[Mb-civic] 'Hearts and Minds' in Iraq - Reuel Marc Gerecht - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

'Hearts and Minds' in Iraq
As History Shows, Ideas Matter More Than Who Pays to Promote Them

By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Tuesday, January 10, 2006; A15

Once again we are confronted with stories about how the Pentagon and its 
ubiquitous private contractors are undermining free inquiry in Iraq. 
"Muslim Scholars Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda," reports the New York 
Times. Journalists, intellectuals or clerics taking money from Uncle Sam 
or, in this case, a Washington-based public relations company, is seen 
as morally troubling and counterproductive. Sensible Muslims obviously 
would not want to listen to the advice of an American-paid consultant; 
anti-insurgent Sunni clerics can now all be slurred as corrupt stooges.

There is one big problem with this baleful version of events. 
Historically, it doesn't make much sense. The United States ran enormous 
covert and not-so-covert operations known as "CA" activities throughout 
the Cold War. With the CIA usually in the lead, Washington spent 
hundreds of millions of dollars on book publishing, magazines, 
newspapers, radios, union organizing, women's and youth groups, 
scholarships, academic foundations, intellectual salons and societies, 
and direct cash payments to individuals (usually scholars, public 
intellectuals and journalists) who believed in ideas that America 
thought worthy of support.

It's difficult to assess the influence of these covert-action programs. 
But when an important Third World political leader writes that a 
well-known liberal Western book had an enormous impact on his 
intellectual evolution -- a book that, unbeknownst to him was translated 
and distributed in his country at CIA expense -- then it's clear that 
the program had value. It shouldn't be that hard for educated Americans 
to support such activity, even though one often can't gauge its 
effectiveness.

Nor should it be so hard to support even more aggressive clandestine 
action in developing democracies such as Iraq. Let us make a Cold War 
parallel. As is well known, the CIA for years financially maintained the 
British journal Encounter. This magazine, which was perhaps the most 
important English-language outlet for anti-communist U.S. and European 
writers, influenced debates among the Western intelligentsia from the 
1950s through the '70s. By bang-for-the-buck calculation, it may be the 
most effective nonmilitary highbrow covert action the United States has 
funded.

Does anyone seriously believe that the French intellectual giant Raymond 
Aron was compromised by regularly writing for this publication or for 
French magazines also funded by the CIA? Regardless of whether Aron or 
others at Encounter might have suspected that their checks were cut by 
the U.S. taxpayer, are their insights and reporting any less relevant 
and true?

A historian looking at Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty when it was 
subsumed within the CIA would probably find it hard to suggest that it 
was less truthful or more subject to political manipulation than today's 
Radio Liberty, which operates under the oversight of the politicized and 
idiosyncratic Board of Broadcasting Governors. RFE-RL was probably the 
most successful "soft power" expenditure that Washington ever made. East 
European and Soviet dissidents didn't have a problem with the CIA 
backing. The issue with them, as it is today with Uzbeks listening to 
Radio Liberty or Muslims elsewhere reading or listening to 
U.S.-supported material, is whether the content echoes the reality that 
they know.

Contrary to what is commonly believed, CIA funding of intellectual 
"propaganda" projects -- including direct cash payments to American and 
foreign journalists -- has usually been done with the lightest touch. In 
my direct experience, and in reading files covering CA activity in 
Europe and the Middle East, I never saw an instance in which agency 
officers manipulated the final product. What was regrettable was that 
CIA officials often didn't have the linguistic skill or education to 
match the countries they covered and had no real grasp of what their CA 
assets were writing.

Why did the United States spend so much covert-action money in Western 
Europe after World War II? Washington was unsure of Western Europe's 
commitment to democracy and its resolve to oppose the Soviet Union and 
its proxy European communist parties. The programs had to be 
clandestine: The foreigners involved usually could not have operated 
with open U.S. funding without jeopardizing their lives, their families 
or their reputations. Did these CA projects retard or damage the growth 
of a free press and free inquiry in Western Europe after World War II? I 
think an honest historical assessment would conclude that U.S. covert 
aid advanced both.

Surely democracy in Iraq is at least as shaky as it was in Western 
Europe after the defeat of Hitler. The real complaint that ought to be 
made against the Bush administration is that it has allowed such 
important work to be contracted to a public relations firm (in the case 
cited above, the Lincoln Group) that has done a poor job of protecting 
anonymity. Nevertheless, one has to give the Pentagon credit: It seems 
to be the only government agency that is at least trying to develop 
Iraqi cadres to wage the "hearts and minds" campaign. The CIA seems to 
have all but abandoned its historical mission in this area.

The Bush administration shouldn't flinch from increasing its covert 
"propaganda" efforts in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The 
history in the last great war of ideas is firmly on its side.

The writer, a former CIA case officer, is a resident fellow at the 
American Enterprise Institute. He will answer questions about this 
column today at 3:30 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/09/AR2006010901430.html?nav=hcmodule
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