by Ariel Cohen
2nd part of 2
Losing in the battlefield of perceptions
Public diplomacy/strategic information is yet another area in which Israel utterly failed and which requires a major revamping. Throughout the world, Islamist insurgents masterfully use images and propaganda, relying on sympathetic elements among Western media and nongovernmental organizations to focus international attention on civilian collateral casualties (even to the point of staging them). They use these images to stir the outrage that increases recruitment for future rounds in the conflict.[9]
The Israelis have been particularly inadequate at perception management at least since the 1982 Lebanon war, when they were attacked for allegedly high civilian casualties. In the ensuing years, Israel was systematically smashed in the international media and by the NGO community for the "occupation" of Arab lands, the alleged incarceration of 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, and other much-publicized misdeeds. In the most recent fighting, many an NGO, such as Human Rights Watch, simply refused to recognize that Hezbollah and Hamas deliberately used civilians as human shields and practiced a consistent policy of locating rocket launchers in civilian dwellings, schools, mosques, and hospitals, despite ample reporting in the mainstream, including liberal left, English language media.[10]
With almost astounding ease, the media fell for every Hezbollah trick and deception, including doctoring Reuters photos;[11] publishing a picture of a non-existing Israeli frigate being hit by a Hezbollah rocket (it was an Australian demolition explosion);[12] falling for a sob story about an Israeli missile hitting a Lebanese ambulance right in the middle of its Red Cross;[13] or using the same ruins to claim Israeli missile hits on different dates and deploying rehearsed "city criers" to feed tear-jerking stories to Western correspondents. Most of these hoaxes were exposed by Western bloggers, not by Israeli information officials, whose job it should be to debunk enemy propaganda.
But, most important, in the war with Hezbollah -- and in previous conflicts, as well -- the media fail to comprehend, and the Israelis fail consistently and adequately to explain, that those who are and were fighting Israel (including the PLO's Yassir Arafat, Hezbollah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and his Iranian sponsors) seek genocide and the ultimate demise of the state of Israel in its totality. Similarly, the media often compartamentalize descriptions of jihadi atrocities and the overall strategic goal of jihadis to force the demise of Western civilization. Representatives of Western governments almost never explain these key points, or they explain them without sufficient facts. Western publics are rarely afforded coherent information through which to frame and understand events.
Stigmatized yet again by the conflict with Hezbollah, Israel lost what little support it enjoyed at the beginning of the conflict in Europe, among the American left, and in many developing countries, while the hatred of the Arab world was easily further inflamed by the daily stream of "atrocity news" being served up by Al Jazeera and Al Manar, the Hezbollah satellite tv network. However, Israeli efforts to engage in strategic information operations were and remain virtually nonexistent. The budget of Al Manar is greater than the entire Israeli foreign ministry public diplomacy (hasbara) budget. The architect of this failing public diplomacy/strategic information policy under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan Gissin, has admitted himself that Jerusalem was particularly lacking on this battlefield.[14]
The Israelis aren't facing this particular battle alone. The U.S. and the West faced similar difficulties after the liberation of Afghanistan and the "desecration of the Koran" allegations; and continue to encounter a media barrage over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, and other perception crises, both real and media-generated. Winning hearts and minds is and will remain the greatest challenge for Israel -- and the West -- in the forthcoming wars against the jihadis.
Lessons learned
Jihadi organizations, supported by anti-status quo powers such as Iran and Syria, do not threaten only individual states, but are bringing about instability and the destruction of regimes throughout entire regions (Iraq, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf, the Indian subcontinent). At the same time, state support is a source of sub-state actors' vulnerability which is not sufficiently understood, let alone exploited. As nation-states have leaderships, assets, and interests, those need to be put under pressure to promote a cessation of support for sub-state or supra-state actors.
The Israel-Hezbollah war, as well as conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, yielded many important lessons vital for the success in the conflict against Islamist radicalism world wide. These include:
Do not underestimate the enemy. Not being a conventional army, Hezbollah elicited the contempt of Israeli political and military elites. The deputy chief of staff and Israeli Air Force intelligence commanders referred to Hezbollah as a "terrorist gang," discounting its lethality.[15] Hezbollah wasted no time, putting down roots in Gaza and attempting to penetrate the West Bank. The Pentagon leadership and the U.S. military top brass were slow to recognize the nature of the conflict in Iraq as an insurgency, not just a terrorist campaign.
