The Battle For Hearts And Minds

By James Poniewozik

We were told that a counterstrike might follow last week's air attacks on Afghanistan. But we did not expect that it would come so soon or that the weapon of choice would be videotape. About an hour after the bombing campaign began, Americans were dumbstruck to see the placid face of the enemy, Osama bin Laden, in their living rooms. Outside a secret cave hideout, a Kalashnikov rifle beside him, he directly challenged the official U.S. line by casting the fight, in flowery classical Arabic, as one between Islam and the West. "America," he said, "will never taste security and safety unless we feel security and safety in our land."

More than most wars, this is a media war. The second strike at the World Trade Center, on live TV, could not have been better timed to detonate like a fireball in the hearts of millions. Now bin Laden was cannily, politically using the mass media for a spin strike aimed at the world's billion Muslims. On Tuesday, his lieutenant Sleiman Abou-Gheith followed with an appeal to Arab unity and the promise of a further "storm of airplanes" against America.

"Prior to Sept. 11, we did not realize that we were in a propaganda war, but we were," says Richard Bulliet, professor of history at Columbia University and a former director of the university's Middle East Institute. It is a war fought in news studios in Qatar and with editorials, sermons and press conferences. It is a war that the U.S. needs to fight not only to stanch the supply of extremists willing to die to murder Americans but also to shore up nervous moderate Arab allies, who fear their people may turn on them for supporting the bombing of Muslims.

And it is a war, say many observers in the U.S. and the Middle East, in which America is at best playing catch-up, at worst losing. President Bush, at a prime-time press conference Thursday, seemed flummoxed at lingering anti-U.S. sentiment after the bombings: "I am amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about... We've got to do a better job of making our case."

The problem is not so much the U.S. message--that our war is not with Islam, that many countries lost citizens in the attacks, and so on--as the fact that it is not reaching Arabs. Too few U.S. representatives in the Middle East speak Arabic. Too few U.S. officials show up on the dominant Arab TV-news network. The U.S. has invested too little in cultural exchange. The overall failing is perhaps simply that the government has no coordinated communications--oh, let's say it, propaganda--strategy. Asks Representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee: "How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has such trouble promoting a positive image of itself overseas?"

In fact, Charlotte Beers, who holds the Administration position closest to minister of propaganda, has headed the Madison Avenue firms Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson. But ask the new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs if she considers herself a "communications czar," and she laughs, "I hope not." Less than a month on the job, Beers has ideas for making the American case--increasing cultural-exchange programs, lining up officials to appear on Arab media and perhaps getting agencies to develop pro-American ads for Arab TV. But she has few tools at her disposal. The government's biggest broadcast arm, Voice of America, has a mandate of objectivity--employees detest the term propaganda--and while it broadcasts into Afghanistan in several regional languages, its proselytizing is limited to the occasional editorial. The station came under criticism for airing excerpts of an interview with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. VOA staff members counter that its independence lends it credibility. Director Robert Reilly told TIME, "It's important to appeal to people's reason. After listening to VOA, if they dislike us, they'll have better reasons for disliking us. And if they support us, they'll have better reasons for supporting us."

Today, even among many educated, Westernized Arabs who admire American pop culture, "America is seen as the evil behind all the problems in the Middle East," says Abdul Rahman al Rashed, editor of the influential Saudi-owned newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. Many instinctively mistrust the U.S. and refuse to believe an Arab could have carried out the attacks, in part because, they claim, the U.S. has failed to bring proof against bin Laden to the Arab media. This absence creates fertile ground for his views, even among those who would not endorse his acts. "I found bin Laden strangely convincing," says Mariam Ali, a Cairo teacher.

Abdallah Schleifer, director of the Adham Center for television journalism at the American University in Cairo, credits bin Laden's canny, opportunistic broadening of his message. Instead of emphasizing his desire for a medieval-style caliphate under Islamic law--which discomfits many moderate Arabs--bin Laden crooned a greatest-hits medley of deeply ingrained Arab grievances--the death of thousands of Iraqi children under U.N. sanctions; U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, home of Muslim holy cities; the partition of Arab lands by Europe after World War I; and that ultimate red-meat issue, Israel. "The original bin Laden motif is not terribly interesting to Egyptians," says Schleifer. "But now he shifted to Palestine, and this has touched a chord."

