Message Control

Before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in March 2003, Iraqis' primary news source was state-run broadcasting. The government had banned satellite dishes, so Iraqis were largely deaf to the dozens of satellite channels saturating the Middle East.

After Saddam's ouster in March 2003, the U.S. military lifted the ban. Dishes began sprouting from rooftops, and televisions hummed with Western and Arabic newscasts. Naturally, the biggest story was the United States' invasion and its future plans-real and rumored.

Freedom of information may be a democratic cornerstone, but the U.S. government has long believed that skeptical Middle Eastern media outlets obstruct its policy goals. So the military planned to circumvent them. It commandeered the state broadcasting system, renamed it the Iraqi Media Network, and dispatched Iraqi journalists to report, under American management, on the occupation. But the state apparatus functioned on land-based antennae. Satellite broadcasting, after all, had been prohibited. As a result, the U.S. occupiers' mission was reported largely by outsiders, while American officials tried to reach Iraqis over rabbit ears.

"What this means," says Charles Krohn, who headed public affairs for the U.S. Army in Iraq, "is that we essentially forfeit the contest for 'hearts and minds' to the competition."

The Bush administration didn't launch a government-produced satellite broadcast to Iraq until early 2004. It did beam radio programming, through a station called Radio Sawa. But the station airs more popular music than news and measures its impact by audience size relative to competing stations, not whether listeners' opinions about America are changed by what they hear, a government audit has found.

Sawa can't show it wins support for U.S. policies, according to a draft report by the State Department inspector general leaked to The Washington Post in October. But this isn't the only evidence the United States is losing the information war in Iraq, media and propaganda experts say. Instead of messages about the future from Americans, Iraqis get critical views of the occupation through Arab and Western media. And, increasingly, they're exposed to a gruesome and effective form of propaganda: videotaped beheadings of coalition collaborators.

Use It or Lose It

The U.S. military is no stranger to the use of propaganda. The armed forces routinely use psychological operations-such as leaflets and radio broadcasts-to demoralize enemies and win over locals. "If we don't harness propaganda in wartime," says Krohn, "it isn't because we don't know how."

Iraqis were fed propaganda by their government for decades, says Rick Barton, who co-directs the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Today, Iraqis want reliable, visual proof that the old regime is gone, says Barton, who worked in Baghdad in mid-2003. This drove occupation officials to stage the televised destruction of a statue of Saddam in 2003, and to display the corpses of his sons, Uday and Qusay, before TV cameras after U.S. troops killed them.

But these were token gestures. "The big, big, big mistake is we didn't flood the marketplace," Barton says. "We put our money into one station," the Iraqi Media Network, whose journalists quit, alleging American heavy-handedness. "Your basic post-conflict model is much more management by chaos than control," Barton says. "A lot of what we did spoke to control models. Part of it was inexperience and part of it was the government's bureaucratic pattern."

Insurgents and terrorists, however, use regional media to get their beheading videos on the air. Stations don't show the executions, but do typically broadcast (or paraphrase) the diatribes against America and its supporters that precede them. The videos play to Iraqis' fears that totalitarian rule is returning, Barton says: "The message is, 'We're coming after you.' It prevents this transition from getting a foothold. . . . It's been really effective."

The videos also play to the rapid-fire contemporary news cycle. The executioners send a tape to a station, or they post footage to a Web site and alert the press. Within minutes, images of a bound prisoner surrounded by masked captors are leading news. Each video begins and ends the same way. A man with a knife denounces the U.S. occupation, declares beheading is God's punishment for collaborators and then slices off the captive's head. The room fills with a frenzied chorus of "Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!" (God is greatest!). The message is concise, consistent and widely disseminated.

The United States can't come close to this level of manipulation in its broadcasts, says Joan Deppa, an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University in New York who studies terrorism and the media. "If we are promoting freedom and we start playing with the message to psych people out, how are we any better than a government that's controlling the press?"

In a sense, the video-makers are using military tactics. Beheadings are psychological operations, "communications as warfare," Deppa says. "As opposed to trying to change people's minds and attitudes, it's really trying to change their behavior." And it may be working. Violence in Iraq has surged and the insurgents' ranks appear to be growing. The executioner in a video typically exhorts others to join his cause.

Owning the Message

So how can the United States fight back? For one thing, by moving more quickly. "The U.S. could use a rapid response team" to react to terrorist videos, says Nancy Snow, a former media coordinator with the U.S. Information Agency. Members of such a team would be ready on a moment's notice to go on TV and denounce the videos to Iraqis.

Instead, terrorist propaganda, including taped messages from Osama bin Laden, often hits the airwaves unfiltered. "This is exactly what they want," says Snow, now a senior research fellow at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy. "We've exalted bin Laden so much I'm ready to see him on Crossfire."

Propaganda scholars say terrorist videos only need to be mentioned-thus tying one person's fate to a nation's decision to stay in Iraq-to terrify and compel people. "The terrorists thrive on shock," says Judea Pearl, whose son, journalist Daniel Pearl, was beheaded on camera in Pakistan in 2002. Pearl notes how the British press "was all over Tony Blair" to withdraw troops from Iraq when Kenneth Bigley, a British contractor, was filmed pleading for his life. (Much of Bigley's statement wasn't shown on screen. He was killed in October.)

Pearl wants journalists to agree not to air the tapes. But even if that happened, the videos would make their way, uncensored, onto the Internet. Some Web site operators defend the practice, arguing the films' brutality may turn people against terrorists' cause.

Some say the United States should counter the video trend by beating the terrorists at their own game. Barton says the military should give video cameras to Iraqi locals and let them make credible documentaries about the occupation. Barton tried that in Bosnia, when, as a senior post-conflict official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, he helped locals produce 30-second commercials, meant to encourage fellow Bosnians to take control of their postwar future.

"By no means was it the best advertising I'd ever seen," Barton says. "But it did take care of this fundamental issue of who's dominating the airwaves."