Two Friday's ago we learned that the Pentagon hired a PR firm to spin the war. Or as it was reported in the San Jose Mercury News , "to help it explain U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan to global audiences." Rendon Group, the firm in question, previously was used by the CIA to write good things about the Iraqui rebels. According to Con Vaitas , when Kuwait was overrun by the Iraquis back in 1990, another such firm was hired by Poppy Bush, which enabled him to tell us more than once that "a young Kuwaiti girl got up in Congress and gave a tearful report of seeing Saddam's goons throwing babies out of humidicribs [Whatever those are.] so they could take the equipment back to Iraq." Con Vaitsas went on to report that "it was later discovered that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and hadn't been anywhere near Kuwait at the time. It was made up with the assistance of an American public relations company." If Con Vaitsas is correct, let's hope Bush, Jr.'s Pentagon PR firm turns out to be a bit more trustworthy.

According to a Guardian story, "the agency will monitor the news media in 79 countries, recommend ways the US military can counter opposition messages and improve public communications." All this for $3,500 a day. But one warning flag is that those working in the Washington PR firm used to work for Congress, the White House, and the Clinton administration, hardly new blood. And the first fruit of the deal that the pubic has been made aware of seemed more like a publicity stunt to give anthrax-frightened citizens something to do. Last Thursday the Pentagon announced a contest. That's right, send in your one-page description of an idea for "defeating difficult targets, conducting protracted operations in remote areas, and developing countermeasures to weapons of mass destruction" by December 23, according to the press release . "Soliciting ideas from any Tom, Dick & Goofball for possible defense contracts," was "disconcerting" to the the NYT's tart-tongued Maureen Dowd. Or as Bush Watcher Ruth wrote, "Now we enter Phase Three: the Thoroughly Modern Inter-Active War! A National Contest sponsored by Yours Truly, The Gummint! Quick! Get your entry form here!

But it's not just the Pentagon that's out of touch. The tatters of what used to be the U.S. Information Agency is now part of the State Department and its being run by Charlotte Beers, an advertising exec with no experience in government or foreign policy. Her idea of getting out the word about America is using the Internet, but the Internet only reaches 1% of the citizens of the key Middle Eastern countries, according to Richard Holbrooke . Nothing seems to be working. The Voice of America is reported to be "barely audible" with an audience of 2%, and few, if any, Afghani's are even aware of the messages we're broadcasting to them from slow-moving planes directly overhaead, according to the BBC.

On a more positive note, yesterday's NYT reports that, perhaps as a result of Rendon Group's advice, American officials including Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld have begun to appear in interviews on previously-shunned Al Jazeera television, the CNN of the Arab world. "The American views — always avowing that the United States has nothing against Muslims or Islam — have received prominent play. But in terms of content and impact, the interviews have often fallen flat," because what American representatives are saying on Arab television and in Arab papers doesn't jibe with what the Arab audience is learning elsewhere. A Cairo professor notes, "America has failed miserably in marketing their war to the Arabs. How can they convince the Arabs of anything while Israel's American-made tanks are occupying the Palestinian territories?" With only Al Jazeera actually reporting from Afghanistan and the BushAdmin filtering all the Afghan war news that ends up being reported in American magazines and newspapers, Arabs are suspicious of what the American representatives are saying, reports the NYT, even though "the American views have received prominent play."

Perhaps what is needed is a more coordinated and more realistic effort through an office of "public diplomacy" to oversee communication efforts, an office like FDR's Office Of War Information, Eisenhower's USIA, or Clinton's special communications office for Serbia, which helped to defeat Milosevic. Holbrooke suggests that such an office could be run out of the White House, because that's the only place "that can coordinate -- by which I mean direct
-- public affairs activities of State, Defense, Justice, CIA, AID and others toward the Muslim world." On the negative side, however, like so much else in Junior's administration, the idea behind such an office would most likely be not be to provide news, but propaganda, with techniques honed by his father and his father's administration during the Gulf War.

In 1991, advertising professor Eugene Secunda wrote, "Operation Desert Storm allowed only one view of the battle: the one authorized by the military. Like travelers led from their buses by tour guides, the TV crews were given an opportunity to videotape the 'panoramic vista' before them, and then were whisked to the next officially authorized destination. In the aftermath of the war with Iraq, strategic planners, preparing for future wars, are unquestionably examining the lessons gleaned from this triumphant experience. One of the most important lessons learned is the necessity of mobilizing strong public support, through the projection of a powerful and tightly controlled PR program, with particular effort directed toward the realization of positive news coverage." This is exactly what the BushAdmin is doing and there's no indication that a White House office of "public diplomacy" would shift the information output from propaganda to news.

"We need to do a better job to make sure that people are not confused as to what this is about," says Sec. Rumsfeld. But as Norman Solomon writes, "It's typical of warmakers to claim that the biggest problems lie with others' faulty perceptions rather than their own deadly orders. But no amount of PR wizardry can change the cold facts....Though you wouldn't know much about it from watching TV news or skimming the front pages, large numbers of Afghans -- many of them children and elderly -- are facing the likelihood of starvation because the bombing has forced recurrent halts to the movement of food-aid trucks from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Concern is growing among humanitarian aid workers that about 100,000 people are now in imminent peril. By winter, the number could be in the millions. Meanwhile, on television, we see footage of air-dropped meals that amount to no more than 1 percent of what's needed to prevent people from starving. That's called good PR."

(c) 2001 by Bush Watch (www.bushwatch.com). May be reprinted with linked attribution.
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