To those who watched the American-led war on Iraq unfold in the spring of 2003, the fighting in most cases seemed distant and confused. No matter which television station one watched or which internet site one monitored, it was very difficult to gain a clear understanding of the events taking place during the American march to Baghdad. Reporters and bloggers could only offer their own limited perspective of the events, and watching and listening to multiple sources (which often contradicted one another) made for a cacophony of noise from which it was very difficult to gain a clear understanding of the situation in Iraq and within the collation military efforts.

For the officers and soldiers of the U.S. military, by contrast, the war made sense. The fog of war was dense at times, sure, but the way the war was fought – by armored and infantry units backed by air support and commando operations – was entirely logical and in keeping with the warfighting doctrine developed by the U.S. military since the end of the Second World War. The Iraqis played by the rules, and they lost to a U.S.-led military machine far more accomplished at large-scale maneuver warfare than its nearest rivals, much less Saddam Hussein’s weakened army.

The years that have followed, by contrast, have been fairly confusing for the U.S. military. It took a full three years for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to adopt the kinds of population-centric counter-insurgency tactics that have helped create a little breathing room for U.S.-led forces and Iraq’s politicians in 2007.[1] During that time, the “enemy” quite often refused, as successful guerrillas usually do, to play by the established rules of maneuver warfare. These same guerrillas also proved more than capable in manipulating the imagery of war to further their political aims, causing General David Petraeus’s chief counter-insurgency strategist to remark that the enemy’s efforts could all to often be described as “armed propaganda” campaigns.[2] Not only did the U.S. military have little idea how to fight a proper counter-insurgency campaign in 2003, it also had no real conception of information operations and how such operations fit into the strategy of both the insurgents and the U.S.-led coalition.

Until recently, complains U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the authors of its new counter-insurgency field manual adopted in 2006, information operations was a field of battle completely abandoned to the enemy. The U.S. knew only how to engage the enemy in physical battle – it had no plan to exploit or explain such operations in the public sphere. When U.S. forces clashed with the Taliban in Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban contacted Arabic-language satellite channels immediately following the clash to make claims of civilian casualties and, in short, spin the battle in their favor. The U.S. public relations officers, by contrast, valued caution over timeliness and often waited days before issuing a statement confirming or denying the casualties.

What is worse, from the perspective of the U.S. military is that while the ponderous American defense bureaucracy has been slow off the mark, the enemy – the insurgent groups against which the U.S. has fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan – have proved more than proficient at the art of propaganda, media manipulation and shaping the way operations and events are perceived by enemy, friendly and neutral populations. In the same way, though the U.S. and its allies talk of the “comprehensive approach,” it is more often than not groups like Hizbullah and Jaish al-Mahdi who best understand military operations as part of a combined effort incorporating “political, military, diplomatic, economic and strategic communication” efforts.

To a large degree, though, the U.S. military cannot be blamed for being caught off-guard by their enemy’s sophistication in managing the way battles and campaigns are perceived. In the past two decades, insurgent, terrorist, and guerrilla groups in the Middle East have grown exponentially more sophisticated in the way they use the media available to them in order to affect the way battles are perceived. From the perspective of someone who studies military innovation, it is a remarkable achievement.

This paper focuses on the evolution of insurgent media operations in support of political-military objectives. Groups like the Taliban and Hizbullah did not start off, from the beginning, as sophisticated manipulators of popular perception. They learned, over time, how to shape the way in which military operations are perceived, and in the process, have taught Western militaries a valuable lesson in the nature of war itself.

Hizbullah and al-Manar

The history of contemporary information operations begins with Hizbullah. In 1990, when the Lebanese Civil War finally ended after 15 years of brutal fighting, the first television station to earn a license from the Lebanese government was al-Manar, Hizbullah’s own outlet.[3] The way in which Hizbullah used al-Manar, however, was both innovative and reflected a careful study of their adversary, Israel, against whom they fought for control of southern Lebanon until the Israeli withdrawal in 2000.

One of the founders of al-Manar, Nasser Akhdar, explained to researchers Dina Matar and Farah Dakhlallah that the primary concern of al-Manar was to communicate “the daily realities of the occupation of South Lebanon to Lebanese society and the heroic acts of resistance to the occupation in an effort to bolster the resilience of the Community of the Resistance in Lebanon.”[4] Accordingly, 40 per cent of al-Manar’s daily output in the 1990s was devoted to its coverage of events in southern Lebanon and insurgent attacks on Israel and its Lebanese allies.[5]

Hizbullah soon discovered, though, that its broadcasts had an effect not just on the Lebanese population but on the Israelis as well. “On the field, we hit one Israeli soldier,” one Hizbullah official explained. “But a tape of him crying for help affects thousands of Israelis … we realized the impact of our amateur work on the morale of the Israelis.”[6] 

Hizbullah, which employs a small army of Hebrew linguists to monitor the Israeli media, soon learned that for Israeli news outlets, broadcasting images of dead or dying Israeli soldiers was taboo. If a Lebanese outlet were to broadcast such images, though, and those images were then picked up by the international news wire services; the taboo was lifted. The cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and Israeli outlets began to re-broadcast the images most Israelis could watch anyway.

Consequently, Hizbullah invested much effort and blood in videotaping their attacks on Israeli columns and positions. As soon as the attack had taken place, the cameramen would race back to Beirut to make sure footage of the attack went up on al-Manar in time for the next news cycle. Footage of these attacks had a galvanizing effect on a portion of the Israeli population but also fueled the growing movement against the war and occupation in Israel.

Timur Goksel, the UN’s longtime spokesman in southern Lebanon, explained in 1993 that “Hizbullah knows they’re not going to win the war on the battlefield, so they’re not taking on Israel’s military might on the ground. They’re taking on the Israelis psychologically.”[7]

Hizbullah pressed their advantage. They understood, correctly, that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon was only possible so long as it was tolerated by the Israeli populace. Consequently, much of Hizbullah’s propaganda was not just aimed at the Lebanese population but at Israelis as well. One of al-Manar’s daily news broadcasts, even today, is in Hebrew. During the occupation, Hizbullah ran a constantly updated photo gallery of Israeli casualties with the phrase “Who’s Next?” written in Hebrew at the end.[8] “We aren’t doing this to show off,” said one Hizbullah official “We want to get into every [Israeli’s] mind and affect Israeli public opinion.”[9]

When the occupation finally ended in 2000 as Israel and its Lebanese allies retreated back behind the “Blue Line” in humiliating and chaotic fashion, one UN official was moved to remark that “75% of Hizbullah’s war against Israel was those videotapes.”[10]

America in Iraq and Afghanistan

When the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were writing the new counter-insurgency manual currently in use in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors of the manual borrowed – as an example of proper counter-insurgency operations – the operational design used by the 1^st Marine Division under the command of then-Major General James Mattis in 2004. The motto of the 1^st Marine Division under Mattis, one of the most respected counter-insurgency practitioners in the U.S. military, borrowed heavily from the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.