Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  According to the U.K. PSYOPS specialists I heard at a conference in London the first week in July 2003 they are convinced that one of the reasons we are currently having problems in Iraq is because we oversold our story. We told them too many times and too strongly that we would make it better and fix things.

  Organizing for Combat

  One way to view how the U.S. Government was organized to do the strategic communications effort before, during, and after the war is to use the chart (below) that was used by the assistant deputy director for information operations at the Joint Staff in his presentation at the London conference on July 2, 2003.

  The center is the White House Office of Global Communications, the organization originally created by Karen Hughes as the Coalition Information Office. The White House is at the center of the strategic communications process.

  It is important to note that there are two Policy Coordination Committees (PCC), one that deals with the information component of the war on terrorism, and one that deals with strategic communications in general.

  In the Pentagon, in addition to the normal public affairs structure, the Office of Special Plans was deeply involved in this effort, supported (with information) by the Iraqi National Congress. This is illustrated below. There was the Rendon Group, headed by John Rendon, who gave media advice to OSD, the Joint Staff and the White House. Finally, there were connections to large PSYOPS activities. The names of individuals came from open reports. I was given the names of people in the Office of Special Plans by a press source.

  The Rendon Group worked for the government of Kuwait during the Gulf I. John Rendon proudly tells that it was he who shipped small American flags to Kuwait for the citizens to wave as troops entered Kuwait City. He suggested the same technique for this war, but the Joint Staff IO (Information Operations) office turned down the idea.

  The Rendon Group worked for both OSD and the Joint Staff during this war. John Rendon says he was part of the daily 9:30 phone calls with the key information players to set themes.

  As illustrated on the chart on the following page, there was, inside the White House, an Iraq Group that determined policy direction, and then there was the Office of Global Communications itself.

  The London Times said the Office of Global Communications was a $200 million program. That certainly raises the question of how much all of this cost in total, including the $250,000 for the pressroom in Doha.

  It's important to note that at times there were as many as three Britons associated with the Office of Global Communications.

  To ensure the military would be a willing part of the network, three people from the White House Office of Global Communications were sent to work with Central Command. This is shown on the preceding diagram. Jim Wilkinson became General Franks's Director of Strategic Communications.

  What all of these illustrations collectively demonstrate is that the war was handled like a political campaign. Everyone in the message business was from the political communications community. It was a political campaign.

  In London, there was even a parallel organization and a parallel coordination process. They kept the coordination with secure video teleconferences. This is illustrated in what follows.

  My concern about all of this became even greater when I attended the conference on Information Operations on July 3, 2003. This was John Rendon's list of things that need fixing:

  We were on the wrong side of expectations during the conflict.

  Embedded journalists were the equivalent of reality television, and they got air time.

  We allowed others to give the context too much.

  We were still behind the news cycle by four hours, particularly in other time zones.

  Lanes are not important as long as an agency with the capability contributes.

  He said, additionally, that the embedded idea was great. It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and, for the most part, they did not loose control of the story. He said one of the mistakes they made was that they lost control of the context. The retired people in the networks had too much control of context. That had to be fixed for the next war. He said he was made aware that lanes are not important. By lanes he meant not letting individual organizations take control of the story, and was hinting at a willingness to step across organizational boundaries in order to achieve his objective.

  The Future

  The information operations part of the future is frightening. Captain Gerald Mauer, Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations at the Joint Staff, said, without a sense of the implications, that public diplomacy and public affairs are being integrated into information operations. He said he was looking ahead to the next war where the U.S. government will need a single fusion center that can integrate the story. He hopes to make more use of Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the future. The 15 Psychological Operations Group (U.K.) will grow, and strategic information operations will take on new importance.

  He described a paper called the “Information Operations Roadmap” that was being coordinated in the Pentagon. He said when the paper was drafted by his office it said that information operations would be used against an “adversary.” He went on to say that when the paper got to the office of the under secretary of defense for policy (Feith), it was changed to say that information operations will attempt to “disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial … decision-making.” Adversarial … decision-making will be disrupted. In other words, we will even go after friends if they are against what we are doing or want to do, i.e., if their decisions are in any way “adversarial.”

  They seem to be documenting the practice that emerged during Gulf War II. If you don't agree with us, you could be the target of an information attack.

  Leave Behind

  If the democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom are really and truly based upon informed, open debate of the issues, we have a great deal of fixing to do.

  A close friend always asks: what's your last chart? He means, what are your recommendations? What is your slide or chart that you're “leaving behind” for your audience, as a “take-home” message. He is right. It does not seem to be enough just to say things have gone bad.

