Public Diplomacy Is Shaped in President’s Ornate War Room

The White House war room, where staffers patrol the information front of the war on terrorism, looks more like a convention hall than a bunker.

Placards announce the various units: London Desk, State Department, Terrorist Finances, Investigations. Huge poster boards on opposite ends of the room list the Media Grid of interviews by public officials in Washington and London (British Prime Minister Tony Blair did the BBC at 6:30 p.m., it says), and the latest tally of aid to Afghanistan ($192 million since Oct. 1, and counting).

Under the windows is a display of the food being sent to Afghanistan: bags of wheat, flour or soy-fortified cornmeal, and a sample goody box sent to children that includes nuts, raisins, socks, a toy and a writing pad. And of course there are the ubiquitous television screens, tuned continuously to cable television news programs.

Housed in the ornate Indian Treaty Room of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the headquarters for coordinating the administration’s “message of the day” to the outside world is almost too picturesque for war.

The Navy once used the room as a library and reception room. It still has its original English Minton tile floor and contains the only surviving original lighting fixtures in the building, completed in 1879.

But to the staffers assembled from various agencies and countries to work the front lines of public relations, the room’s history only adds to an enormous sense of contributing to the cause.

“It feels like we’re doing something for the war effort,” said Tracy Young, a White House communications staffer at the Pakistan Desk. “The nice thing about having this room is that it makes you feel like you’re making a difference.”

Seeking to defend the war on terrorism to an Islamic world that is largely suspicious of Western motives, the war room takes its cues from President Bush’s public speeches.

“We’re the echo chambers for the president’s message,” said Tracey Schmitt, who books interviews in the Arab media for top U.S. officials and visiting dignitaries.

“We want to make sure his message does not stop with the White House press corps.”

In the early days of the war, the Taliban leadership was making many charges: that its forces had shot down U.S. planes, that U.S. bombs had killed Afghan civilians.

“Now we bury the Taliban lies,” said Jim Wilkinson, a Navy Reserve officer who runs day-to-day operations at the war room.

“This is the first war that has a never-ending news cycle. It may be 3 o’clock in the morning in the United States, but somewhere in the world, a journalist is on deadline. A 24-hour news cycle required the coalition to set up a 24-hour operation to communicate the facts.”

The British created a similar facility to coordinate information policy during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 1999 air war in Yugoslavia.

Not long after the U.S. decision to launch the communications operation, Blair spokesman Alistair Campbell was in Washington meeting with Bush counselor Karen Hughes to plan for it.

Known as Coalition Information Centers, offices were set up in London and Islamabad, the Pakistani capital (these days, there’s also one in Kabul, the Afghan capital, although it’s not clear how long it will operate).

A daily conference call was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Eastern time to coordinate the key message the administration wants to get across that day.

This week, on the 100th day of the war on terrorism, the message sought to underscore the coalition’s achievement.

The goal of the war room is not to change those hearts and minds in the Islamic world that are already turned against the United States. Instead, officials set out to sell the war on terrorism to a worldwide audience, especially to Muslims in the Middle East.

“The audience may be skeptical,” said Wilkinson, who keeps a New York Fire Department jacket on his computer desk chair to remind him of Sept. 11, “but we still have to speak to them directly.”

Experts give the war room credit for spotlighting the Taliban’s treatment of women. First Lady Laura Bush and Blair’s wife, Cherie, a human rights lawyer, both gave speeches on the topic.

Media coverage in the West and the Islamic world was considerable.

Within weeks, negotiators in Bonn put a woman in the new Afghan Cabinet, as head of a new Ministry for Women’s Affairs.

But some observers say the effort is too fleeting to make a lasting difference in the region.

“The real issue in the Middle East and the Islamic world is not something that leaflets or radio broadcasts or anything that we can develop in short time can do very much about,” said Barry Fulton, director of the Public Diplomacy Institute at George Washington University.

“The issues are much more fundamental than what you can do in 100 days. They are the kinds of issues born of poverty and different perceptions and different religions, that require long-term effort.”

Fulton, a retired foreign service officer who had a 30-year career with the U.S. Information Agency, said that “in wartime, we ramp it up, and then my fear is that after a few months we will forget about public diplomacy.”

Wilkinson said the war room would remain in operation “as long as there’s a war.”

But he keeps a picture near his desk of the president hosting two teams of youngsters for a T-ball game at the White House, one organized by Wilkinson.

“I keep it here as a reminder of what it was like before,” he said, “and what I can’t wait for it to be like again.”