Iraq So Far Holds the Edge in Propaganda Battle With West : Media: A lack of understanding for regional nuances works against the U.S.

WASHINGTON — The reference came at the end of a news bulletin over Radio Baghdad last weekend, something tossed off, offered almost casually: “The Union of Saudi Arabian People has condemned last week’s massacre by American troops against demonstrators in some towns and villages of Saudi Arabia.”

There were no other details or explanation. Nor, according to those monitoring the Iraqi government radio broadcasts, was there any earlier story of the alleged event. Listeners in Saudi Arabia were apparently supposed to be left curious. Perhaps they would ask some friend. Maybe, by word of mouth, rumors of a massacre might spread.

The “news item” represents the one form of Mideast war that has already broken out. As the massing of troops on both sides of Saudi Arabia’s border has led to a military stalemate, this has become a propaganda battle, a war of words, waged according to the rules of psychological combat, fought for hearts and minds.

The object is not human life and geographic territory but popular opinion, stabilizing and destabilizing diplomatic alliances, raising the stakes politically for the other side and generating pressure on each other’s troops.

And the result can do much to shape not so much who wins in warfare as who prevails when the combat is over.

A study of international broadcasting and press worldwide suggests that, so far, the Western allies are holding together to a degree that may surprise those skeptical of Western European and Asian resolve.

But the United States may not be succeeding so well in waging the word war in the Middle East.

First, the Iraqi government is successfully jamming American and British broadcasts in Arabic in the region, using equipment purchased from the West for its war with Iran.

Second, the United States is typically not adept at understanding the nuances of the region, a problem that former officials of the Jimmy Carter Administration admit severely limited the success of the Camp David accords in the 1970s.

Third, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s miscalculation of the Western response to his invasion of Kuwait may be more than matched by his skill at employing the code words and passions that move politics, at least among masses, in his own region.

This was strangely and powerfully demonstrated in his appearance with Western hostages Thursday on Iraqi TV, which was broadcast live on American television. Trying oddly to borrow a page from the universal politician’s handbook, the Iraqi ruler even posed with a supposedly gentle arm around the frightened and at times defiant-looking children he is holding in captivity.

The gentle if strained image--a stark contrast to the images of bound and blindfolded hostages held in Iran 10 years earlier--seemed obviously designed to demonstrate that the Iraqi leader is not the “evil” Hitlerian figure that President Bush has described.

“For all his bombast and rhetoric, Saddam Hussein is very concerned with his Arab audience, the ordinary guy with the pocket transistor who is listening for certain buzzwords,” said William Quandt, a senior policy analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “I don’t think we have a strategy for competing on that scale.”

To a degree, the United States lacks the equipment to even attempt to compete in the war of words in the Middle East. The Voice of America, for instance, reported that the Iraqi government has 100 times the kilowatt transmitter power of the United States in that region.

In the Iraqi transmitter site at Salah Uddin, one of just four of Iraq’s major transmitter locations, the Baghdad government has 16 state-of-the-art transmitters and 100 antennas. To compete, Voice of America brought up an out-of-service 100-kilowatt transmitter from West Germany that had been captured from Czechoslovakia by the Germans in World War II.

Nor, according to United States Information Agency officials and those monitoring international broadcasting for The Times, is the United States engaged in the serious psychological warfare in the region that Hussein is attempting.

The biggest effort, according to USIA officials, is that the Voice of America has increased its broadcasts in Arabic from seven hours a day to 9 3/4 hours--broadcasts that are being jammed. “We are not dropping leaflets out of airplanes,” said USIA spokeswoman Leslie Vossen.

To get its message to much of the Western world, on the other hand, the U.S. government wages the communications fight through the American press. Trying to manipulate and massage the media plays on a typical American myopia that focuses largely on domestic and congressional reaction, current and former Administration officials say.

And in part, say those familiar with communications, this is because most foreign correspondents who cover the United States do so mainly by watching TV and reading American newspapers.

“Their legwork is the equivalent of the American press coverage,” said Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein Barone Center for the study of the press at Harvard University.

In addition, “because of the technological revolution that has taken place,” Kalb said, “when you give a good picture to the American (TV) networks you are providing it to the (rest of the) world as well.”

But the more distant the culture, the less this reliance on the prestige and impact of America serves American interests, experts said. And that is perhaps truest in the Middle East.

The West in general doesn’t appreciate the “crisis of legitimacy and leadership vacuum” in the gulf region now, argued Shireen T. Hunter, deputy director of Middle East studies for the Center for Strategic International Studies. People in the Middle East “feel extremely disoriented. They feel they have lost a patron in the Soviet Union.”

