I was watching Democracy Now today and one headline in particular caught my attention. The headline was "Sen. Webb Calls on Pentagon to Cancel $300M Iraq Propaganda Program". The article is about Senator Jim Webb of Virginia asking the pentagon to halt a program that would hire four US-based companies to engage in what is often euphimized as a "hearts and minds" campaign and the DOD is calling its "strategic information” initiative. The contractors are the Washington-based Lincoln Group, the LA-based Leonie Industries, as well as MPRI and SOSI, both based in Virginia. This originally interested me because of an argument I got into with some friends about this Three Doors Down music video, which I first saw in a movie theater in Washington DC, and then again at Cinemark in Amherst. It was produced by the US National Guard to promote recruitment which has plunged since it started sending so many enlistees to Iraq to supplement the regular army.
One of the four companies contracted by the Pentagon, The Lincoln group, in the "job openings" section of their website, lists an opening for the position of "PSYOP Planner". PSYOP is army jargon for psychological operations. The wikipedia article about PSYOP is pretty crazy. This is my favorite line: "This euphimism for mind control is ironically an example of psychological operations -- i.e. using psychological techniques to persuade [manipulate] a large number of people to support something that they wouldn't normally support." It is attributed to William Dougherty in "A Psychological Warfare Casebook", John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979.
The US Military wants to "win", or as John McCain so often puts it "to return victorious and honorably". It is clear to me listening to this man so long steeped in military ways of thinking that we are never going to see a music video, commercial, PSA or any other piece of mass media produced by the military that promotes any other agenda. "But the military's agenda is to stabilize Iraq now", you may say. So why are we spending $300 million on a unidirectional PR campaign? Do you think that Iraqis have a skewed understanding of what is going on in their own country? There's a difference between selling a product and promoting an understanding (of actions, ideas, intentions...). All of the four companies selected for this contract also advertise their services to "large multinational corporations" and "the private sector", which indicates to me that they specialize in making people believe the messages that they are paid to disseminate. Similarly when I listen to the news about Iraq, the voices I never hear are the voices of Iraqi people. Seems to me that is what builds a democracy- but maybe the media just doesn't report on that.
My job as a filmmaker is to try and make things clearer (read: more complicated, but more intelligible too) not to convince people that what I say has more to do with reality than their own experience. In the end, it is my own experience that I represent, but the process of articulating that experience is also colored by it. Can the military say that its opinion of its own presence in Iraq has changed at all in the last eight years? I'm curious to know. I'm also curious to know if Three Doors Down has been to Iraq.
1 comment:
It's frightening how blaming people who disagree with or question the war, accusing them of being unpatriotic or wishing ill to our soldiers, is so acceptable - the right to think and question our government is our most important right. Being able to speak our thoughts and not being attacked for it is precious. But there is a difference between fighting to defend our freedoms and fighting an ill-conceived war that was dishonestly begun and has been clumsily carried out. People who have died did so honorably, serving their country. But their deaths, and the wounding of thousands more, do not justify more deaths and wounds, and the continuing misery of the Iraqi people. It may be that there is no way that we can "win": in the end it is their country, and they will have to either make peace with each other, or not. So far they don't seem all that disposed to do it. I think that other nations in the area need to step in, and the Iraqis who have power need to work this out for themselves.
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