Find sponsors and leaders. More intelligence penetration of Hezbollah and of Iraqi militias is necessary, both in terms of human intelligence and signal intelligence. More scrutiny needs to be focused on the location of Hezbollah's leadership; the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah link, including the identities of liaison officers; the type and volume of hardware supplied to Hezbollah; the nature and location of the joint Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah command-and-control center in Syria; the identities of Iranian experts and trainers working with Hezbollah; the identities of Hezbollah personnel trained or training in Iran; and the doctrine and tactics, techniques, and procedures (ttp) that the Iranians are teaching Hezbollah and their allies in Iraq and elsewhere now or in the future.
Similarly, the leadership and connections to foreign states and funders of the Ba'ath underground and the Shiite militias need to be further mined for actionable intelligence of the kind collected in the January 2007 raid on the Iranian representative office in Mosul. Such information can assist in putting down the insurgency.
Local knowledge, language skills, and understanding of political, historical, and religious dynamics of the theater of operations are weapons in themselves. Hezbollah spent a tremendous amount of resources spying on Israel, including recruiting Israeli military officers and gaining a deep understanding of Israeli doctrine and tactics. A similar effort is afoot in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every war is a war of intelligence, of strategic and operational deceit and subterfuge, but twenty-first-century wars will be outstanding for their heavily reliance on and integration with intelligence activities. Gathering and analysis of intelligence are impossible without linguistic and cultural knowledge.
Safe havens are crucial. These wars are not local. Just as Syria provided Hezbollah a safe haven, and Iran supplied money, weapons and training, the Taliban and other jihadi groups are using safe havens, such as in Pakistan, to train, equip, treat the wounded, and learn military and technological innovations. A task for the twenty-fist century war against radical jihad will be to render safe havens unsafe, using diplomacy where possible and force where necessary.
The Hezbollah victory is empowering Iran and threatening to destabilize the whole Middle East. Iranian leaders from Ayatollah Ali Khameini to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have called the outcome "the divine victory." Arab commentators have already opined that the Hezbollah success will boost jihadis (Both Sunni and Shiite) from Iraq to Jordan to Egypt.[16]
Riyadh, Amman, and Cairo were deeply uncomfortable about the Iranian involvement with Iraqi Shiites and support of Hezbollah. Sunni adicals, however, sided with Iran. Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, welcomed Hezbollah's resilience, opening the way to expanded cooperation between extremist Sunnis and extremist Shiites in toppling pro-Western regimes. Cooperation between the United States, European powers, out-of-area actors, and the moderate/pragmatic Arab nation-states, as well as Israel, needs to be boosted to stem the Iranian expansion and a possible anti-American Sunni-Shiite jihadi alliance.
Information warfare and perception management is paramount. Without effective hearts-and-minds strategies that are an integral part of the overall war strategy, the West and its allies in the area have very little in terms of soft power to counter Iran and the jihadis. This information strategy has to affect not just the Western and Muslim media, but also the mosques and the education systems. Modern states and militaries have repeatedly failed to clearly recognize, much less effectively counter, the deliberate campaign of manipulation and propaganda being carried out by militant Islamists/jihadis through the mass media, especially the internet. The largely pacifist Western nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector is often a target of Islamist propaganda that vilifies the U.S. and its allies. Islamists consistently score points through the media, academia, and the NGO community in the court of the public opinion. A case in point for an information warfare offensive would be pressuring the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, to further cut support not just to al Qaeda and other jihadi organizations, but also to radical Islamic charities and madrassahs, and to deligitimize jihadi-supporting preachers and imams. More efforts are needed to boost the profile of those clerics who promote a message of tolerance and to facilitate the launch of satellite tv channels and websites with agendas aimed at reconciliation and peace. This should be the highest priority in the war of ideas ג€" information warfare that so far the U.S. has been fighting only half-heartedly, and unquestionably losing.
The U.N. is an unreliable agency for peace. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the permanent members of the Security Council, especially France and Russia, did precious little to fight terror in Lebanon or Iraq. As far as France is concerned, things are improving under the new administration of President Nicolas Sarkozy. The UN peacekeeping force,unifil, has collected and published detailed data about Israeli force movements in wartime, endangering the lives of Israeli servicemen and women, and violating its own neutrality mandate.[17] Just as the UNSC sat on its hands when Lebanon and Hezbollah failed to implement UNSC Resolution 1559, which stipulated the disarmament of Hezbollah and deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces to the South, the violation of UNSC Resolution 1701, which demanded the same and more, began the day it was signed. Specifically, Hezbollah announced that it refused to consider procedures to disarm, and it refuses to stop the resupply of weapons from Syria; it considers Israeli troops legitimate targets -- with no repercussions from the UN. Syria and Iran are openly defying the UN and furnishing arms supplies to Hezbollah, with no sanctions and no calls for sanctions against these terror-sponsoring states. Those U.S. and Israeli decision-makers who actively lobbied for Resolution 1701 as the solution for the conflict now look na&uiuml;ve at best, and possibly worse than that. All this is hardly surprising in view of previous UN failures in the Middle East (such as the hasty evacuation from Sinai of the UNEF by Secretary General U Thant in 1967) and the UN "peacekeeping" disasters in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda.
