Bush’s Videotape to Iraq: Polished but Ignored

Standing in front of his desk in the Oval Office last Thursday morning, President Bush read through an eight-minute script to produce his videotaped message to Iraq. Then, since he had the camera crew handy, Bush recorded a message to help the city of Atlanta in its bid for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.

So far, the Atlanta tape appears to have been more persuasive. The International Olympic Committee awarded the games to the Georgia city, but U.S. analysts say there is little sign that Bush’s message to Iraq has had much impact on Saddam Hussein or his people.

That’s not for lack of trying, however.

Among other things, production of the Bush tape for Iraq required around-the-clock work by a team of 27 U.S. translators who spent two days making sure that the President’s words were correctly rendered into classical Arabic.

The message was also translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Indonesian, Farsi, Hindi and Urdu and has now been seen by audiences on every continent.

Although the broadcast of a videotaped presidential message to the people of a hostile nation is a rare event, the actual production of the tape took advantage of a host of well-honed skills at the White House and the U.S. Information Agency’s Worldnet service.

The White House regularly produces videotapes featuring Bush. The tapes are used for everything from public service spots--Bush earlier this year recorded an anti-drug message, for example--to speeches for Republican political events that cannot be fitted into the President’s hectic travel schedule.

Worldnet, meanwhile, began in 1987 to broadcast in Arabic, adding that language to a system that beams U.S. programming across the world in French, English and Spanish.

“It would have been more difficult” to produce the Bush tape before 1987, said Stephen Murphy, USIA’s director of television and film services. But, with 2 1/2 years of Arabic broadcast experience behind them, the USIA teams managed to complete work on Bush’s message in time to make an international broadcast deadline of noon Sunday.

As viewers of Iraqi statements broadcast to the United States have seen, translating political speeches not only between languages but between two vastly different cultures poses potentially major pitfalls.

To avoid those, the White House initially consulted with Arab experts from the State Department and the National Security Council staff to ensure that Bush’s remarks “would be effective for the audience,” a White House official said. “A great deal of care was taken in the crafting of the President’s message and the presentation so that it would convey precisely the intended message,” the official added.

The experts in Arab culture rejected at least some initial White House ideas for the setting of the speech, feeling that informal images that would work well in an American setting might “seem peculiar to a typical Arab viewer.”

The eventual choice--having Bush stand in front of his desk and speak--was designed by Bush’s media chief, Sig Rogich, to “portray a serious image” and take advantage of the President’s “powerful figure,” the White House official said. Rogich, who produced many of Bush’s campaign commercials, joined the White House staff last year to beef up its ability to project a positive political image for the President.

Once taping of the message was completed last Thursday, White House officials took the tape to USIA’s Washington studios, where translators prepared dubbing tapes in several languages and wrote Arabic subtitles. A copy was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where Chinese subtitles were written for broadcast there.

Although several dialects of Arabic exist, the Administration chose to translate Bush’s message into “classical Arabic,” the same standard dialect used by Iraq in its own television broadcasts. Classical Arabic can be understood anywhere within the Arab world, Murphy said, unlike regional dialects, such as Gulf Arabic, which residents of other areas find hard to understand.

In addition to Iraq, which broadcast Bush’s statement to the accompaniment of large anti-American demonstrations, the videotape has now been seen in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, Murphy said. The tape has also been widely aired in both Europe and Latin America and may have been seen in at least parts of China as well.

Typically, however, the nation the United States is trying to defend did not broadcast Bush’s message.

Saudi Arabia, which has tried to limit the broadcast of Western programs within its territory and which has sharply limited what its own press may report about the U.S. deployment on its soil, aired only brief excerpts of Bush’s speech on its television news programs.