NEWS ANALYSIS : Allies, Iraqis Trading Shots in Image War

There is another war in the Persian Gulf--one not detailed in Pentagon briefings, the count of Scud attacks or videotape of surgical bombing sorties.

It is the battle for the mind.

Its weapons are radio reports from Baghdad, stories planted in foreign newspapers, images sent from Iraqi TV to the West via Cable News Network. It is an element in everything from Iraq’s Scud attacks on fellow Arabs in Saudi Arabia to the once-secular Iraqi government’s decision to overlay the symbol of Islam on its flag the day before war began to the timing of U.S. military briefings in Washington.

Winning the psychological war could influence how long the shooting war lasts and will help determine the political landscape after the war has ended.

While many Iraqi claims and images may strike Americans as inept attempts at propaganda, each blow of psychological combat is evaluated for its impact on the troops of both sides, other Arab populations and citizens within the United States and Iraq.

So far, say the experts, the Gulf War allies have a basic advantage. The overwhelming evidence suggests that they are winning militarily. Should that continue, no propaganda will be able to deny it for long.

At the same time, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s ability to depict himself as defying allied might is striking a chord in the Middle East, casting him as a hero in a region where the underdog can win merely by surviving.

But Iraq’s efforts in the aspect of war called “psychological operations” seem hampered by at least two factors. One is that Hussein has had to repudiate much of what he stood for during the Iran-Iraq War, when he cast himself as a bastion against Islamic extremism.

The other is a fundamental lack of understanding of the West. Perhaps the best example of that was Baghdad’s decision to release pictures of allied prisoners of war.

The images, Arab and Western observers in the Middle East say, apparently were designed in part to engender anti-war sentiment in the West, as Iraqi leaders reportedly believed similar POW footage did during the Vietnam War. But the pictures more likely intensified Western anger toward Iraq, experts say.

The POW pictures also were a risk, even supporters of Hussein acknowledge, for the Iraqi propaganda effort in the Middle East. Even though Americans may think such hostage videos are common after the experience in Lebanon, Arab experts say mistreating hostages is an anathema in the Arab culture. Hostage videos from Lebanon, they explain, are designed to intimidate the West, not inspire the Middle East.

Even one Jordanian intellectual sympathetic to Iraq had to admit: “The Americans described him as madman and a butcher. Now he has been pushed into a position where he has to act like one.”

The Iraqis may know the POW technique backfired. They have announced a suspension of such broadcasts.

Signs of Iraqi ignorance of the West are long standing. In a broadcast from Iraqi radio last fall, the voice dubbed “Baghdad Betty” warned soldiers that while they were sitting in the desert, their sweethearts back home were having dates with “Paul Newman, Tom Cruise and Bart Simpson.”

False Steps

When Hussein first visited British hostage families for TV cameras last fall, patting the head of a terrified British child, Western reporters found Iraqi officials back at the Foreign Ministry gleeful at what they considered their propaganda coup. Yet the video probably did as much to harm Hussein’s cause in the West as any moment in the months leading to war, said Neil Livingstone, a Georgetown University professor who directs the Institute on Terrorism and Subnational Conflict in Washington.

Similarly, many analysts think the initial Iraqi decision to expell all Western journalists, except Cable News Network’s Peter Arnett, was a sign of panic. To some degree that move weakened the credibility of government-inspired reports carried over CNN because Arnett was clearly in the hands of Iraqi censors. An Iraqi claim that the allies had damaged a baby formula production facility, for example, was ridiculed by the U.S. government, and Arnett’s handling of the report was criticized, even among some other journalists.

The allies have also destroyed Iraq’s regional television broadcasting capacity, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said. “Saddam Hussein did not have the ability to transmit those (POW) pictures to other countries,” except by giving them to CNN, Williams said. And, because most Iraqi citizens are without electricity, to a large degree he no longer has the capacity to televise within Iraq, CNN’s Arnett has said.

But last week Hussein recovered, readmitting to Iraq a CNN crew with a satellite dish that would permit Arnett’s interview with Hussein to be transmitted. The unflinchingly confident visage of Hussein was evidence, especially to Arab audiences, that an Arab leader was standing up to the West. He also readmitted a group of European and Turkish reporters, apparently with the goal of trying to drive a wedge between the United States and its coalition partners.

