By Wes Pedersen
The U.S. is wasting millions of dollars on propaganda to sway minds in the Middle East.
The latest stab at Pentagon PR is an outrage, and should help trigger a Congressional probe into the cost-effectiveness and basic worth of America’s propaganda effort.
This particular Defense Dept. contract is for help in the U.S. Afghan Command. It calls for PR to help the Command "take aggressive actions to win the battle for public (Afghan) perception."
That’s boilerplate copy from almost 10 years ago. Here’s what’s new: the contract is written so it could continue until 2016.
That is two years after our troops are supposed to leave.
The Command is not retrenching PR-wise. It wants to expand its 24/7 efforts to monitor native-language radio, TV and print to include Internet and, apparently, cellphone transmissions. (Big Brother potential with the latter?)
Meanwhile, the U.S, Embassy and the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) are spending millions for their Afghanistan Media Development and Empowerment project.
One PR shop that has profited from U.S. largesse is The Moby Group, founded on an AID grant and now an Afghan communications conglomerate. Its TV programs include Afghan versions of U.S. reality shows and "American Idol."
Has any of this effort actually helped U.S.? Probably not, especially considering that, for all practical purposes, we lost Afghanistan years ago.
The same is true of Iraq. Consider excerpts from a new report, "Iraq’s News Media After Saddam," released by the Center for International Media Assistance of the National Endowment for Democracy:
"Despite massive infusion of cash from the U.S. government for media development – more than $500 million by most estimates – the country’s media development does not look promising on several fronts…
"(Many of the Iraq media) have become mouthpieces for ethno-political factions with the potential to inflame sectarian divisions that have led the country to the brink of civil war."
As things now stand, the White House and NATO have made the job of any official U.S. publicist almost impossible throughout the Middle East and much of the rest of the world.
The White House is ensnarled in efforts to explain away discrepancies in its early story of its execution of bin Laden. Failing in that task, it has gone silent until some sensible story can be patched together.
Doubts are growing louder and wider now in the Middle East that we will ever give them a script they can believe.
U.S. public affairs offices throughout the region are sweating; trying to assure local media friends we really are not the clumsy PR oafs everyone there assumes us to be.
As for Libya, NATO, and President Obama early on, have denied that our strikes on Gadaffi’s compound were aimed at killing Gadaffi.
We have lied big time on Libya. The White House has lied. NATO has lied. The deadly onslaughts against the Gadaffi compound were all clearly aimed at Gadaffi himself. One killed a Gadaffi son and three of the leader’s grandchildren.
Our insistence that we are not trying blast the head of a still sovereign country into hell are recognized as phony by anyone who can add one and one.
With all that as pathetic background, it is clear that our propaganda warrant re-examination. We have too many official feet in the PR fire in the Middle East, obviously. Congress ought to take a prompt look at our PR programs there, and probably around the world.
In the process, anyone making such a study should ask this question: Do we really need a huge propaganda establishment working the overseas crowd anymore? We certainly no longer need heavy communications equipment.
Social media, in all their guises, can swamp the world with official messages in seconds.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C. |