  Parliamentary Inquiry. In the U.K., it's not enough to look at the arguments about weapons of mass destruction before the war. There needs to be an inquiry into the broader question of how spin got to be more important than substance. What roles did information operations and strategic psychological operations play in the war? What controls need to be placed on information operations?

  Information Operations. Someone inside the U.S. Government said to me that there were so many offices involved in information operations he couldn't even name them. We need a major investigation. We need restrictions on which parts of the government can 'do' information operations. We should not direct information operations against friends. We have to get this back under control.

  Smith-Mundt Act. The law was written just after World War II. Its intent was that the American people would not become the target of our own propaganda. It no longer works. We became collateral damage, a target group of messages intended for other groups. The Internet and international media access have changed the conditions. We need to revise the laws.

  Post Script

  The reactions to my research have been very interesting.

  When I show the material to individuals inside the government – mostly the career people who have been around more than one administration – they have an almost universal first reaction. They say something like, “Be careful with this; they will punish you.” I don't hear that I have got it wrong. They don't correct my research. I keep hearing the notion, as I found in the research, that punishment of those who disagree is a dimension of the strategy.

  Print media have been quite interested. I think reporters like the idea of someone confirming they had not been getting the true story. I have detected a major issue in these discussions in what r
eporters have not said to me.

  I think the materials point to problems in the way newspapers did their job during the war. Why don't they react immediately by saying that they need to do some self-appraisal? I think one could take the stories I have highlighted and ask some direct questions. How was it that the Washington Post took classified information on the Jessica Lynch story and published it just the way the individual leaking it in the Pentagon wanted? Why did the New York Times let itself be used by “intelligence officials” on stories? Why did the Washington Times never seem to question a leak they were given? Why were newspapers in the U.K. better than those in the U.S. in raising questions before and during the war?

  I have not heard any self-criticism from reporters to whom I have talked.

  When I have talked to television producers and reporters my sense is they believe the whole story is just too complex to tell. That's sad but probably true.

  Cynicism is the most disturbing reaction I have encountered. I got it from a limo driver who was taking me to the MSNBC studio for a debate on the no-WMD story. He said, “It's just what politicians do.”

  I gave a briefing on my research to one of the major Washington research organizations, a think tank. A major thrust of reactions was to keep asking: “What's new. This kind of thing always takes place.” I think I heard laughter when I said there was no passion for truth in those who were taking us to war. Didn't I understand what goes on in government?

  I pain for the limo driver because our leaders have pushed him to be so cynical. I pain even more for the senior researcher. He seems to have no sense of a higher vision. I pain for our democratic process when I find individuals are not angered at being deceived.

  1. Report to Congress Regarding the Terrorism Information Awareness Program, May 20, 2003.

  1. James Bamford, A Pretext for War (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 295.

  1. From the White House on December 18, 2001: it was “increasingly looking like” the anthrax sent through the mail came from a U.S. source.

  1. Peter Stothard, Thirty Days: Tony Blair and the Test of History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

  We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us.

  —Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, USA, June 22, 2005

  … if we don't fight them here, we will have to fight them in Syria.

  —Syrian fighter, to a reporter in Fallujah

  in 2004 on why he was in Iraq fighting

  American forces

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY:

  HONEST MEN CONSIDER THE SITUATION OF IRAQ

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: As this volume goes to press, literally on the eve of the first deadline for Iraq's so-called “new” Constitution, Prof. Al-Qazzaz's comments look prescient beyond measure. Taken along with Mark Gery's essay on the first Iraqi “election,” and the pieces by Col. de Grand Pré and Dr. Doebbler, which look tangentially at Ba'athism through the lenses of our continued occupation and our refusal to treat Saddam Hussein in accordance with the law – both international and American – al-Qazzaz's remarks about America's need to partition Iraq as a way of making sure it is not a rallying point for Pan-Arabism seems hard to argue with.

  This is an aspect of things that few people grasp, and even fewer experts discuss. But it is there, behind the scenes, if those reading or listening have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. All the discussions that have taken place during the “dramatic” and “suspenseful” days leading up to the “new constitution” center around the possible division of Iraq into Kurd, Shiite, and Sunni statelets. Just recently (August 12, 2005) a radio interview with former CFR head Leslie Gelb and National Defense University scholar Judith Yaphe focused on the issue, arguing about whether it would be good for Iraqis to have their country split into three smaller, loosely united states. To her credit, Yaphe mentioned that only the extremists want that outcome, and when pressed to explain who those extremists are, she identified the Shiite cleric al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Most Iraqis, she said, consider themselves to be Iraqis, not members of this or that sect, race, or religion. Nevertheless, self-interested U.S. designs for Iraq proceed, the desires of the Iraqi people notwithstanding …

  As political developments in Iraq unfold, it will be important for us all to have a clear idea of what the truth really is, lurking behind popular media coverage and superficial “expert” analysis. We could do worse than to have as intellectual guides the clear perspectives of scholars such as Prof. Al-Qazzaz and others in this volume.

