How to Win the Media War

February 20.2006

brinksmanship

Last week US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a stunning concession.  The United States, he fretted, was losing the media war to the cave-dwelling enemy.  Ever colorful colloquially, in comparing the United States to a five and dime in an ebay world, the Secretary called vaguely for institutional improvements and cash to better get out the message.  True to the lean-and-mean military model for which Mr. Shock and Awe has been both lauded and pilloried, Rumsfeld called for a culture shift in the public affairs workings of the military juggernaut and the investment of modest sums of capital to better win hearts and minds.

While television marketing in the United States has grown progressively more creative in its methods and tradecraft, there remains an underlying presumptive maxim that more is always better.  If a company can put its product on display in the living rooms of American households twenty times in a given week, its sales may be expected to do significantly better than if it pays for only five commercials that week.  Whether the saturation returns are arithmetic, geometric, or asymptotic is a soft-science consideration best left to well-paid K-Street statisticians; however, as a layman I would venture that it is clear that the more you advertise, the more you sell, whether it’s a product, a service, or a brand.

And of course the United States is all three and much more.  But in marketing terms, the USA is a brand.  It stands for something, like Nike, only different.  Up until March, 2003, Brand USA was not a very tough sell on the whole.  For your average planetary contemporary anywhere, Brand USA was hard to hate for its many implicit positives:

1)     Wealth

2)     Health

3)     Civil liberties and equal rights.

4)     Democratic principles with free elections.

5)     Upward economic mobility, i.e. The American Dream.

6)     Intellectual and political progressivism

Before the United States launched two simultaneous wars, Brand USA sold itself.  It didn’t need advertising; it didn't even really need to dominate the Olympics though of course as such a talented and prideful nation how could we not?  In those halcyon days riding on the Clinton economic phenomenon there was no pesky Adidas leaning into America’s swagger, no Reebok breathing down its neck. 

Brand USA doesn’t sell itself anymore.  Not in these dog days of American military projection, and the rummy nod to an advertising campaign smells like little more than the last band aid in a depleted first aid kit hastily applied to a blossoming body-blow to American credibility wrought by America’s erstwhile Protector-In-Chief.  On the eve of the third anniversary of the controversial military adventure in Iraq, even strong traditional allies have grown rightfully suspicious and circumspect of the United States, while traditional adversaries have devolved to outright hostility and violence in response to US actions and initiatives around the world.  Brand USA is not what it used to be, and cramming it down the world’s throat with greater advertising density is likely to cut little into the enemy’s purported edge in the “media war.”

polarity

To win the hearts and minds of the world, America must change its drastic and reckless course precipitated by the President’s post-911 power grab and to return the nation to its embodiment of the time-honored values and principles that have delivered it to its apical position at this potential historical watershed

Steps that America may take to make the Brand USA sales job a bit less daunting in the winning of hearts and minds worldwide and at home include the following.

1)     Close down Abu Guantánanamo.  More than any other thing, GITMO symbolizes everything America abhors.  Penal practices in eastern Cuba demonstrably violate the Geneva Conventions to which the US is a signatory as well as time-honored American legal institutions such as habeas corpus, the right to legal representation, and the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.  Finally, Guantánamo is no longer strategic and is a colonial provocation of not only Cuba but of all the Latin American nations the US has at one time or another in its history had occasion to militarily tyrannize. 

2)     Renounce torture.  Three cheers for John McCain’s noble drive to do just this in a law overwhelmingly passed by fellow legislators.  The President, in signing the bill into law after being rebuffed for his Number Two’s objection  that at least the CIA be allowed to torture, was accompanied by a hush-hush disclaimer in which the administration abstracts itself from the law's constraints, a delightful development that according to the unfolding may test the time-honored balance of power among the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government, the father, son, and holy ghost, so to speak of American fundamentalism.  What the administration fails to grasp is that nothing hurts America more than torturing its captured enemy, unless of course it is the bungling torturing of a mistaken identity "suspect" and and those that just get rounded up.  A real renunciation of torture is required in this thought experiment, and the President must be cautious not to overrate the legal relevancy of His hushed disclaimer.

3)     Re-define the extent and breadth of the administration’s war powers.  The American administration has directly violated a variety of American laws put in place specifically to limit executive excess.  This administration has argued that the American congress put the administration above the laws of the land in its prosecution of the War on Terror.  Many senators and congressmen from both parties have publicly complained that it was never their intention or understanding in authorizing the President to militarily topple the Taliban that they were also giving the nod to torture, unregulated domestic espionage, abrogation of the Geneva Conventions, nor denial of due process to birthright Americans swept up in the dragnet.

4)     Impeach George Bush.  Nothing would make the world take notice of this nation’s commitment to a return to fundamental time-honored American standard-bearer democratic and progressive principles than to put the man most responsible for this country’s ethical and moral drift out of a job.  While the political will may be lacking in a Republican-led congress in an election year, the political calculus is likely to suffer a seismic shift in November.  There’s no shortage of high crimes and misdemeanors upon which to frame the Articles of Impeachment, and while this President may not warrant jail time, this American nation most certainly warrants a future other than the darkly frightful one that this President has brought to our collective doorstep.  House Prosecutors could start off with the willful fabrication and manipulation of intelligence it used to justify a war the President had already settled on launching before 9/11, and which the United Nations has declared illegal.  The institutional encouragement of torture in interrogations of suspected enemy militants is an action that is almost certainly illegal and would have a prominent place in the congressional debate over the president’s future.  The unauthorized wiretaps of Americans in direct contravention to a law enacted in 1977 to redress the Nixonian obsession with internal dissent in the Vietnam era is demonstrably illegal, the administration’s weak argument that the War Authorization gave him those powers notwithstanding.  Clearly, the administration’s sidestepping of the Geneva Conventions with the erection of GITMO is blatantly illegal.  Finally, as testimony ensues in the perjury trial of the Vice President’s right hand man, it is almost certain to become obvious to those to whom it is not yet obvious, that the Vice President for Torture is almost certainly behind the illegal revelation of the identity of an undercover CIA operative.  This ugly shadow may glance across the standing President more than through association if his wunderkind, Karl Rove, is indicted for any dirty dealings in the whole sad affair, a possibility that has not been discounted by the eerily dispassionate Prosecutor.

America cannot whip the whole world, as this administration is discovering.  And this president’s costly military gamble on a country that it turns out was actually the odd-man out in the Axis of Evil has left the United States incapable of militarily or by the proxy of implied threat containing either North Korea or Iran in their respective nuclear aspirations.

personal degree of commitment

America also cannot flee the pottery-barn red-faced to circle the wagons around its borders and withdraw into isolationism.  Whether you like globalization or now, it’s now part of the planetary fabric and only in its infancy, and for America to sustain and increase its wealth requires that it engage the world with trade, commerce, and the concomitantly necessitated projection of power.

And with the Afghan insurgency on the rise and Iraq almost certainly doomed to civil war, it’s time for the United States military, diplomats, politicos, business leaders, and citizenry to make tough choices about where to stand firm and where to bend in its negotiation with the world to be allowed back into the fold of civilized and respectable nations, a club founded by the United States itself during World War II. 

Seventy-five million dollars in additional funding for the media war is not going to do the job.  For us to win hearts and minds around the world we have to return to the principles of the great nation that we were before September 11^th, 2001 and deja vu back somehow to the present day in our policy and polity with the laser scrutiny reforms predicated on 20-20 hindsight.

That’s the way that the United States of America will ultimately win its clumsy “War on Terror,” whether it is within this decade or whether it takes two.