Michael Schrage in today’s Washington Post has an interesting piece, “Use Every Article In The Arsenal,” related to this January 10, 2006 Worldwide Standard post: Many liberals want to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, derail the current NSA surveillance operation tracking terrorist communications to the U.S., and remain outraged at U.S. covert “propaganda” efforts in Iraq — Sen. Kennedy has called such efforts “a devious scheme.” On this point, Reuel Gerecht argues in today’s Washington Post that “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.” Gerecht asks:
Why did the United States spend so much covert-action money in Western Europe after World War II? Washington was unsure of Western Europe’s commitment to democracy and its resolve to oppose the Soviet Union and its proxy European communist parties. The programs had to be clandestine: The foreigners involved usually could not have operated with open U.S. funding without jeopardizing their lives, their families or their reputations. Did these CA projects retard or damage the growth of a free press and free inquiry in Western Europe after World War II? I think an honest historical assessment would conclude that U.S. covert aid advanced both.
Similarly, Schrage writes:
Yet revelations that U.S. forces in Iraq have surreptitiously purchased and placed stories in the local media to promote the quality-of-life improvements they have made possible and to highlight the country’s democratic progress have provoked journalistic outrage here at home…. Enough, already. The truth is, you can’t wage a successful counterinsurgency campaign without an “information warfare” component … Securing positive coverage for our troops in Iraq can be as important to their safety as “up-armoring” vehicles and providing state-of-the-art body armor. The failure to wage the media war is a failure to command…. But a “free” Iraqi press dominated by one-sided thuggery and threat is neither free nor fair…. Holding Iraq’s nascent media to American ethical standards makes little sense. In a counterinsurgency war zone, the locals understandably pay close attention to the risks and rewards of raising one’s media profile. Not all friendships, alliances and sympathies come free…. Moreover, such principled purity defies the precedents of historical American wartime and occupation experience. After World War II, both Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s occupied Japan and Gen. Lucius Clay’s occupied Germany imposed levels of press oversight and control that make Iraq’s information environment look as unregulated as the blogosphere…. As recently as 1999, during NATO operations in Kosovo — an environment far less hostile than occupied Iraq — American military operatives secretly paid for planted stories in Serbian media outlets. The stories, which military officials insist were accurate, were intended to counter Milosevic’s anti-NATO media campaign. American media leadership is divided over its own ethics and obligations in protecting journalists in Iraq. On the one hand, many media outlets agreed to a news blackout to buy time for kidnapped Christian Science Monitor freelancer Jill Carroll. On the other, many Western media didn’t hesitate to publicly reveal names of Iraqi media outlets accepting American funds, thus putting Iraqi lives at risk. The U.S. military, understandably, wants to protect its people and its allies, too.