It is with an understanding of this backdrop, Hunter argued, that the war of words should be played. Hussein has had an “easier job demagoguing” because there is a sense in the region that “there is no one else with the charisma and the power” to emerge as a pan-Arab leader.

Quandt, of Brookings, said he thinks President Bush should direct more of his own actions at the international audience. There has been “no major statement,” he said, “addressed to Middle Easterners.”

Earlier last week, several Bush aides argued in private White House sessions that the President was actually harming U.S. interests abroad by not paying enough attention to how his remarks would be played overseas, according to a senior Administration source. They were concerned in particular about Bush’s descriptions of Hussein as a “liar” and an “evil” force who had no regard for “human life.”

Some, such as Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, caution against reading too much into words in the Middle East.

“My experience is that what they say and what they’re thinking and doing are two different things. . . . We pay far too much attention to what Saddam Hussein says. We can’t ignore it, but it’s not always meaningful.”

But others contend that the risk of ignoring the propaganda side of war can be profound. Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that “the President could become the prisoner of his own rhetoric--the talk about Saddam Hussein being a Hitler, that this is a struggle for life and death for the survival of our civilization.”

Such rhetoric could even destabilize the more moderate governments in the region, analysts argued.

“If we get rid of Saddam Hussein but end up losing (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak and (King Hussein of Jordan) we don’t win anything,” said David Aaron, another former Carter-era National Security Council member.

Such mistakes are not unheard of.

Quandt, a Middle East specialist in the Carter White House, conceded in retrospect that the value of the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel was severely restricted because the Carter Administration failed to define how the agreement would be explained in the Middle East.

“We never really mounted a full-scale effort to (give what the agreement meant) our particular spin. And as a result, the basic definition of what Camp David meant was what Arabs heard from Israeli radio.”

By the time the Carter Administration recognized that the intended purpose of the accords was being lost in Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s redefinition of it in the Middle East, it was too late.

“Within a month . . . the Arabs had made up their minds and closed the door,” Quandt said.

A survey of the world’s media suggests that, whatever the reasons, the Western European and Japanese press are presenting the conflict in the gulf in a manner that the Bush Administration might hope for. France’s Le Monde newspaper, for instance, described the fallen Kuwaiti emir as a representative of “the exemplary case of a monarchy based on democratic principles.”

Even the Soviet newspaper Pravda last week published a report denouncing Cuban press coverage as too pro-Iraqi.

“If you read the Cuban newspapers, it sounds as though the United States and not Iraq has invaded Kuwait,” Pravda complained.

What criticism has come has seemed muted. Jock Elliott, an international radio monitor for Passport to World Band Radio, an annual guide to international broadcasting, reported that a discussion of the dispute on Australian shortwave radio was limited to questioning whether that country’s prime minister had consulted adequately with his legislature before sending troops to Saudi Arabia.

Time has seemed to weaken support for the American position. Wen Wei Po, a Chinese-language paper in Hong Kong, dismissed the idea that Iraq intended to invade Saudi Arabia, arguing that it could have done so before the American troops had mobilized if that had been its intention.

But in the Middle East, comment seems to reflect a more strained and delicate balance.

In an interview published in Le Monde, for instance, even Moroccan King Hassan II, probably as strong a friend as the United States has in Arab Africa, said that if Saddam Hussein makes a proposal that allows both sides to save face, “he has friends who are prepared to translate any peace initiative into fact. Morocco is one of those friends.”

Al Shaab, the paper of Egypt’s opposition Socialist Labor Party, said any blame against Iraq for invading Kuwait is “meaningless” now that Christian troops from the West, which it called “armies of all the arrogant,” are flocking “to hit an Arab Islamic country.”

On top of this comes the heavy propaganda campaign by Iraq in the region. Some of the effort is designed for those outside Iraq. The Times of India, for instance, quoted an unspecified Arabic paper in London alleging that the Pentagon had hired 5,000 Egyptian women as prostitutes for American troops.

Baghdad’s government-run daily Al Thawra similarly charged that the United States plans to dump nuclear waste in the Saudi desert.

USIA disinformation specialist Todd Leventhal described these as examples of false stories deliberately spread by the Iraqi government, a charge that Iraq’s embassy in the United States has denied.

Such psychological warfare may indeed be crude, but it can also be chilling. Consider this broadcast from Radio Baghdad to American troops sitting in “the burning desert”: “Your children are waiting for you. Your wife is waiting for you. You might have a lover, she is also waiting for you. Why are you killed?”