Can You Win the Battle of 'Hearts and Minds' without any Ideas?

Reuel Marc Gerecht writes in the Washington Post that the Pentagon propaganda scandal in Iraq is really much ado about very little. If anything, similar covert operations were prevalent throughout the Cold War and were quite effective at shaping European public opinion and undermining Soviet support. For him, the only thing objectionable is that the Pentagon contracted out such important work to an incompetent private company, and that the CIA has abandoned propaganda as a serious political tool.

Gerecht's argument has met with a number of criticisms, such as that covert operations are likely to be discovered and backfire, or that it actually erodes democracy at home and abroad. While these arguments are well taken, they miss the larger reason why the Cold War analogy fails and why Administration defenders are so desperate to employ it. Independent of its strategic choices, one could always argue during the Cold War that the U.S. was confronted by an ideological enemy (communism) and that its policies were in pursuit of unmistakeable political principles. People knew that Radio Free Europe was propaganda, but many liked the station precisely because they agreed with the deeper message. However questionable the means, one couldn’t dispute that they served actual ends.

By contrast, the American presence in Iraq is motivated largely by pragmatic survivalism. How can Bush get the troops out without the country completely collapsing and with as few U.S. casualties as possible? One minute, the Administration likes deBaathification, the next minute it doesn’t. One minute, women’s rights must never be compromised, the next minute the fear of civil war trumps such worries. Although Bush loves words like freedom and democracy, these amount to slogans without any specific content and with little visible link to American maneuvering in Iraq. In a sense, what makes the Pentagon’s actions so futile is that it has no ideas to propagandize. Even the subject of the Lincoln Group’s news stories are telling. They weren’t about ideals, goals, political principles. Instead, the stories were trying to do the impossible of telling Iraqis that the facts on ground weren’t what they saw everyday. Hey guy, the gasoline line you spend four hours a day waiting on isn’t really there…

Ultimately, Administration defenders return again and again to the Cold War, because they think that by invoking a real ideological conflict they can give substance to today’s fiasco. But maybe no one can tell us why we went to war in Iraq because there is no clear ideological commitment actually driving the enterprise. It’s just a mish-mash of pragmatic considerations run amok combined with the galvanizing need to give purpose to the emptiness of domestic politics. Perhaps, conventional wisdom to the contrary, Bush II has an even bigger problem with the “vision thing” than his Dad. And, no matter what Mr. Gerecht says, you can’t win the game of hearts and minds if the hand you’re playing has nothing.