In the third week of the war on terrorism, Karen Hughes, the White House communications director, met with her British counterpart to join forces in what may be the most ambitious wartime propaganda effort since World War II.
The two officials agreed that there was an urgent need to combat the Taliban's daily denunciations of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, vitriol that was going unchallenged across the Islamic world. Soon they had set up a round-the-clock war news bureau in Pakistan and a network of war offices linking Washington, London and Islamabad that help develop a "message of the day."
PHOTO: REUTERS
The highly orchestrated communications effort is a first step in a broader campaign to create a 21st-century version of the muscular propaganda war that the US waged in the 1940s. Matching old-fashioned patriotism to the frantic pace of modern communications, the Bush administration is trying to persuade audiences in the US and abroad to support the war. At the same time, it is trying just as hard to reveal as little as possible about it.
To reach foreign audiences, especially in the Islamic world, the State Department brought in Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive, who is using her marketing skills to try to make American values as much a brand name as McDonald's hamburgers or Ivory soap. The department's efforts are also meant to directly counter the propaganda of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
The foreign message crafted in Beers' new shop at the State Department dovetails with the domestic news management led by Hughes at the White House. From a nerve center set up two weeks ago in the Old Executive Office Building, the top communications directors of the administration -- including veterans who ran war rooms for presidential campaigns -- talk every morning to keep one step ahead of the news from the enemy.
"Before the war room it was like spitting in the ocean," said Mary Matalin, chief political adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and a participant in the communications effort. "Now we can collect all the utterances, proclamations from around the world that will buttress our arguments -- last week that the Taliban has hijacked a peaceful religion -- and get them out, get them noticed in real time."
Formidable foes
The effort to cobble together a new global approach is a backhanded acknowledgement that bin Laden and the Taliban are formidable propaganda foes, having spent years winning the hearts and minds of much of the Muslim world. It is also an acknowledgement that propaganda is back in fashion after the Clinton administration and Congress tried to cash in on the end of the Cold War by cutting back public diplomacy overseas, especially government radio broadcasts into former communist countries, to balance the budget.
The other side of this propaganda war is the equally traditional military role of suppressing information while running psychological operations in the war zone.
The Pentagon has imposed a tight lid on sensitive military news, particularly about special operations, trying to walk the fine line of saying enough to reassure the public that the war is on target but keeping the news media at bay.
Veteran communicators of other wars are amazed at the limited information and limited access to the battlefield. Barry Zorthian, the chief spokesman for the US war effort in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, said this conflict is "much tighter than Vietnam."
"Saigon was almost wide open compared to this," Zorthian said. "We gave out much more information, and we had no real problems with the media giving away information that would harm the troops."
On the battlefield, the military has also heated up its psychological operations. Air Force planes drop propaganda leaflets that describe the US as a friend of the Afghan people, and then drop food packets to try to drive home the point. Planes also act as airborne radio stations, broadcasting warnings to civilians to stay out of the way of US forces.
In this new effort to bridge the classic tension between controlling information while promoting the message to a diverse audience, the administration is reaching back to World War II. It is revving up foreign-language radio broadcasts behind the amorphous enemy lines and asking Hollywood to pitch in.
Yesterday, Karl Rove, a senior political adviser to Bush, was scheduled to visit Hollywood, where he was expected to receive a warm welcome from producers and directors eager to show their patriotism.
But the World War II propaganda effort put Hitler front and center, effectively using radio, film and even cartoons to depict the dictator as the personification of the evil enemy.
The Bush administration, by contrast, has shied away from making bin Laden the most prominent image in its propaganda war, airbrushing him out, at least for now. Given the pace of propaganda in the 21st century, that may change.
Foreign-language broadcasts
Rove, who in 1994 helped defeat a government effort to eliminate Radio Free Europe and who is now Bush's central political adviser in today's propaganda campaign, is trying to put foreign-language broadcasts back at the center of the war effort, particularly to the Islamic world.
"It's time to bring back the idea of an Edward R. Murrow in Arabic, modernized of course, using satellites and shortwave, and Karl Rove understands all this perfectly," said Kevin Klose, who headed Radio Free Europe in 1994 and is now president of National Public Radio.
Foreign-language broadcasts are just one of the old ideas being dusted off and given a new life in an effort to recreate the kind of propaganda campaigns that were waged in World War II and the Cold War.
Another old idea being recast is enlarging the propaganda message overseas through US diplomacy. This was once the domain of the US Information Agency, but that agency was reduced and folded into the State Department in the Clinton administration.
Beers became undersecretary of state last month to help sell the US war to the Islamic world. She quickly put Christopher Ross, a former ambassador fluent in Arabic, on the Arab satellite network al Jazeera to counter a videotaped message from bin Laden, and has put Secretary of State Colin Powell on Egyptian television to defend the US bombing campaign and Egypt's role in the war on terrorism.
`Catalog of lies'
Last week Beers sent a "catalog of lies" through the State Department to Pakistani newspapers to dispute Taliban allegations, including the claim that the US was purposefully targeting civilians.
And Beers has begun addressing groups of foreign journalists in Washington, many from Muslim nations. Those sessions are closed to American journalists.
As part of its psychological operations, the military has been dropping leaflets over Afghanistan and broadcasting radio programs from aircraft meant to encourage the defections of Taliban soldiers by showing the cruelty and tyranny of the regime.
Originally, some of the leaflets were designed with a more direct message -- to tell Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters to surrender or risk certain death. But experts in Afghan culture working in the military's psychological operations team balked, explaining that an Afghan soldier would read a demand to surrender as an invitation to become a coward and lose his honor. The wording was changed.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, while paying lip service to Persian Gulf War guidelines for news media coverage of combat, has enforced policies ensuring that journalists have little or no access to independent information about military strategies, successes and failures.
