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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In war, you deny information, spread lies and use psychological warfare. An expert on military information operations explains how Bush has mastered this technique -- and used it against the American people.
Sep 22, 2004 | On Thursday, Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will speak before a joint meeting of Congress, and from what he said in London on his way to the United States, it looks like Americans are going to be getting more of the strategic information operations that have been crucial to Bush's policy on Iraq from the beginning.
On Monday, Allawi said at a press conference: "Terrorists are coming and pouring into Iraq to try to undermine the situation in Iraq ... And God forbid, if Iraq is broken or the will of Iraq is broken, then London will be a target, Washington will be a target." In those sentences, Allawi employed the basic doctrine of strategic information operations: Influence emotions, motive and objective reasoning. Use repetition to create a collective memory in the target audience. And the recurrent message of both Allawi and the Bush administration is: Iraq = terrorists = 9/11.
The Army Field Manual describes information operations as the use of strategies such as information denial, deception and psychological warfare to influence decision making. The notion is as old as war itself. With information operations, one seeks to gain and maintain information superiority -- control information and you control the battlefield. And in the information age, it has become even more imperative to influence adversaries.
But with the Iraq war, information operations have gone seriously off track, moving beyond influencing adversaries on the battlefield to influencing the decision making of friendly nations and, even more important, American public opinion. In information denial, one attempts to deceive one's adversary. Since the declared end of combat operations, the Bush administration has orchestrated a number of deceptions about Iraq. But who is its adversary?
In August 2003, the administration's message was that everything in Iraq was improving. The White House led the information effort and even published a paper on the successes of the first 100 days of the occupation. By October the message had shifted: Things were going well in Iraq, but the media was telling the wrong story.
Then, toward the end of 2003, the message was that the whole problem in Iraq was "dead-enders" and "foreign fighters." If it weren't for them, the situation would be fine. Then, after Saddam Hussein was captured in December, the message shifted again: The coalition had discovered along with the former dictator documents revealing the insurgent network, which now would be broken. Once again, everything would be fine.
At the approach of the hand-over to Iraq's interim government in late June, the administration said the event represented the worst fears of the insurgents, who did not want any movement toward democracy. The White House warned that there would be increased violence as the insurgents tried to prevent the interim government from assuming its proper role in running the country. In fact, violence did increase before the transfer, but there was even more violence afterward. But the administration's information about the situation in Iraq sharply declined.
Denying information to adversaries is one way of maintaining information dominance. (According to the Army Field Manual, this dimension involves "withholding information that adversaries need for effective decision-making.") In the case of Iraq, this has meant eliminating press releases and press briefings. Since the hand-over of power, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq has issued only six releases, including one on the new Iraqi environment minister's visit to a landfill project. The most recent press release, on Aug. 12, was about a boxer on Iraq's Olympics team. The last press briefing by the Multi-National Force in Iraq was June 25. The interim Iraqi government does not hold press conferences.
The White House Web site also reflects the strategy of withholding information. It used to actively provide content on Operation Iraqi Freedom (or as the Web site now says, "Renewal in Iraq"), but the last new entry is dated Aug. 5.
The effect of the White House's control of information has been dramatic. The chart above shows how English-language press coverage of Iraq has fallen off since July. Early in July, it was typical to find almost 250,000 articles each day mentioning Iraq. That number has dropped to 150,000. The goal of denying the adversary access to information is being realized. But, again, who is the adversary?
Before, during and immediately after the war, the White House orchestrated an intensive program of press briefings and releases to saturate media time and space, stay on message, keep ahead of the news cycle and manage expectations. The White House conference call set the daily message. The press briefings from the Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, were designed to dominate the morning and afternoon press coverage, while the afternoon press briefing by the Pentagon was intended for the evening news.