Among all the major influences on Arab public opinion--the mosque, the press, the schools--the newest and perhaps most revolutionary is al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab, all-news satellite station that is becoming to the terrorism war what CNN was to the Gulf War. Most Americans discovered it last week when U.S. networks picked up its broadcasts of the tapes from al-Qaeda and its exclusive video of the bombardment of Afghanistan. (In the U.S., CNN, which shares a corporate parent with TIME, has an exclusive deal to air al-Jazeera footage first, but it eventually agreed to allow its competitors to show that video as well.) Founded in 1996 in the tiny emirate of Qatar on the Arabian peninsula (its name means "the peninsula" in Arabic), al-Jazeera quickly became a phenomenon, standing out for its openness, sophisticated journalism and outspoken viewpoints.

What most vexes some observers is these viewpoints, especially those on popular, free-wheeling talk shows like The Opposite Direction. "[It's like] Crossfire on steroids," says Jon B. Alterman, Middle East expert at the Washington-based U.S. Institute of Peace. "On many of its talk shows, the range of opinions is from anti-American to virulently anti-American." Colin Powell, one of only a few high-level American officials to appear on al-Jazeera, lobbied the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, al-Jazeera's founder, to curb the anti-American rhetoric. Arab governments have withdrawn ambassadors from Qatar because al-Jazeera aired their critics.

But that controversialism--and the relative independence it implies--has won an estimated 35 million Arab viewers. Says Abdullah Fahd, an Islamic-law student in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: "Al-Jazeera is the only place to find out what's going on." And al-Jazeera has gained unparalleled access to bin Laden, who has tapes hand-delivered to the network as well as to the Taliban, which has granted it the only official access to broadcast in Afghanistan. Those images, including pictures of badly burned children in a Jalalabad hospital, have been powerful and potentially useful for the Taliban. But managing director Mohammad Jassem al-Ali denies that the network is being used, and he defends airing al-Qaeda tapes: "This doesn't mean we're perpetuating bin Laden's point of view. Any network would have done the same thing."

Not necessarily. Last week, at the U.S. government's request, American TV-news networks agreed not to air unedited al-Qaeda tapes before reviewing them. Few would argue with one concern--that bin Laden might be sending coded messages through them to terrorist cells. But another argument--that the broadcasts could demoralize Americans and further spread bin Laden's message to international viewers--raises the question of whether American networks are expected in this war to suppress not only dangerous information but also hostile rhetoric. And it begs a question of strategy. Why exert so much effort controlling the message at home, where the Administration enjoys unprecedented support, and so little in a vital region where the U.S. suffers open hostility?

Some experts suggest it's because the U.S. does not have a message palatable to the Muslim world. The U.S. may have an interest, as the State Department's Beers says, in emphasizing its "freedom and tolerance" to the Arab masses. But in building its coalition, the U.S. is also courting military and strategic support from undemocratic and often intolerant regimes. Says Columbia's Bulliet: "We do not have a message that serves both our military-strategic interests in the short run and our national people-to-people interests in the long run."

The U.S. has launched some short-run efforts in Afghanistan, aimed not so much at larger ideological points as at proving our niceness and making the country friendlier when U.S. soldiers come in. Commando Solo, an Air Force cargo plane converted into a $70 million flying radio and TV station, will broadcast messages to Afghan citizens that the attacks are aimed not at them but at the Taliban. TIME has learned that the CIA is providing portable radios that will be air-dropped or trucked in so Afghans can listen to what Commando Solo is broadcasting. An Army PSYOPS unit has printed hundreds of thousands of leaflets, heavy on pictures for the largely illiterate populace. The decision to drop food as well as bombs was a hearts-and-minds stratagem. As was Bush's announcement last week of a fund for Afghan children to be supported by $1 donations from American kids.

The fund could win some hearts. As for minds, British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week most prominently jumped into the media fray, speaking with al-Jazeera the day after bin Laden's tape aired and sending an op-ed article to Arab newspapers that made the case against bin Laden in Islamic terms: "As the Prophet Muhammad (God's peace and blessings be upon him) said to his armies: 'Do not kill women or children or non-combatants.'"

The Bush Administration is considering, though warily, offering al-Jazeera an interview with the President. Effecting real change in enraged Muslims' view of the U.S. will probably take years. But the government would settle for less. Says Beers: "I'd be very happy if [potential terrorist recruits] said, 'I understand how you are. I want nothing to do with it. But I would not like to murder you.'"

--Reported by Matthew Cooper and Douglas C. Waller/Washington, Lina Lofaro/New York, Azadeh Moaveni/Doha and Amany Radwan/Cairo

With reporting by Matthew Cooper and Douglas C. Waller/Washington, Lina Lofaro/New York, Azadeh Moaveni/Doha and Amany Radwan/Cairo