A Pilgrim’s Digression

Every parent has heard some variation of the excuse. Some of us may even have tried an example of it on our own parents, when we were children: “But Dad, all my friends are doing it.”

Unfortunately, this seems to be the response of the putative “adults” in the Bush Administration, and their defenders in the media, to allegations that the Pentagon pays Iraqi media outlets to run propaganda. The Pentagon variant of “the excuse” runs something like this: “All our enemies are doing it, so we must do it, too, as part of our overall strategy to win the war.”

Cal Thomas, in an article for the Town Hall opinion website, titled Propaganda and the eye of the beholder, actually calls the phony stories propaganda, but says that’s okay because it is “truthful” propaganda. And a National Review editorial adopts much the same tack, finding “nothing damning” in what the United States has done. Propaganda has been a part of war “since the dawn of history,” writes the editor (so has the sacking of villages, rape of women, and torture of prisoners of war; we no longer honor those practices by continuing to use them, however). Rather makes you wonder about NR’s own editorial standards; would they allow one of their journalists to accept payment from the Pentagon to run a piece of propaganda?

National Review even goes so far as to excuse the admitted fact that “the articles’ true authorship was not disclosed,” by stating that if the military had disclosed its authorship, the newspapers and journalists who published the propaganda would have faced assassination by insurgents. Incredibly, NR offers the illogical excuse that “surely the cause of a free Iraqi press is damaged less by American payments to Iraqi journalists than by the assassination of those journalists.”

Nevermind the fact that those journalists would not be under threat of asassination if we hadn’t offered to pay them to publish propaganda in the first place. That’s just an inconvenient bit of logic the editors at National Review would like you to disregard. It starts from a false premise: that it was perfectly ethical for the United States to pay journalists to publish propaganda in the first place. Questions of truth and factuality are irrelevant if the means of disseminating “truth” and “facts” are unethical.

The original LA Times story that ignited the scandal, U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in U.S. Press, is still available on-line and is worth re-reading for a refresher course in exactly what “truthful” propaganda the Pentagon put out there in the Iraqi media. I would dispute the “truthful” epithet anyway. Since the provenance of these stories is kept secret from the public who may read them as the reporting of legitimate journalists, there is an intent to deceive at the base of the whole operation. Even if the deception was truly meant to save the lives of Iraqi journalists, it is a deception nonetheless. I would argue the real reason the Army did not reveal that American soldiers authored these pieces is that they knew such a revelation would diminish the effectiveness of the propaganda. Propaganda isn’t effective unless people trust the source.

In the end, it does not matter whether the content of the stories is factual, though there is some dispute about that, too. Here again, as in the Abu Ghraib scandal, we have clear evidence of not just individuals, but a significant segment of the American military, undermining the liberal values we are professing to uphold in Iraq.

As a senior Pentagon official puts it, as quoted in the La Times, “Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we’re breaking all the first principles of democracy when we’re doing it.”

People like Cal Thomas and the editors of the National Review seem to lose their sense of irony, when it comes to “their” war. They defend it tooth and nail, partly because they truly believe in it, but also because their own personal reputation is wagered on an Iraqi miracle.

Opponents of the war may have the same problem, only to opposite effect: opponents have staked their reputations on an Iraqi failure. But judging between the two opposing camps of “propagandists,” I think critics of the war are more clear-eyed about what is actually happening.

The Iraq War has always been an attempt to demonstrate that the end result can justify the unethical means to achieve it. If critics of the war seem obsessive about the means with which the war is conducted, it is because we don’t accept that first premise.

Going back to basics, to child-rearing, a parent also knows that it is our example as much as our words that influence the kind of person our child grows up to be. Inasmuch as Iraq is our “child” (to adopt an unfortunately paternalistic metaphor), if we want Iraq to become a model of freedom and democracy for the rest of the Middle East, we had best begin demonstrating the values we profess.

Unfortunately, given recent reports of Shi’ite reprisals against Sunnis (Grisly Evidence of Sunni Slaughter Grows), as well as reports of corruption and cronyism within the Iraqi government, the Iraqis are learning exactly the wrong things from American attempts at nation building.

For better or worse, Iraq is our baby, and we determine by our actions, as well as our pretty words, what kind of adult that baby will grow up to be.