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."
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."
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