“Saddam is still there. Their guy has been able to take our best shot,” Livingstone said. “And the longer it goes on, the fact that he is still there becomes very powerful.”

Survival Is a Victory

Simple survival can be especially meaningful given the psychological affinity in the Middle East for the underdog. Even to Arabs ambivalent toward Hussein, Livingstone said, “it could be like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.”

Even Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the allied forces, acknowledged on CNN that Iraq’s 36-hour seizure of the abandoned Saudi town of Khafji may have been a propaganda victory for Hussein.

In that regard, the U.S. propaganda technique of showing videos of precision-bombing runs to demonstrate American military prowess may reinforce the image in the Middle East of Hussein’s invincibility even as it builds support for the military in the West.

In addition to relying on what is in effect a personality cult, Iraq has had success mounting a disinformation campaign designed to enrage Arabs outside Iraq, analysts say. “We’ve seen a lot of (these) Iraqi stories (reprinted in the media) in Algeria, the Tunisian press, Jordan, Yemen--Yemen has been very active” and “to a lesser extent” in Morocco and Pakistan, said Todd Leventhal, coordinator for disinformation at the United States Information Agency.

Iraq’s Messages

U.S. officials say the Iraqi disinformation campaign has four basic messages:

--One is that Iraq is strong and the multinational coalition weak. At one point the Iraqis were claiming that 178 allied planes were downed, roughly 10 times the number the allied authorities had given.

--Another is that Israel is secretly part of the multinational coalition. One common claim is that Israeli soldiers are fighting disguised as Americans, using Israeli tanks repainted with American markings. A recent broadcast over Holy Mecca Radio, a clandestine Iraqi station beamed into Saudi Arabia, accused King Fahd of ordering Saudi women to fight and to become “instruments of pleasure for Bush’s pigs and (Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak) Shamir’s tigers. . . .”

--Third is that U.S. forces are committing crimes against Islam and atrocities in general. A common report has Americans throwing beer cans on the prophet Mohammed’s tomb in the Saudi city of Medina.

--Fourth is that the United States is at odds with various members of the coalition. The day before the conflict started, for instance, a Pakistani newspaper reported that Pakistani soldiers objecting to being put under American command had mutinied, killing 72 Americans and suffering five casualties. Two days later, the Iraqi press counselor was declared persona non grata in Pakistan for using bribes to place false stories in the press and for inciting protest demonstrations.

Some Stories Believed

Many experts believe these reports are having some effect even though much of the Iraqi propaganda is wildly exaggerated. Shortly after the first Scud missiles landed in Israel, for instance, Radio Baghdad reported that Israel had been transformed into a “crematorium.”

Anyone with access to Western television or BBC radio would know the Iraqi Scud missiles had inflicted only nominal damage. But the language struck some experts on Arab culture as a deliberate attempt to evoke anti-Jewish prejudice by using a term that recalled Nazi death camps.

The hyperbole in general is “part of the style of the area,” said Judith Kipper, a Middle East specialist at The Brookings Institution.

And it can work.

“I think he has far more support in the Arab world than we have permitted ourselves to believe,” said Noel C. Koch, former director for special planning in the Pentagon and now president of a company that provides security services to countries, corporations and families around the world.

“Palestinians are very learned and sophisticated as a group, in general, but they are certainly buying the message,” Koch said. “People cling to what they want.”

It also works, experts say, because Hussein’s message evokes a deep sense of resentment among Arab masses over the lack of freedom in their own countries and what they feel is a lack of respect from the rest of the world. “He has struck a chord, and it is one I believe of deep radicalism, hating the West, hating authorities,” said Daniel Pipes, an Arab specialist and head of the Foreign Policy Institute in Philadelphia.

“He’s still trying to reach an Arab audience, a Muslim audience, and propaganda is an important tool in wartime,” Pentagon spokesman Williams has said. “It’s another thing in his favor.”

Arab Backlash

Arab members of the allied coalition have retaliated in a number of ways. Egypt extended winter vacation at schools and quashed plans for demonstrations. Syrian President Hafez Assad began jamming pro-Baghdad Jordanian television and blasted Iraq’s missile barrage at Israel as a “theatrical threat” to provoke retaliation.

Both Egypt and Syria have turned up the volume of their anti-Hussein rhetoric, much of it dwelling on the contradictions in Hussein’s image.

