A Good Way To Endanger Genuine Journalists

In an opinion piece in today's Outlook section of the WaPo, a security "expert" (I am using that term loosely) tells us that American propaganda operations in Iraq do not go far enough in the direction of total information control.

The piece is authored by Michael Schrage, a former reporter who now is an senior advisor to MIT's Security Studies Program. I will leave it to the reader's imagination how a journalism background may qualify someone for instructing military and intelligence prospects.

Schrage defends the Lincoln Group activities in Iraq without addressing the cogent point that when reporters in a war zone are considered to be possible spies or propagandists, this makes all journalists targets for retaliation by insurgents.

Our MIT boy has a model in mind for U.S. propaganda operations in Iraq:

Shortly after V-E Day, for example, the U.S. Army's "Psychological Warfare Division" became the "Information Control Division" under Major Gen. Robert McClure. McClure effectively oversaw the denazification and reorganization of West Germany's entire media infrastructure.

In 1946, he exulted to a Time magazine friend: "We now control 37 newspapers, 6 radio stations, 314 theatres, 642 movies, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7,384 book dealers and printers, and conduct about 15 public opinion surveys a month, as well as publish one newspaper with 1,500,000 circulation, 3 magazines, run the Associated Press of Germany (DANA), and operate 20 library centers."

Times have changed. Iraq has no McClure, though perhaps its painful transition to democracy might have proceeded more smoothly and safely if it had. But the notion that "pay for placement" somehow represents a breach of military protocol or practice is nonsense.

Isn't having the entire American media in the United States under McClure-type command good enough for Schrage?

While force protection issues alone justify the military's active involvement in hostile information environments, strategy and circumstances should dictate the appropriate information intervention levels. Just as with post-war Germany and Japan, the more stable, open and prosperous a society Iraq becomes, the more the need for a military role in local media will evaporate.

At that point, we turn over propaganda duties to our client's intelligence service.

The military exit strategy is the media exit strategy. The goal of a successful counterinsurgency, after all, is to facilitate a vibrantly self-sustaining and self-governing society. We should hope that a decade hence, the Iraqis will be complaining about their own "fair and balanced" media in much the way that Americans, Britons, Europeans and Japanese complain about theirs. That's success.

Either Schrage has no idea about how politically-aware Americans view the "fair and balanced" presentation by the co-opted media, or he is being slyly ironic.

But if the U.S. military's involvement in the information environment leaves Iraqis with a healthy skepticism of what they read in the papers or see on TV, well, one could argue that would be another positive contribution to their civil society.

Verdict: He wasn't slipping in a joke. Schrage is clueless.

Schrage is attempting to burnish his "security" cred. Let me suggest an old special forces exercise that would really prove his mettle.

Schrage should volunteer to be choppered 20 miles out into a hostile environment, clad only in a jockstrap, and navigate his way back to base by the power of sheer ingenuity.

Only then should anyone pay attention to anything he has to say. And if he writes blather like today's piece, at least he will have a talent to fall back upon.