Use Every Article In the Arsenal

In 1946, he exulted to a Time magazine friend: "We now control 37 newspapers,

6 radio stations, 314 theatres, 642 movies, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7,384 book dealers and printers, and conduct about 15 public opinion surveys a month, as well as publish one newspaper with 1,500,000 circulation, 3 magazines, run the Associated Press of Germany (DANA), and operate 20 library centers."

Times have changed. Iraq has no McClure, though perhaps its painful transition to democracy might have proceeded more smoothly and safely if it had. But the notion that "pay for placement" somehow represents a breach of military protocol or practice is nonsense.

As recently as 1999, during NATO operations in Kosovo -- an environment far less hostile than occupied Iraq -- American military operatives secretly paid for planted stories in Serbian media outlets. The stories, which military officials insist were accurate, were intended to counter Milosevic's anti-NATO media campaign.

At a December conference on the role of information operations held at Fort Leavenworth and hosted by Lt. Gen. David Petraeus -- who recently oversaw the training of the Iraqi military forces -- officers were conflicted about the practice of surreptitious media payoffs. Though nearly everyone agreed that the military should promote truthful and accurate stories, the participants disagreed over "pay-for-placement" tactics.

"Counterinsurgency at the tactical level is an effort to win the trust and confidence -- not the hearts and minds -- of the indigenous population," observed Lt. Col. Charles Eassa, the deputy director of the Army's Information Operations. There are legitimate tensions between the risks of subverting trust by paying for coverage and the harm of undermining trust by failing to support sympathetic media outlets. Field commanders need to understand those trade-offs, said Eassa, but there was no conference consensus to formally deny "boots-on-the-ground" military leaders the covert option.

Similarly, American media leadership is divided over its own ethics and obligations in protecting journalists in Iraq. On the one hand, many media outlets agreed to a news blackout to buy time for kidnapped Christian Science Monitor freelancer Jill Carroll. On the other, many Western media didn't hesitate to publicly reveal names of Iraqi media outlets accepting American funds, thus putting Iraqi lives at risk. The U.S. military, understandably, wants to protect its people and its allies, too.

While force protection issues alone justify the military's active involvement in hostile information environments, strategy and circumstances should dictate the appropriate information intervention levels. Just as with post-war Germany and Japan, the more stable, open and prosperous a society Iraq becomes, the more the need for a military role in local media will evaporate.

The military exit strategy is the media exit strategy. The goal of a successful counterinsurgency, after all, is to facilitate a vibrantly self-sustaining and self-governing society. We should hope that a decade hence, the Iraqis will be complaining about their own "fair and balanced" media in much the way that Americans, Britons, Europeans and Japanese complain about theirs. That's success.

But if the U.S. military's involvement in the information environment leaves Iraqis with a healthy skepticism of what they read in the papers or see on TV, well, one could argue that would be another positive contribution to their civil society.

Author's e-mail:

schrage@media.mit.edu

Michael Schrage, a former Washington Post reporter and Los Angeles Times columnist, is a senior adviser to MIT's Security Studies Program.