[Mb-civic] 'Hearts and Minds' in Iraq - Reuel Marc Gerecht -
Washington Post Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Tue Jan 10 03:51:20 PST 2006
'Hearts and Minds' in Iraq
As History Shows, Ideas Matter More Than Who Pays to Promote Them
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Tuesday, January 10, 2006; A15
Once again we are confronted with stories about how the Pentagon and its
ubiquitous private contractors are undermining free inquiry in Iraq.
"Muslim Scholars Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda," reports the New York
Times. Journalists, intellectuals or clerics taking money from Uncle Sam
or, in this case, a Washington-based public relations company, is seen
as morally troubling and counterproductive. Sensible Muslims obviously
would not want to listen to the advice of an American-paid consultant;
anti-insurgent Sunni clerics can now all be slurred as corrupt stooges.
There is one big problem with this baleful version of events.
Historically, it doesn't make much sense. The United States ran enormous
covert and not-so-covert operations known as "CA" activities throughout
the Cold War. With the CIA usually in the lead, Washington spent
hundreds of millions of dollars on book publishing, magazines,
newspapers, radios, union organizing, women's and youth groups,
scholarships, academic foundations, intellectual salons and societies,
and direct cash payments to individuals (usually scholars, public
intellectuals and journalists) who believed in ideas that America
thought worthy of support.
It's difficult to assess the influence of these covert-action programs.
But when an important Third World political leader writes that a
well-known liberal Western book had an enormous impact on his
intellectual evolution -- a book that, unbeknownst to him was translated
and distributed in his country at CIA expense -- then it's clear that
the program had value. It shouldn't be that hard for educated Americans
to support such activity, even though one often can't gauge its
effectiveness.
Nor should it be so hard to support even more aggressive clandestine
action in developing democracies such as Iraq. Let us make a Cold War
parallel. As is well known, the CIA for years financially maintained the
British journal Encounter. This magazine, which was perhaps the most
important English-language outlet for anti-communist U.S. and European
writers, influenced debates among the Western intelligentsia from the
1950s through the '70s. By bang-for-the-buck calculation, it may be the
most effective nonmilitary highbrow covert action the United States has
funded.
Does anyone seriously believe that the French intellectual giant Raymond
Aron was compromised by regularly writing for this publication or for
French magazines also funded by the CIA? Regardless of whether Aron or
others at Encounter might have suspected that their checks were cut by
the U.S. taxpayer, are their insights and reporting any less relevant
and true?
A historian looking at Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty when it was
subsumed within the CIA would probably find it hard to suggest that it
was less truthful or more subject to political manipulation than today's
Radio Liberty, which operates under the oversight of the politicized and
idiosyncratic Board of Broadcasting Governors. RFE-RL was probably the
most successful "soft power" expenditure that Washington ever made. East
European and Soviet dissidents didn't have a problem with the CIA
backing. The issue with them, as it is today with Uzbeks listening to
Radio Liberty or Muslims elsewhere reading or listening to
U.S.-supported material, is whether the content echoes the reality that
they know.
Contrary to what is commonly believed, CIA funding of intellectual
"propaganda" projects -- including direct cash payments to American and
foreign journalists -- has usually been done with the lightest touch. In
my direct experience, and in reading files covering CA activity in
Europe and the Middle East, I never saw an instance in which agency
officers manipulated the final product. What was regrettable was that
CIA officials often didn't have the linguistic skill or education to
match the countries they covered and had no real grasp of what their CA
assets were writing.
Why did the United States spend so much covert-action money in Western
Europe after World War II? Washington was unsure of Western Europe's
commitment to democracy and its resolve to oppose the Soviet Union and
its proxy European communist parties. The programs had to be
clandestine: The foreigners involved usually could not have operated
with open U.S. funding without jeopardizing their lives, their families
or their reputations. Did these CA projects retard or damage the growth
of a free press and free inquiry in Western Europe after World War II? I
think an honest historical assessment would conclude that U.S. covert
aid advanced both.
Surely democracy in Iraq is at least as shaky as it was in Western
Europe after the defeat of Hitler. The real complaint that ought to be
made against the Bush administration is that it has allowed such
important work to be contracted to a public relations firm (in the case
cited above, the Lincoln Group) that has done a poor job of protecting
anonymity. Nevertheless, one has to give the Pentagon credit: It seems
to be the only government agency that is at least trying to develop
Iraqi cadres to wage the "hearts and minds" campaign. The CIA seems to
have all but abandoned its historical mission in this area.
The Bush administration shouldn't flinch from increasing its covert
"propaganda" efforts in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The
history in the last great war of ideas is firmly on its side.
The writer, a former CIA case officer, is a resident fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute. He will answer questions about this
column today at 3:30 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/09/AR2006010901430.html?nav=hcmodule
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