Pentagon correspondents say their usual sources have taken Rumsfeld's warnings about leaks to heart and are reticent where they had once been forthcoming in giving guidance to reporters.
Limited access
In addition, after-action access to the troops engaged in bombing or other combat missions has been almost nonexistent. While there are hundreds of reporters in countries like Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states, Uzbekistan and the northern areas of Afghanistan -- all places where US troops have been deployed -- the Central Command has yet to allow reporters to have any contact with troops.
The desire to keep information and expectations at a minimum stems directly from the experience of the Vietnam War, longtime military reporters and military historians say. The Johnson administration "oversold greatly the degree of success" of the war before the Tet offensive in 1968, said Don Oberdorfer, a former diplomatic and military correspondent for The Washington Post. The unrealistic expectations turned the Tet battles -- arguably a US military victory -- into a massive public relations defeat.
"A whole generation of military officers grew up believing that the press was the problem, if not the enemy," Oberdorfer said.
Rumsfeld said on Oct. 18 that he "had no problem" with the nine-year-old "Principles of Coverage" that Cheney agreed to when he was defense secretary. Among other things, the principles state that the military, as quickly as practicable, provide reporters with independent access to combat operations -- under the stricture that reporting would never compromise missions or endanger troops or intelligence-gathering operations.
But leading journalists say Rumsfeld's acceptance of the guidelines is in name only.
If the US has a public relations problem among its allies, it boils down to this: Many Europeans feel they have precious little information they can trust. They rely on conflicting and equally unverifiable claims from Pentagon briefings and Taliban news conferences in Pakistan, and are increasingly unwilling to believe either side.
European journalists suspect that American news media have been co-opted by the government, or at least swept up by patriotism. "The journalists and the media directors suffer, in my opinion, from a `post Vietnam patriotic syndrome,'" wrote Freimut Duve, a German who heads the office on free speech at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna, Austria.
When one nation is bombing another, it is difficult to convince the bombed of the virtue of the bombers. In Afghanistan, this has been America's challenge. Planes have been dropping leaflets as well as explosives.
One flier offers justification: "On September 11th, the United States was the target of terrorist attacks, leaving no choice but to seek justice for these horrible crimes."
Another asks soul-searching questions: "Do you enjoy being ruled by the Taliban? Are you proud to live a life of fear? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations a terrorist training site?"
Cut off from the world
Afghans are eager for news but information is scarce. Television has been banned by the Taliban; there are no newspapers to speak of. Radio has been people's primary link to the world. The Taliban's mouthpiece, Radio Shariat, was quickly silenced by the air raids.
The US would like to provide its own substitute. The week before last, Congress voted to create Radio Free Afghanistan, a station that would beam Afghan versions of entertainment and American versions of the news. In the meantime, a specially equipped US aircraft is occasionally broadcasting from the sky.
Many Afghans are accustomed to listening to the BBC and the Voice of America, which offer news in the local languages.
The government is aiming to recruit 1,096 foreign English teachers and teaching assistants this year, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. The foreign teachers would work closely with elementary and junior-high instructors to create and teach courses, ministry official Tsai Yi-ching (蔡宜靜) said. Together, they would create an immersive language environment, helping to motivate students while enhancing the skills of local teachers, she said. The ministry has since 2021 been recruiting foreign teachers through the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which offers placement, salary, housing and other benefits to eligible foreign teachers. Two centers serving northern and southern Taiwan assist in recruiting and training
WIDE NET: Health officials said they are considering all possibilities, such as bongkrekic acid, while the city mayor said they have not ruled out the possibility of a malicious act of poisoning Two people who dined at a restaurant in Taipei’s Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 last week have died, while four are in intensive care, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. All of the outlets of Malaysian vegetarian restaurant franchise Polam Kopitiam have been ordered to close pending an investigation after 11 people became ill due to suspected food poisoning, city officials told a news conference in Taipei. The first fatality, a 39-year-old man who ate at the restaurant on Friday last week, died of kidney failure two days later at the city’s Mackay Memorial Hospital. A 66-year-old man who dined
‘CARRIER KILLERS’: The Tuo Chiang-class corvettes’ stealth capability means they have a radar cross-section as small as the size of a fishing boat, an analyst said President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday presided over a ceremony at Yilan County’s Suao Harbor (蘇澳港), where the navy took delivery of two indigenous Tuo Chiang-class corvettes. The corvettes, An Chiang (安江) and Wan Chiang (萬江), along with the introduction of the coast guard’s third and fourth 4,000-tonne cutters earlier this month, are a testament to Taiwan’s shipbuilding capability and signify the nation’s resolve to defend democracy and freedom, Tsai said. The vessels are also the last two of six Tuo Chiang-class corvettes ordered from Lungteh Shipbuilding Co (龍德造船) by the navy, Tsai said. The first Tuo Chiang-class vessel delivered was Ta Chiang (塔江)
EYE ON STRAIT: The US spending bill ‘doubles security cooperation funding for Taiwan,’ while also seeking to counter the influence of China US President Joe Biden on Saturday signed into law a US$1.2 trillion spending package that includes US$300 million in foreign military financing to Taiwan, as well as funding for Taipei-Washington cooperative projects. The US Congress early on Saturday overwhelmingly passed the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act 2024 to avoid a partial shutdown and fund the government through September for a fiscal year that began six months ago. Under the package, the Defense Appropriations Act would provide a US$27 billion increase from the previous fiscal year to fund “critical national defense efforts, including countering the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” according to a summary