HOW HE SEES IT Media struggles jeopardize the fight

By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
Can America win a sustained war in this media age? The U.S. military doesn't seem to be too sure.
According to a Pentagon report released earlier this month, "Victory in the long war ultimately depends on strategic communication." The "long war," of course, is the global war on terror, which began in 2001.
For his part, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld doesn't offer a whole lot of hope. "Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age," he declared in a speech last week, "but for the most part, we -- our country, our government -- has not adapted." Those words are worth pausing over. Can it really be true that Al-Qaida is beating Uncle Sam at the communications/propaganda game? Are Arabs really better at getting their message out?
Yes, according to Rumsfeld. In his speech, and in a column that ran in Monday's Vindicator, Rumsfeld cited last year's Newsweek story about the Quran-flushing at Guantanamo, since retracted, as a case study of the bad guys' getting the jump on the good guys: "Once it was published in a weekly newsmagazine, it was posted on Web sites, sent in e-mails and repeated on satellite television and radio stations for days, before the facts could be discovered." Part of the problem, Rumsfeld continued, is that the U.S. government "tends to be reactive, rather than proactive -- and it still operates, for the most part, on an eight-hour, five-days-a-week basis, while world events, and our enemies, are operating 24/7, across every time zone." It's a little hard to believe that the Pentagon, which proposes to spend $439 billion next year (not counting the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), and the rest of the federal government have really let themselves be outwitted by folks operating from safe houses and caves.
But the "long war" is more complicated than a struggle between spin doctors, for two reasons. First, the world's media are fixated on America's faults, and this makes the enemy's task easier. As Rumsfeld observed, the "vast quantity of column inches and hours of television devoted to the allegations of unauthorized detainee mistreatment at Abu Ghraib" outweighs the coverage devoted to, say, Saddam Hussein's atrocities.
War zone
The defense chief has a point, though of course Saddam never claimed to be anything more than a tyrant, while the Americans proclaimed themselves to be champions of human rights -- a high standard to live by when operating in a war zone.
And the media problem, worldwide, isn't getting any better. Here's Variety's report on a new British docudrama: "Two years ago, Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul were wearing orange suits as the 'guests' of the U.S. Marine Corps at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay. Last week they walked Berlin's red carpet to attend the world premiere of 'The Road to Guantanamo.'" Any guesses about the ideological slant of that movie?
The second complicating factor is Arab and Muslim public opinion. Let's be honest: Were we really greeted as liberators in Afghanistan and Iraq? And if so, for how long? One recent poll found that 88 percent of Sunnis in Iraq support deadly attacks on American troops. And 41 percent of the Iraqi Shia favor anti-American violence, too. Indeed, the new Shia-dominated government seems to be closer to Iran than to the United States.
Meanwhile, the Muslim world is aflame over the Muhammad-mocking cartoons. Protests against Denmark seem to have morphed into the same-old-same-old attacks on the United States; on Sunday, Muslim militants tried to storm the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia.
It's possible, of course, that there's a pro-American Muslim "silent majority" out there. But the only place in the Arab world to hold free elections of late was the Palestinian territories; the balloting was won by Hamas -- not fans of ours.
No wonder Rumsfeld is so gloomy. He may feel that his Pentagon has mastered the battlefield, but by his own stark admission, we are mostly clueless about the planetary mindscape, where the war will be won -- or lost.
X Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service