  CHAPTER

  35

  Behind the Smoke Screen: Why We Are in Iraq

  ………

  An Interview with Prof. Ayad S. Al-Qazzaz

  PROFESSOR, THE HEART of this interview will concern the current conflict with Iraq, and the reasons for the United States' attack upon that country. But before we turn to the conflict today in Iraq, it would be useful to know a little of your background. Could you describe your life in Iraq and your reasons for coming to the United States?

  AQ: I came to this country in January 1963 when I was 21 years old. I had just finished my Bachelor of Arts in Sociology at Baghdad University. I was very lucky to be accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue my graduate studies. In the late 1960s I decided to look for a job, and I accepted an offer from California State University, Sacramento. At which time I started several research projects and publications.

  LID: Some of those publications involved Iraq, I assume?

  AQ: Well, a number of them involved Iraq. The first article I published was in 1967 in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. It was an article comparing Iraq, Syria and Egypt, and that article mainly explained why the military coup in Egypt stabilized the system in Egypt while the military forces in both Syria and Iraq led to instability.

  LID: It seems to me that there is an attempt to link Iraq and al-Qaeda and then to compare Muslim countries in general with the historical period in which Muslim countries fought the West, consciously reviving the images and sentiments of the Crusades. This exploits widespread ignorance of the history of Iraq and of peaceful relations between Muslim countries and the West.

  AQ: Iraq is an interesting country. On the one hand you can say it's a very modern country, dating it to 1921 when it was established formally under the British mandate.

  LID: With the League of Nations.

  AQ: Right. But on the other hand, the land of Iraq – and this is what people misunderstand – the land of Iraq is an ancient land. It's the cradle of civilization. The land of Babylon, the land of the Assyrian Empire, the land of the Akkadian and Sumerian Empire. The wheel was invented there, the first urban settlement was there, writing was invented there, the calendar was established, and in that region the Hanging Gardens were established, as well as the juridical Code of Hammurabi (1792–1750 B.C.) which is perhaps the “mother of all codes.” Thus we are talking about a country with a very long, complex and rich history. If you look a little further into history, you find that Baghdad became the center of a huge Muslim empire, the Abassid Empire, in the eighth and the ninth century, under the Caliphates of Harun ar-Rashid (786–809). At that point the culture in Baghdad represented the highest of achievements, materially, intellectually, and so on. The Caliphate established the first university, called the “House of Wisdom,” and in that university they did most of the translations of Greek documents. A lot of the Greek documents – Aristotle, for example – have been lost in the original, and all that we have is the Arabic translation for them.

  But most of the time, between the 15th and 20th centuries, Iraq was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Iraq at that time was divided into three provinces – Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. Each one of them had its own governor, but Baghdad was the most powerful center. In 1914, the British invaded Iraq. They started by invading the south, and they completed the invasion of Baghdad in 1917. Interestingly, when the British invaded Baghdad, they issued
a proclamation saying, Bush-like, “We came to liberate you.” The British “liberation” turned out to be an occupation, a mandate, and the British practically did not leave until 1958.

  LID: What about 1932?

  AQ: Iraq became independent formally in 1932, but was tied by treaty to the British for 25 years. The treaty stipulated: firstly, that the British could maintain two military bases. Secondly, they could bring in troops at will during wartime. The British used this treaty on many occasions, naturally.

  LID: Can we compare the British occupation and proclamation of liberation to the current public relations message that Iraq is now independent, with a Prime Minister and cabinet?

  AQ: Yes. Iraq's government is a puppet government. It's amazing how history repeats itself. Remember the statements when we were invading Iraq: “We have no intention of occupying the country”? Then immediately after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, we went to the UN requesting that we be declared the official occupier. When the occupation, which has now lasted for two years, became very costly to us and very hard to justify and sell to the American people, we came up with the gimmick of establishing an interim government, claiming it represents the sovereign Iraqi people, and further claiming that we are in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government.

  LID: In spite of the occupation of Iraq by British forces, would you say, nevertheless, that there was a fairly cordial relationship between the broader Arab world and the West, which changed drastically with the creation of the Israel?