Snow - Propaganda, Inc.: selling Americas culture to the world

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

OVER TWO DECADES AGO, I wrote an essay as part of my Fulbright application to live for one year as a government-sponsored exchange student in the Federal Republic of Germany. When asked why I wanted to live abroad, I drew upon my love of a German language poet and writer, Rainer Maria Rilke, who corresponded with a young artistic man about to enter the German army.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Dont search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Though I am no longer young like that young man, in everything I do, I continue to love lifes eternal questions. Life is too short to ever expect all the answers. My time spent abroad would help me not only to love the questions about international relations, but also to live them in real time. During my time in Germany, and then when I returned home, I continuedand have continued ever sinceto live vital questions about my home countrys place in the world.

Its been ten long years since the United States Information Agency (USIA) shuttered its doors as an independent agency of the US government. Tasked with telling Americas story to the world, this cold war American propaganda agency was kept on life support throughout most of the Clinton years. While the USIA was not resuscitated after 9/11, the Bush administration acted to upgrade its vestiges in the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Department of State. This third edition of Propaganda, Inc. is meant to bring us up to speed with the more current manifestations of American propaganda post-9/11, and their disturbing relationship to the war on terror.

The DOD was the clear winner between the two agencies vying for Americas perception management resources, though it wasnt always the best at its own press relations. In February 2002, the New York Times carried a headline that read Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad. The article identified a new Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), created in October 2001 in response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent declaration of a war on terror. The goals of the OSI ranged from the most benign means to influence foreign audiences, such as explaining the war on terror through press releases and traditional public relations practices, to the most sinisterdeceptive information practices, known as black propaganda, designed to confuse and challenge enemy targets and foreign civilian populations. The BBC reported that the Pentagon was planning a propaganda war by planting apocryphal stories with false sources in foreign media. Specifically, the Pentagon OSI staff would compose articles and emails for foreign distribution with no military attribution. In email speak, this would mean that a foreign target would receive an OSI-generated email from a .com source rather than a .mil source, thereby hiding the real source of the information.

Journalists were predictably outraged at the latter tactics, arguing persuasively that it was impossible to control information flows in a global media environment. Information packaged for an enemy target could easily migrate to an unintended friendly audience, thereby weakening American credibility in the world. Pentagon stories designed for placement strictly overseas could easily blow back into US media outlets. There was no way to fully protect friendly populations from these enemy viruses of the mind. That there was also no means to prevent these OSI-generated tactics from influencing Americans was in itself a clear violation of US law, which prohibits using black propaganda tactics on domestic audiences.

Within a week, and allegedly under fire from an embarrassed White House, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reassured journalists on February 26, 2002, that the OSI would shut down, or at least its official name would be retired. Nine months later on November 18, 2002, a defiant Rumsfeld commented on what happened to OSI during a DOD press conference using his obtuse Rummy speak:

What Rumsfeld was acknowledging in that statement was a longstanding American commitment to democratic propaganda, otherwise known as a campaign of truth or strategies of truth. From early twentieth-century president Woodrow Wilson to early twenty-first-century president George W. Bush, American propaganda has been defined as telling a version of the truthnot the whole truth, but rather, as much as democratically possible in time of war. Trouble is, the public (domestic or global) does not get to determine the bandwidth of what is acceptable truth, only the political and military leadership do. Its just like the often-repeated line from Aaron Sorkins A Few Good Men, You cant handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.

Men with guns or who threaten to use guns continue to conceal the truth from full spectrum light.

Operation Iraqi Freedom and the war on terror established a whole new spectrum of telling Americas story in wartime. Weapons of Mass Destruction that never materialized, the manufactured hero-turned-all-too-human Jessica Lynch story, and the marketing of the war as a welcome liberation over occupation proved highly controversial. The coalition of the willing was more ad hoc than fraternal. Tony Blair, overseer of Americas most important ally across the Great Pond, was accused of being a lapdog poodle to the American president.

Propaganda continues to be misrepresented to the American public mind as necessary information or disinformation. The American government has used this excuse as a convenient semantic device to shield itself. It allowed the Bush-Cheney administration to operate more in secret than in plain sight and to comfort the afflicted with the mantra that it told the truth while the enemy proliferated propaganda. Rarely will you hear an American political leader say that the United States conducts propaganda campaigns in the world. Rather, we will hear about efforts to tell the truth regarding our good intentions. In January 2005, just days before beginning his second term in office, Bush at least acknowledged to CNN that the US decision to invade Iraq was as important to public perceptions as what the US government said its mission was: