Beyond Blather

Strategic Communication got taken to the woodshed in the blogosphere last week after former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld again promoted a high-level government office to manage strategic communication for the United States.

Here’s the context.  According to William Matthews at Defense News, Rumsfeld said the United States is “sitting on the sidelines” in a global battle of ideas during his January 23 remarks at Network Centric Warfare 2008, a conference organized by the Institute for Defense & Government Advancement (IDGA).

Rumsfeld contended that the U.S. is losing the war of ideas because it is barely competing.This is not a new message from Rumsfeld, who promoted robust strategic communication throughout his tenure as secretary of defense.

Matthews reported that Rumsfeld, in his keynote address, called for a “21st-century agency for global communications” to fill the void left by the demise of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA).

The USIA was established in 1953 by the Eisenhower administration to promote U.S. national interests through information and diplomacy at a time when the Soviet Union was promoting communist ideals around the globe.  USIA initiatives included Voice of America broadcasts, the Fulbright Scholarship Program, and other information and cultural exchange programs.  Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the USIA was dissolved under the Foreign Affairs and Restructuring Act of 1998 and its responsibilities were divided up among other government entities, including the Department of State’s bureaus of Education and Cultural Affairs and  Public Affairs, and the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors.

No agency has orchestrated communication of U.S. values to the world since USIA closed its doors October 1, 1999, though many people began calling for a renewed national effort just two years later in the wake of 9/11.  Rumsfeld has been one of those voices.

In his remarks last week, Rumsfeld called for a new strategic communication agency to make use of blogs, social media, talk radio, and other communication channels that have developed since USIA, Matthews said.

It’s probably pretty safe to assume that among the people attending the conferences on network-centric warfare, Rumsfeld’s target audience for his message, there are plenty who wholeheartedly agree that somebody should be managing the message, even if they don’t agree on who it should be or the priority of funding it.

Beyond the conference rooms, however, Rumsfeld’s comments, or rather interpretation of Rumsfeld’s comments, set off a torrent of discussion in the blogosphere.

Sharon Weinberger at Wired’s Danger Room covered the event and shared this quote from the former SecDef:

“Private media does not get up in the morning and say what can we do to promote the values and ideas that the free Western nations believe in? It gets up in the morning and says they’re going to try to make money by selling whatever they sell… The way they decided to do that is to be dramatic and if it bleeds it leads is the common statement in the media today. They’ve got their job, and they have to do that, and that’s what they do.

“We need someone in the United States government, some entity, not like the old USIA . . . I think this agency, a new agency has to be something that would take advantage of the wonderful opportunities that exist today. There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, blogs are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there. There are all kinds of opportunities. We do not with any systematic organized way attempt to engage the battle of ideas and talk about the idea of beheading, and what it’s about and what it means. And talk about the fact that people are killing more Muslims than they are non-Muslims, these extremists. They’re doing it with suicide bombs and the like. We need to engage and not simply be passive and allow that battle of competition of ideas.”

In reporting that line of thought, Weinberger sneezed the words “U.S. Propaganda Agency” and the slur spread like a pandemic across the blogosphere.

Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner, who generally presents well though-out and insightful discussion on StratComm, called Weinberger to task for a knee-jerk reaction to Rumsfeld’s remarks, and reposted some of his earlier explanations of the need for enhanced public diplomacy and strategic communication coordination.

But that was not how most of the blogosphere responded. 

The majority of posts and comments followed Weinberger’s “propaganda” lead.

Jeffrey Carr at IntelFusion argued his inability to make sense of Armstrong’s remarks, accusing him of pandering in an effort to find employment using his new master’s degree in public diplomacy (never mind the fact that Armstrong’s recent education in this topic might make his point worth taking some extra time to understand).

Armstrong’s response to Carr: the real issue with Weinberger’s post is that the messenger became the message.  Granted, Rumsfeld is not the best guy to be carrying the water for strategic communication.  A key tenet of SC is choosing the right sender for the message.  Rumsfeld’s credibility has sunk too low to allow him to be the right sender for a message about managing messages. But have we reached the level of judging messages entirely upon whom we hear talking about them?

The answer appears to be yes, if you read Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent.  Following Weinberger’s cue, Ackerman echoed Danger Room’s headline, posting:  “Remember Donald Rumsfeld? He seems like a bad dream. And yet here he is, popping up in Washington to talk about how the U.S. needs a Ministry of Propaganda.”  Ackerman concludes by dismissing every idea or argument Rumsfeld might raise: “Whatever he says is discredited by the sheer fact that he’s the one saying it. He should be legally obligated to end of all his sentences with, ‘…but, on the other hand, I’m a total jackass.’”

At Early Warning on WashingtonPost.com, William Arkin also invoked the “propaganda” label.  Arkin spent the majority his post explaining why the military is not the right branch of government to manage strategic communication, though he says it has stepped in to fill the void.  Might one assume this means he supports Rumsfeld’s position that a separate agency should be established to do the job?  He was oddly silent on closing that loop.  Arkin almost seems to have missed Rumsfeld’s entire point about a new agency outside DoD or State to keep everyone on the same page.  To wrap things up, Arkin used the assertion that the military is poor at communicating its messages to argue that it does not need to be involved in improved communication management.

In The Lede blog at the New York Times, Mike Nizza posted that Rumsfeld’s idea sounded splendid at a distance, but then cited Wienberger and Arkin to draw the conclusion that if Rumsfeld supports the idea, it would have to be subject to Rumsfeld’s own previous missteps in strategic communication, and may therefore not be a good idea.

Over at Intel Dump, Phillip Carter drew this conclusion: “Rumsfeld’s latest proposal suffers from a fundamental flaw (as did the IO campaign he waged while SecDef) — he’s trying to put lipstick on a pig and convince everyone that it’s not a pig.”   

Carter argues that there’s no point in communicating what is right about America’s values as long as we’re making some wrong moves.Carter concludes, “Ultimately, I believe we must pay a great deal more attention to our deeds — not our message — in order to earn the support of the world. Otherwise, our policies are just a pig. And no matter how much lipstick we might apply, it’ll still just be a pig.”

Clearly, having all our nation’s actions aligned with our values is something most Americans would like.  But Carter doesn’t explain why we should not take any other positive steps while we wait for something we haven’t had in our entire history.

His position ignores the fact that organizations like Al Qaeda routinely misrepresent our actions using the same tools Rumsfeld mentioned.  As Mike Gudgell reported from Iraq in December for ABC News, Iraqi insurgents post false reports fabricating U.S. atrocities within minutes of successful U.S. operations against legitimate targets.  Gudgell showed “how the ‘information battlefield’ can turn a tactical success into a strategic nightmare.”

According to Carter, we must cede the entire market of ideas to extremists who behead captives and strap explosive vests to children because some of our people made bad decisions which most of us oppose.

And out across the blogosphere, Weinberger’s talk of “propaganda” echoed on.

PRWatch.org’s Spin of the Day reported Weinberger’s coverage under the headline Rumsfeld Calls for Propaganda 2.0.  Unfortunately, the use of the term “propaganda” was not the spin to which they were referring.  PRWatch wrote: “In particular, Rumsfeld is advocating for a ‘21st century agency for global communcations’ — or propaganda, similar to his controversial Office of Strategic Influence.”  It was, of course, Weinberger, not Rumsfeld, who drew the parallel to the OSI.  Who’s doing the spinning here?

J. Thomas Duffy on the Garlic also echoed Weinberger’s post. Under the headline: “Leave It to Rumsfeld: There’s Not Enough Lying Going On!” Duffy wrote, “Notice how effortlessly, how easy, how endemic it is for these Neocons to include the fearmongering in their speech. Here, much like the continuous thread of the Bush Grindhouse, if we don’t engage in a propaganda program, terrorists are going to come and kills (sic.) us.”

Robert Stein’s Connecting the Dots picked up the story from the Lede and Danger Room, reporting: “When Sharon Weinberger of Wired asked what his new agency would do, the former Secretary Defense referred nostalgically to the good old days when the Army paid locals to plant stories in the Iraq press until American media spoiled the fun by reporting about it.”  To her credit, that’s not really what Weinberger said, of course.

So is that it?  Rumsfeld supports it, so it must be propaganda, and must be bad?

Here’s another possible interpretation of the former SecDef’s quote in Danger Room.

The private media are business enterprises. They maximize owner value by serving the broadest mass demand.  Explaining the highest ideals of a free and democratic people is not profitable. When markets don’t provide for their common needs, people in a democratic society meet those needs through their government. If a free and democratic people are to communicate their shared values, such as their opposition to beheadings, their public servants should do this using the most effective communication channels available, such as Web 2.0.

Is that sinister?

Is propaganda a fair label?  Or can a democratic government legitimately communicate the values of the people it represents?  This is America.  The people are the government. We elect representatives to voice our shared values to the world.  Isn’t it possible for a free people to communicate our values without incurring the negative label “propaganda?” 

We live in a world in which zealots arguing for a non-democratic caliphate are growing increasingly sophisticated in their strategic communications.  If democratic nations cannot legitimately participate in the free marketplace of ideas, the future of democracy is dim.

Posted by Chad B. Holmes

Technorati Tag: strategic communication