Drowning Rats Cling To Propaganda Outposts

Not that these viciously vied for blunt propaganda assets are going to swing targeted psyches any which way but ignored & bored - but what the heck, let the Crazies dream on. -M1

As the administration of US President George W Bush struggles through its last two years in office, it appears that the agenda of neo-conservative ideologues has finally lost its appeal among strategic parts of the US foreign-policy apparatus.

But as their influence has waned at the Pentagon and State Department, neo-conservative hawks have taken charge on the battlefield of public diplomacy.

Intent on fixing what American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Joshua Muravchik termed President Bush's "public diplomacy mess", right-wing hawks have gained control of the weapons in the "war of ideas" - US government-funded and supported media outlets such as Voice of America (VOA), Al-Hurra, and Radio Farda, which broadcast to the Middle East and aim to offer an alternative view of the news.

The recent appointment of Jeffrey Gedmin, a veteran neo-conservative polemicist, as the director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE), and a smear campaign that led to the recent resignation of Larry Register, Al-Hurra's former news director, appears to herald a turn toward more ideologically rigid programming.

As a result, viewers and listeners of US-supported media in the Middle East are being exposed to a tougher ideological line that endorses the hallmarks of the neo-conservative agenda - regime change and interventionist policies in the region.

"No group other than neo-cons is likely to figure out how to do that," wrote Muravchik in a December 2006 article in Foreign Policy magazine titled "Operation comeback", a reference to the declining influence of neo-conservatives in the Bush administration. "We are, after all, a movement whose raison d'etre was combating anti-Americanism in the United States. Who better then to combat it abroad?"

In a widely circulated e-mail memo sent to White House adviser Karl Rove last July and obtained by Inter Press Service, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, also criticized the State Department's inability to manage the information campaign advocating US foreign-policy interests in the region.

He called on Karen Hughes, under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department, to "run the information operation aimed at delegitimizing Syria, Iran and Hezbollah every day".

This year, a report authored by Ladan Archin, head of the Pentagon's Iran directorate who, in the run-up to the Iraq war, worked in the Defense Department's controversial Office of Special Plans, charged that both VOA's Persian TV service and Radio Farda, a Persian-language radio station that broadcasts from Prague and Washington, were too soft in their criticism of Iran's regime.

Archin's report, which was obtained by the McClatchy Newspapers Washington bureau, complained that while VOA's Persian TV service "often invites guests who defend the Islamic Republic's version of issues, it consistently fails to maintain a balance by inviting informed guests who represent another perspective on the same issue".

With the neo-conservative drums beating inside the Washington Beltway, the reshuffling of key positions at RFE and Al-Hurra came as no surprise.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced in February a major initiative to promote democracy in Iran, including US$50 million to increase Persian-language television broadcasts.

Congress also appropriated $21.4 million to expand VOA's Persian television programming to 12 hours a day, and $14.7 million more for Radio Farda (which means "tomorrow" in Farsi).

Early this year, Broadcasting Board of Governors chairman Kenneth Tomlinson named Gedmin, a former AEI fellow and a founding member, along with Vice President Dick Cheney and former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, of the Project for a New American Century, as RFE's director. Gedmin's new job gave him control over Radio Farda and Voice of America. Some listeners have since noted changes in the tone and content of their programming.

A June 14 VOA broadcast in Persian, for example, featured an original interview with AEI fellow and leading neo-conservative Richard Perle on the future of democracy in Iran, as well as a roundtable discussion with Shahryar Ahi, chief organizer of a conference of Iranian opposition groups in Paris. Ahi, an informal liaison during the 1970s between the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and the White House, currently works with the late shah's 45-year-old, Washington-based son, Reza Pahlavi.

Radio Farda has featured three exclusive and well-publicized interviews with Perle, Michael Rubin, yet another AEI fellow, and Pahlavi, according to Hossein Derkhshan, an Iranian blogger whose weblog, Hoder.com, is widely read.

As the Bush administration ramps up its offensive against Iran's regime through VOA and Radio Farda, neo-conservatives have also taken aim at Al-Hurra, a US-sponsored Arabic-language satellite television station that broadcasts to 22 countries across the Middle East on an annual budget of more than $70 million.

Early this month, Register resigned from Al-Hurra after less than six months on the job, in the wake of a series of public attacks against him and the station's allegedly anti-US content by neo-conservative columnist Joel Mowbray in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Mowbray complained that Register was directly responsible for most Al-Hurra broadcasts that, among other things, carried Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's December 2006 anti-Israel speech in its entirety, reported uncritically on last year's Holocaust conference in Iran, and referred to the establishment of Israel in 1948 as al-Naqba, which means "catastrophe" in Arabic.

"Our taxpayer-financed Arabic network was set up to counter Al-Jazeera, not echo it," Mowbray wrote.

Since its launch in 2004, Al-Hurra had served as the centerpiece of Washington's "aggressive post-[September 11, 2001] courtship of the Arab world" and was "fulfilling its mission" until it hired Register, according to another Mowbray column.

Yet Register's predecessor, Moufac Harb, resigned a month after a scathing report from the US Government Accountability Office found that Al-Hurra lacked "a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan" and criticized its reported audience statistics.

Register, a veteran producer and vice president who worked at CNN for 20 years, was supposed to boost the profile of Al-Hurra, win audience share and generate political debate. But his attempts to appeal to an Arab audience ostensibly went against the goals of the neo-conservative establishment in Washington.

"The conservative crusade against Register demonstrates one of the great difficulties facing any official American broadcasting in the Middle East," Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University whose blog, Abu Aardvark, on Arab media and politics is widely read in Washington, wrote in Britain's Guardian newspaper.

"To be a free and credible media outlet means allowing critics of American policy to speak and covering news that might make America look bad," he noted.
IPS