Under-promise and over-deliver. The best strategy is not to advise the enemy of your strategic goals. Policymakers should not have promised "a new Middle East" safe for democracy; they should not have proclaimed that Hezbollah would be destroyed, disarmed, or denied the ability to fire rockets into Israel. All Israeli leaders needed to say was "Hezbollah will pay the price" -- and strike at a time and place of their choosing. Instead, they fought when and where Hezbollah wanted them to. Rather than under-promising and over-delivering, the Israelis inflated expectations, articulated maximum goals, and managed to snatch a public perception of failure from the jaws of potential victory. Similarly, the U.S. over-promised in Iraq by talking about turning the country into a model of democracy for the New Middle East. Now Washington needs to find ways to exercise the art of the possible and achieve pacification with the least number of American and Iraqi casualties. Whether this is in fact possible remains to be seen.
The time is now
When facing sub-state actors, conventional, twentieth-century military doctrines aimed at wars against nation-states and industrial-era mass armies are effectively dead. Even the best traditional militaries, such as the U.S. and Israeli armies, face formidable difficulties when confronted with irregular, well-motivated, and foreign-supported forces, which enjoy media battlefield advantages. The Israel-Hezbollah conflict was not so much a defeat of Israel as it was a defeat of the old-style warfare by the new. The same can be said about the U.S. military in Iraq. The best nineteenth-century cavalry army would be impotent against small and well-trained tank and mechanized infantry divisions. And with modern warfare becoming increasingly political, intelligence-based, and waged on the information battlefield, it is time to restructure the military to answer these challenges. The time to wake up and rethink the paradigms is now. Tomorrow may be too late.
Footnotes
1 Ariel Cohen, Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis (Greenwood Publishers, 1998).
2 Ayman Al Zawahiri, quoted in Bruce Hoffman, "Combating Al Qaeda and the Militant Islamic Threat," Testimony presented to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, Rand Corporation CT-255 (February 2006).
3 Anthony Cordesman, "Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War," Center for Strategic and International Studies (August 27, 2006).
4 Julie Stahl, "Radical Group May Declare Islamic Caliphate in Gaza," CNSNews.com (August 24, 2006).
5 Opheera McDoom, "Islamist Threaten to Fight U.N. Darfur Force," Reuters (August 25, 2006). See also, Ariel Cohen, "Hizb ut-Tahrir: An Emerging Threat to U.S. Interests in Central Asia," Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder 1656 (May 30, 2003).
6 Ari Shavit, "Systemic Failure," Haaretz (August 4, 2006); Yuval Steinitz (the former chairman of the Knesset foreign affairs and defense committee), "The War That Was Led Astray," Haaretz (August 17, 2006).
7 Interview with the author, retired general, Israeli general staff (August 8, 2006).
8 Ralph Peters, "Hezbollah 3, Israel 0," New York Post (August 17, 2006).
9 Anthony Cordesman, "Qana and the Lessons for Modern War," Center for Strategic and International Studies (July 31, 2006).
10 Alan Dershowitz, "What are they Watching," New York Sun (August 23, 2007).
11 "Reuters Drops Beirut Photographer," BBC, (August 8, 2006).
12 "Hezbollah sinks Australian War Ship," Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt's Blog (August 22, 2006).
13 "The Red Cross Ambulance Incident. How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War"
http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/.
14 Raanan Gissin, "The Critical Importance of Israeli Public Diplomacy in the War Against the Iran-Hizballah Axis of Terror," Jerusalem Issue Brief, Institute for Contemporary Affairs 6:9 (August 23, 2006).
15 Gissin, "The Critical Importance of Israeli Public Diplomacy."
16 Tamim Al-Barghouti, "Two souths, one war," Al Ahram Weekly Online (August 3-9 2006).
17 Lori Lowenthal Marcus, "What did you do in the war, UNIFIL?" Weekly Standard (September 4, 2006).
Ariel Cohen is senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is the editor and co-author of Eurasia in Balance (Ashgate, 2005.)
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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