Rumsfeld Complains that US is Losing PR War to Al Qaeda

Secretary of State Field Marshal Donald von Rumsfeld stood in front of a crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Friday and complained that the US was losing the public relations war with Al Qaeda. “For the most part, the US government still functions as a ‘five and dime’ store in an eBay world,” the Field Marshal opined. That is defeatism pure and simple, and if Michael Moore or Howard Dean had said it, there would have been shrieks of rage from the radical right.

According to the Field Marshal, America’s enemies fight the propaganda war with Blackberries, weblogs, instant messages, and e-mail. Meanwhile, the US has not adapted to the new age of information technology. US military public affairs officers need to anticipate and respond to news faster, and he thinks one way to do that is to promote good communications officers faster. Moreover, the Pentagon’s information operation has to run round the clock rather than eight hours a day for five or six days a week.

What the Secretary of Defense clearly fails to appreciate is the difference between a powerful nation state with a free press and a shadowy amalgam of rich kid murderers hiding in the caves of Northwest Pakistan. It is vastly harder to control the message when an independent press is observing every move than when the press is owned by the state. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were quite capable of staying on message (fat lot of good it did them). Al Qaeda, by contrast, doesn’t even run a single city of any size (or America would have bombed it flat), meaning there is little opportunity for investigative reporting on its actions.

The bigger problem, though, is reality. Despite what the forces of the Counter-Enlightenment in the Bush Administration believe, the facts matter. The US marched into Afghanistan and Iraq claiming that it was liberating the people, freeing them from oppression. Then, it promptly set up the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where no one gets charged with a crime, no one has the status of prisoner of war, no one gets a lawyer and where there are rumors of torture. This was followed by the war crimes at Abu Ghraib, and the photos that were leaked to the press by one brave soldier who knew right from wrong.

If America is losing the propaganda war, it is because of things like Abu Ghraib. Had the Field Marshal’s department responded as it should, the perpetrators of the torture and murders would have been tried and sentenced without prodding from an outraged press and public. Of course, that would require the proper sort of leadership at the top. That has been lacking ever since the Field Marshal ordered his military subordinates to arrange for an invasion and occupation of Iraq by stripping Afghanistan of the troops needed to do the job there while simultaneously ensuring that there weren’t enough troops in Iraq to pacify the country. Perhaps the propaganda war is being lost because the man at the top doesn’t know what he’s doing.

The Danish flag appears here as a protest against the violence being done to the free press of that country and elsewhere by those offended by some cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, peace be unto him. A perceived insult is not an excuse for intimidation and violence, even in the name of the Creator. One cannot insult God, only small-minded men who falsely claim to speak for Him. © Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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