For example, Hussein has been ridiculed for his flip-flopping image. He has swung wildly from being the Arab hope against the rise of religious fundamentalism, when his non-religious Arab Baath Socialist Party led an eight-year war against Iran, to today being the champion of Islam against other Arab nations, including Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A day before the war, for instance, he added the Arabic words Allahu Akbar to the Iraqi flag, meaning God is Great.

They also point out that Hussein is fighting Arabs, not just Americans. In this regard, the decision to send Scud missiles into Saudi Arabia rather than just Israel is perplexing, at least from an Iraqi propaganda standpoint.

“I think now there is real confusion in the Arab street,” Kipper said. “The context has changed in very important ways.”

Allied propaganda efforts also attempt to take advantage of this confusion. The importance of the Arab versus Arab propaganda point was dramatically underscored last Thursday when American troops took a mostly backup role in the ground combat that retook Khafji. Saudis took the lead.

Allied Strategy

The allies also intend to take advantage of Iraqi distrust of their own state-controlled media. One of the first allied moves in the psychological war was to drop transistor radios to Iraqi troops so they could hear the BBC and the Voice of America, both trusted news sources in the Middle East.

Allied planes also have dropped millions of leaflets telling the Iraqis that they cannot win and how to surrender to allied troops.

Eventually, the allies may take over Iraqi radio and television as well, circumventing the need in previous wars to physically seize enemy broadcasting outlets.

“We have the means at our disposal to take over his communications, to broadcast in there. The time hasn’t come for that, but we have extremely sophisticated assets,” Koch said.

The code name for the operation is “Coronet Solo” and is conducted by aircraft, but Pentagon sources will say little else about how it would operate. It may even have already begun, they suggest.

The battle for the mind is nothing new. Christian clergymen in the 11th Century mustered support for the Crusades by portraying the Muslim custodians of the holy places as demons--inventing such atrocities as the claim that the Saracens had poisoned the pepper exported by the Orient. The propaganda of the day was carried in poems, songs, oral narratives and even paintings carried from town to town by runners.

“Force and fraud,” Thomas Hobbes, the English social philosopher, wrote in the 17th Century, “are in war the two cardinal virtues.”

But propaganda for the most part is a product of modern warfare, historians say. “It has become more intense because the horrors of war have become worse and because the media have become more sophisticated,” military historian Paul Fussell said.

There were no controls, for instance, over the media during the Civil War. By World War II, the military public relations officer was created, and the military sought massive control over Hollywood. The Office of War Information sat in on story conferences with Hollywood’s top executives, reviewed screenplays at most top studios and even wrote dialogue for key scenes.

The 1942 bombing raid on Tokyo led by Gen. James H. Doolittle, one of the most celebrated American memories of World War II, was less important militarily than as a message to weaken the spirit of the Japanese and buoy the Allies.

And after the Vietnam War--which historians suggest was lost in hearts and minds as much as on the battlefield--the invisible battleground has become all the more crucial.

In an age when both sides hear and see each other’s messages instantly via satellite, it is also far more complex.

For example, when concern was mounting that the allied war effort might be stumbling, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin L. Powell headed it off by holding a lengthy briefing for reporters. “This was a political decision to feed the (media) animals, and they brought out their smoothies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to do it,” said NBC Pentagon correspondent Fred Francis.

Yet at the very moment the briefing ended--and the networks set about assessing what they had heard--Iraq hurled a volley of Scud missiles into Saudi Arabia and Israel. Even Pentagon officials suggested the timing was more than coincidental.

Clearly, soldiering in the information age has become much more than the tactical movement of tanks and artillery.

In the end, however, analysts say the most powerful tool of psychological operations is truth.

One illustration came before the war even started. With Iraqi and allied troops massing at the Kuwaiti border, allied officials actually tried to encourage the Iraqis to cross over to fraternize in the allied lines.

At one point, Schwarzkopf visited a hill at the front line and was told he could see the enemy if he looked through his binoculars. The general raised his glasses but saw nothing. Saudi Lt. Gen. Prince Khalid ibn Sultan pushed the glasses down until they were focused nearly over the tip of Schwarzkopf’s shoes.

At the bottom of the hill, the Iraqi troops had come over for water, shoes and cigarettes, which were being given away by Saudi troops. The message was obvious: We have all we need, and you do not.