a whole bunch of interviews back in May-June 2005, then nothing for a while.  But since November she's been appearing frequently.  I'd say that this reflects Hughes's influence, but Rice rather conspicuously continues to avoid al-Jazeera.

Second, al-Arabiya is far and away the administration's outlet of choice.  This is most likely because of that station's self-presentation as the pro-American, "moderate" alternative to al-Jazeera.  For officials who want to tap into a regional Arab TV audience but hate al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya has emerged as the station of choice.  Al-Hurra, as I note below, has not - an interesting development, one might think.  Rumsfeld's choice of al-Arabiya to break his Arab TV boycott is not therefore surprising.   

Third, and perhaps most surprising, I can find no evidence that any of the big four have appeared on the American funded al-Hurra in the last year (though Rumsfeld did do an interview with Radio Sawa last November).  I'd guess that this means that top officials don't want to waste their time on a station which nobody watches.   You'd think that they might go on the station to support the station nonetheless, since it is a rather expensive American taxpayer funded enterprise.  Heck, it might even be a place to send Cheney, who doesn't seem to like to talk to anyone other than Fox News.  But neither a friendly environment nor a sense of public obligation seems to be enough to get these top officials on to al-Hurra.  Personally, I think that's a wise choice, but it still seems noteworthy.  If you put the preference for al-Arabiya and the avoidance of al-Hurra together, and you get some confirmation of my longstanding sense that al-Arabiya has long since become what al-Hurra was supposed to be. 

Fourth, despite the growing appreciation for al-Jazeera among public diplomacy types as the best way to reach Arab audiences, the big four continue to shun it.  Al-Jazeera has become a popular destination for Karen Hughes (at least 2 appearances) and lower level American officials.   If I extended the search to include those lower-level officials, the picture would start to look a bit different - I'll try to do this if I have time, though I did notice that for some reason Hughes's State Department website does not include transcripts of several al-Jazeera appearances which I know she did. 

Bottom line:  I find it very intriguing, and potentially positive, that not only CENTCOM but even Rumsfeld now seem to be acknowledging the importance of engaging with Arab satellite TV. I don't think this reflects any great love for it, but rather a recognition of its practical importance.   How these officials do on Arab TV will also be a big question mark - as with certain Americans who have appeared on these stations in the past, they may well end up making things worse rather than better.  But even if they do, it's better to be in the debate than out of it.   So on with the show. 

Mark Kimmitt on al-Jazeera

I was surprised to see an unexpected American official show up on al-Jazeera the other day:  Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.  Kimmitt, the former spokesman for the American military in Iraq and now deputy director for strategy and plans at CENTCOM, went on al-Jazeera to talk about "the future of the American military presence in the region."

Mark Kimmitt and Ahmed Mansour in the al-Jazeera studio, April 5, 2006

Kimmitt didn't just go on al-Jazeera... he did the show No Limits, probably the most hostile environment for an American military official of any of al-Jazeera's programmes.  The host, Ahmed Mansour, not only has a well-deserved reputation as one of the toughest interviewers in the Arab media.   He is also one of the most broadly anti-American in his political outlook, and - of most direct relevance - was  the correspondent on the ground in Fallujah in April 2004 .   His reporting from Fallujah infuriated the American military and contributed to the early termination of that campaign. All of which makes Mansour's show a very interesting choice for Kimmitt's appearance.

What makes Kimmitt's appearance noteworthy is what it might mean for American public diplomacy.  There's been something of a war going on in the administration between those (like Karen Hughes) who think that American officials should go on al-Jazeera, since that's where the Arab political action and largest audience is;  and those (like, broadly speaking, the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President) who see al-Jazeera as the enemy and think American officials should have nothing to do with it.  Thanks in large part to Hughes, there has been a really dramatic increase in the number of American officials appearing on al-Jazeera in the last few months. And she's taken a lot of heat from al-Jazeera's critics in the administration for it.   

The newly confirmed Defense Department spokesman Dorrance Smith is on record as describing al-Jazeera as actively collaborating with the Iraqi insurgency;  I've heard worse from others on that side of the debate.   Could Kimmitt's appearance on al-Jazeera signal a breakthrough in that internal struggle, with the Defense Department finally coming around to the Hughes position?   I don't know, but inquiring minds want to knkow.  I do note that for some reason the transcript doesn't show up on the Defense Department website, even though other transcripts dating later than this one do appear.  Is someone trying to conceal his al-Jazeera appearance?  From whom?