The Word at War

Over a recent lunch, they agreed to discuss what they do, albeit only in broad brush. They are stingy with details, they said, because their contracts prohibit them from revealing too much.

Lincoln Group works in Iraq, Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates and Jordan, employing about 200 people, says Craig, who attended but did not graduate from West Point before he joined the Marines. He founded Lincoln along with Christian Bailey, a British entrepreneur. Bailey was not available for lunch, as he was off in the world somewhere, influencing.

The P-Word

Words can change what people think. Add some emotional punch and piercing imagery, and words can change how people behave. Repeat these words and images over and over, and they can define a culture.

That's the info war -- far more intense than mere "spin" -- and it's been raging in the United States since the words "war on terror" were uttered in public and the national zeitgeist became one of fear. With the body politic and the vox populi deeply polarized before and after the war started, "we look at everything in terms of propaganda," says Nancy Snow, a former State Department official and author of "Information War."

Think of all the big-ticket war issues that still are contested: WMD, aluminum tubes, uranium, the spurious Saddam-9/11 connection, the Iraqis whom U.S. officials said would greet U.S. troops as liberators, the good news that allegedly is being ignored by all those journalists who keep writing about the bombs still exploding, the bodies still falling.

In the most recent burst of concern about disinformation and the war, enter the Lincoln Group and accusations that its packaging of an American point of view is just propaganda.

It's that P-word again. So let's parse it. It means "any systematic, widespread dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, practices, etc., to further one's own cause or to damage an opposing one." That's the basic Webster definition, which sounds so straightforward.

In the real world, though, the word is "a contested term, ideologically based," says Snow, a senior research fellow at the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California and an assistant professor in communications at the California State University at Fullerton.

It's a slippery word indeed. At the core, it's about manipulation, planting an idea in your head or a sentiment in your heart on the sly.

"Part of the beauty of real successful propaganda is it works without you knowing that it works," says Anthony Pratkanis, co-author of "Age of Propaganda" and a professor of social psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The word "propaganda" conjures some pretty ugly stuff, like the old Bolshevik and Soviet agitprop, the sinister wordsmithery of Nazi Joseph Goebbels, the "destroy the village to save it" doublespeak of U.S. military leaders during the Vietnam War.

To be lumped with those folks is, well, understandably upsetting.