The Times, MONDAY OCTOBER 22 2001
In a propaganda war, do you put guns before peanut butter?
MICK HUME
The covert war against terrorism will not be televised, the American and British Governments have repeatedly given warning - right up to the moment when the Pentagon organised blanket television coverage of the US special forces' first raid inside Afghanistan.
Some military experts reported Saturday morning's brief incursion as the start of a serious ground offensive. They may well be right, but to my untrained eye those first grainy pictures looked like a militarised publicity stunt, a grander version of the kind of PR film we are more used to seeing from little terrorist groups who wave rifles on video as a "show of strength".
When people talk about "the propaganda war", they normally mean a political campaign designed to support and justify the stated objectives of a military operation. This time, however, we are dealing with something different. The kind of military action staged so far appears to have been shaped less by clear strategic objectives than by PR calculations as to how it might play with audiences at home and around the world. This entire operation is a propaganda war.
Propagandist considerations have helped to determine Washington's response at every turn, as an indecisive Administration lacking in real authority seeks to package its campaign in ways that it hopes will please almost everybody.
On the one hand President George W. Bush wants to give both his Administration and a wounded America a renewed sense of mission and purpose, and uphold the hardline Cold Warrior image cultivated by some of his top advisers. On the other, he has to deal with the changed rules of the post-Cold War world, where wars can be justified only so long as they can be promoted in the language of international humanitarianism.
These tensions help to explain why Washington spent four indecisive weeks unable to decide what to do after September 11. And even since the military action began, the priority has remained appearing as all things to all men and women - as a champion of America, a friend of Islam and a saviour of starving Afghans, just for starters.
Our Governments want us to believe that the bombing campaign has been devastatingly successful, at the same time as they insist that little damage has been done to Afghanistan and almost nobody has been killed. The nervous Pentagon has spent millions of dollars buying up commercial satellite pictures of Afghanistan, presumably to avoid us seeing anything unpleasant. This apologetic attitude has made the US authorities uniquely vulnerable to criticism over civilian casualties. Last week the deaths of four Afghan security guards working for the UN were headlined as "a PR nightmare for Washington". In the past, four casualties would hardly have disturbed Washington's sleep.
Then, at the weekend, the Pentagon took the unheard-of step of broadcasting Saturday's "secret" raid within Afghanistan, in order to reassure America and its allies that they are taking firm action. Yet they were also at pains to explain the very limited aims - and risks - involved in the operation, as if getting the soldiers out unharmed had almost been the point of sending them in.
We have witnessed, too, the bizarre spectacle of the American military dropping bread (or at least packets of peanut butter) and cruise missiles on Afghans at the same time, in order to bolster the campaign's humanitarian credentials. In this context the bombs and the exploding food parcels seem designed to serve the same purpose, as alternative weapons in the propaganda war.
As Washington veers between President Bush's bellicose "dead or alive" rhetoric and a defensive attitude towards the war, things become more confused. The closer one looks at what is going on, the more one seems entitled to conclude that we are dealing not simply with a badly run propaganda campaign, but with a war shaped by propagandist considerations that is bereft of consistent aims.
The main results to date seem the opposite of what many had hoped. International tensions have increased, while fearful Western societies turn further in upon themselves, so that a glimpse of white powder can now start a national panic.
Of all the televised responses we have seen to the horrors of September 11, one of the most telling remains the frozen look on President Bush's face when an aide first whispered news of the terrorist attacks.
As the war enters a new and more dangerous phase, he still appears to be caught in the headlights of history
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