Winning Hearts and Minds, Emitting Yarns and Jive

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Speaking at the U.S. Army War College on March 27, Donald Rumsfeld said this: "If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a D or a D-plus as a country as to how well we're doing in the battle of ideas that's taking place in the world today. . . . Every time the United States tries to do anything that would communicate something positive about what we're doing in the world, we're criticized in the press and in the Congress."

     He was thinking, among other things, about the Pentagon's policy of paying Iraqi newspapers for favorable coverage, as well as various other propaganda efforts which have, putting it mildly, failed to sway Muslim or world opinion in favor of American policy in Iraq.

    Whether the stories planted in the Iraqi press were true or not, they cannot be taken seriously: the sheer fact that a newspaper is paid to run a story discredits the newspaper entirely, to say nothing of the story itself.

     The only way the administration seems to understand the notion of "winning hearts and minds" is as a question of overpowering their hogwash with our humbuggery, of manipulating public opinion more effectively than they do by demonstrating our dishonesty as thoroughly and continuously as possible. Then we can head for the Army War College and wonder aloud why no one believes us.

   A perfect example of where this takes you is provided by the March 26 raid which has caused the Shiite coalition to withdraw from talks aimed at forming a unity government. According to Muqtada al-Sadr's people, backed more or less by the Iraqi government, American soldiers raided a mosque and shot the Imam and a group of unarmed worshipers. According to the Pentagon, we took out a terrorist cell in a firefight.

     Now you'd have to be a chump to believe al-Sadr on this. But you would have to be a chump to believe the Pentagon. Indeed, the news outlets that reported the story essentially threw up their hands: no one with access to the scene has any credibility. It is very likely that we will never know what happened.

    Now that, I suppose, might be the result that Rumsfeld wants. I suppose from his point of view sheer confusion is better than flat disbelief. But sheer confusion is the very best you can hope to achieve if you conceive the task as propaganda.

    "Hearts and minds" has entered our vernacular, like "Abbott and Costello," "bacon and eggs," "fair and balanced," or "secrets and lies." I must say I have come to deeply despise the phrase.

     Partly this is because I despise anything that everyone is muttering all the time as a substitute for thinking. And partly it's because "winning hearts and minds" puts the focus on controlling people's thoughts and emotions rather than on telling them the truth.

      If one starts by asking how to manipulate opinion, one has already lost, because people will feel themselves manipulated. Now this might make you think: we've got to make our fiction more convincing; we've got become much more devious about planting stories and controlling coverage. That is precisely what Donald Rumsfeld is thinking.

    I tell you that this way lies madness: an endless self-refutation in which all people reach the point of literally being powerless to believe anything you say, ever again. History is going to refute you and then stomp on your bones, as it has other leaders who took this sort of approach, from Stalin to Lyndon Johnson.

    But whatever you may want from history, no one is going to believe you now unless there is good reason to think you are likelier to tell the truth than are your opponents. And the only way to begin to make that happen is by telling the truth.

    I would say, however, that confusion may be the best that this administration can now achieve; it and we are so entirely saturated with its claptrap that the notion that it could convince anyone anywhere of anything - much less "win hearts and minds" - has become merely silly.