Mind-Munitions

The World after 11 September 2001 319
through the media, there was an outcry amongst the press and it
had to be closed down.
In this new battle for hearts and minds, propaganda – however
it is termed – will play a central role, especially if the ‘war’ against
international terrorism lasts for a long time. Many people ask
whether the world has changed since 11 September, but certainly
many aspects of American foreign policy have changed. The identification
of an ‘axis of evil’, the openly declared desire to foster
‘regime change’ in places like Iraq, the determination to ‘hunt down’
terrorists and their supporters, and the renewed emphasis on preventing
‘weapons of mass destruction’ from reaching undesirable
hands may well be understandable reactions to 9/11 but they do
create enormous challenges from a democratic propaganda point
of view. Image and reality must go hand-in-hand if a nation’s
actions are to be perceived in a desired way. Otherwise, the world’s
sole surviving superpower will merely be seen to be wielding what
has become another dirty ‘p’ word, namely power.
In December 2002, American PSYOPS teams began dropping
leaflets on Iraq warning its soldiers not to fire on coalition aircraft.
Commando Solo broadcasts encouraged Iraqi soldiers to desert the
regime of Saddam Hussein. American resolve to destroy the first
target of the ‘axis of evil’ prompted many to question the link
between Iraq and the events of 11 September but the debate over
weapons of mass destruction, and whether Iraq might one day
supply them to al-Qaeda, placed the realm of foreign policy into
the ‘what if?’ category rather than its more traditional pragmatism
for dealing with what had already happened. This makes it even
harder for the propagandists because they are forced to deal with a
world as it might be rather than with constructing justifications for
actions that have already taken place. In such a world, image may
have nothing to do with reality. And in a world where image is
everything, reality has nothing to do with ‘facts’ or ‘the truth’. The
only truth is power.