Information Warfare
The Battle for Hearts and Minds
By John D. Turner
Information warfare is the offensive and
defensive use of information and information systems to deny,
exploit, corrupt, or destroy, an adversary's information,
information-based processes, information systems, and computer-based
networks while protecting one's own. Such actions are designed to
achieve advantages over military or business adversaries.
-- Dr. Ivan Goldberg
One facet of information warfare,
“psychological operations” or psyops, is all around you.
It is in the commercial advertisements you see
when you drive your car, or watch TV. It’s on the network news you
watch and in the newspapers and magazines you read. When you see a
political ad, put out to convince you to vote for someone (or
against them), that is information warfare. When we want to put a
good face on it, we call it “public relations”. When we wish to
demonize, we call it propaganda. It is the battle for the hearts and
minds, in a positive or negative sense, of the target audience.
A big part of what we are trying to accomplish
in Iraq is based on psychological operations; an attempt to win the
hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and bring a stable democracy of
some sort to that region.
Why a democracy?
Because, as it has been noted by many,
democracies do not fight democracies. A democratic form of
government is more likely to bring peace and stability to a region
than is a dictatorship. We may not always like what they do (e.g.,
French, Russians, and Germans when we went into Iraq in the first
place), but we don’t go to war with each other.
A big part of what al’Qaida and other
terrorist organizations are trying to do fall into the category of
psychological operations as well. They are not simply trying to win
hearts and minds, but to intimidate them as well. In Iraq, they want
to intimidate us into leaving and convince the Iraqi public to throw
us out.
In the first case, they believe that if they
cause us enough pain and perpetrate horrific enough violence that
our population will force our government to leave (a la Mogadishu,
Lebanon, et al).
In the other case, they want to show Iraqis
that aiding us is a death sentence and that the United States offers
no protection.
Pictures like those from the Abu Ghraib prison
bolster their case and weaken ours. Our media plays into their hands
by airing such photos over and over. To hear them talk you would
think that this was the biggest atrocity since Dachau. I guess this
is just a further example of how “sex sells”.
Where are the “fair and balanced” stories of
the good things our troops and civilian contractors are doing every
day?
Where are the photos of the atrocities
perpetrated on Iraqis by the Saddam regime, or the al-Qaida
terrorists themselves?
Why do we no longer see footage of the
destruction of the World Trade Center?
Are we just supposed to forget about that?
Indeed we are. The battle for hearts and minds
is not just fought in Iraq. It is fought here in this country as
well. What the public thinks here in America is to a large extent
shaped by the news we receive and how our major news outlets present
it. From most of the reporting I have seen, we may as well be
getting a direct feed from Al Jazeera. As with Vietnam, we may be
winning the war on the battlefield, but losing it here on the home
front.
The problem here seems to be two-fold.
First is the common “if it bleeds, it leads”
mentality of our media.
It is much more likely that a news article
concerning a couple of our service personnel being killed by a
roadside bomb will be aired than an article about how an army
company helped the local community by providing school supplies for
the kids at the local elementary school. Events like this occur on a
daily basis (our squadron here in San Antonio is having a school
supply drive right now, the supplies to be funneled through one of
our squadron members who is deployed to Iraq) but go pretty much
unreported. Except perhaps in the print media, on page 27 of section
G in small print at the bottom of the page under the heading “Iraqi
Schools Ill-equipped”.
This brings up the second point.
There is a broad undercurrent in our
mainstream media to paint anything coming out of Iraq in a bad
light. And above all, never credit the President with anything
positive. If it is a positive news story, and these are few and far
between, somewhere in the article will be a dig of some sort at
George Bush.
“Yes, this good thing has happened, but
remember that this is an unjust, ill-advised adventure on the part
of an illegitimate president who stole two elections from the
rightful Democrat candidate, and lied about weapons of mass
destruction in order to invade peace-loving Iraq for oil and
Haliburton”. The media, in general does not like George Bush, did
not vote for George Bush, and will not willingly give him any
positive press. News items are slanted accordingly.
It seems that it is more important for many
(in the Congress as well as in the media) to pursue their personal
political agendas than it is to be concerned for the welfare of
their own country and the safety of its citizens. Losing this war a
la Vietnam would not be a good thing for the United States as a
whole, even if it might be perceived as a victory for the Democrat
party.
Anarchy in the Middle East and the triumph of
militant Islam is not a good thing for America, and ultimately will
not be a good thing for the Democrat party either, regardless of how
sweet getting rid of George Bush and unseating the Republicans might
seem in the short run.
It is interesting that shortly after the
attacks on September 11th, the media stopped showing video of the
bodies falling from the World Trade Center buildings. Such images
were deemed “too traumatic” for American audiences to view. And what
we did see was edited, and much less graphic than what audiences’
overseas saw. However, our media seems to have no problems at all
with showing us footage of American and Iraqi victims of suicide
bombers or other terrorists (usually labeled as “insurgents”). And
they are typically complete with a body count dating back to the
start of the war and some sort of negative statement towards the
administration.
We get constant reminders of the cost of the
war, with no attention paid at all, as to why we have been pursuing
this course of action in the first place. Instead we get idiotic
statements from our own congresscritters, such as Senator Durbin
(D-Ill), equating our interrogators in Guantanamo with the Nazi
Gestapo, Stalin’s Gulags and the minions of Pot Pol. Sure, he
apologized, but later, when the firestorm of criticism got too hot.
But the damage was already done. The apology doesn’t take his words
off the public record or off the air on Al Jazeera.
As might be expected, from such a concentrated
media blitz, sustained as it has been for the past several years, it
is working. Recent polling data shows that 57 percent of Americans
believe that the war in Iraq has made us less safe, this despite the
fact that there hasn’t been an attack on our soil in nearly four
years. 61 percent believe that President Bush is handling the war
badly, while 50 percent think that the US is losing ground in its
efforts to establish democracy in Iraq. 56 percent accuse President
Bush of being “arrogant”.
Winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi
public is an important goal. Keeping the hearts and minds of our
public is equally important. It’s hard to do that when our press and
certain scoundrels in Congress feed us a daily diet of negative
propaganda.
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