Better PR Training Needed, Part II

Mark Mazzetti reports:

On Tuesday, a day after an Ethiopian jet strafed the airport in Mogadishu, the capital, the State Department issued internal guidance to staff members, instructing officials to play down the invasion in public statements.

“Should the press focus on the role of Ethiopia inside Somalia,” read a copy of the guidelines that was given to The New York Times by an American official here, “emphasize that this is a distraction from the issue of dialogue between the T.F.I.’s and Islamic courts and shift the focus back to the need for dialogue.” T.F.I. is an abbreviation for the weak transitional government in Somalia.

“The press must not be allowed to make this about Ethiopia, or Ethiopia violating the territorial integrity of Somalia,” the guidance said.

Of course these talking points become less effective when put out in this form. But just remember, "Officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia."

Comments

Not too long ago I was trying to get into the foreign service (fat chance, 1 out of 15 of us passed the interview that day). But its this kind of Orwellian bullshit that makes me not mind so much.

The memo really couldnt get any more clear: steadfastly deny or downplay bad things we actually know are happening and are, in fact, supporting. Ethiopia? what? where's that? who?

Posted by Mr. Todd | December 27, 2006 11:17 AM

This is rich, from the article:

Washington was concerned about reports that the Islamists were using child soldiers and abusing Ethiopian prisoners of war.

When you do it, it's not ok; when we do it, it's ok.

Posted by Ugh | December 27, 2006 11:46 AM

At the risk of playing Devil's Advocate... isn't this a substantial improvement over the first six years of Bush foreign policy?

We've now advanced from trying to provoke a crisis with China just to give the war party something to do... to naive optimism about the ability to reforge the world in our own image at gunpoint... to "clear and hold"... to quietly supporting foreign proxies while maintaining plausible deniability.

From McKinley to Wilson to LBJ to Reagan in six years, skipping all the good parts. It's been like a remedial history course with live-action bloodshed. But at least the latter policy is the least disastrous. Third world proxy armies work on the cheap and don't come home in flag-draped coffins.

A failed state in Somalia, governed by Islamist warlords, is not in anyone's best interest except the Jihadists. A regional conflagration in the Horn of Africa is not in anyone's best interest except for gun smugglers and defense contractors. But if Ethiopian troops can successfully stand up the UN-approved Somali government without an obvious American presence, and then withdraw peacefully, this scenario (however unlikely) is probably the best possible outcome.

I don't know enough about the situation to judge whether this is the right US policy toward Somalia. But at the very least, the Bush Administration appears to be test-driving a new approach to foreign policy that leaves a smaller American footprint in our military actions against Islamists.

It's a start.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | December 27, 2006 12:03 PM

That said, I would not dispute the need for better PR training. I think the State Department's approach to this conflict could best be termed "implausible deniability."

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | December 27, 2006 12:10 PM

LaFollette Progressive, you're certainly right that an Islamist Somalia isn't in our interest. But the Bush administration's backing of Ethiopia, while perhaps not so overtly moronic as previous policies, is still plenty moronic. Backing an Ethiopian invasion is going to make the scenario of an unified Islamist Somalia more likely. To overgeneralize, Somalis and Ethiopians revile each other for the most part. The two countries fought wars over the Ogaden, the Somali-populated part of Ethiopia, as well as proxy wars throughout the Cold War. If there's anything that will rally Somalis around the CIC (which has already managed to unite Somalis to a degree that would have seemed fanciful a few years ago), its an Ethiopian invasion. Moreover, the invasion will completely discredit the UN-backed government as a tool of Ethiopia, wasting years of diplomatic efforts to bring Somalia back into the fold.

as i've said in a previous comment, backing Ethiopia is merely taking the same failed policy, backing Mogadishu warlords against the CIC, to the next level. As soon as Somalis found out the CIA was backing them, support collapsed virtually overnight. This does not bode well for the internationally recognized Somali government.

Of course everything will go great at first, Ethiopia's got all the firepower, theyll roll in, install a bunch of Chalabis, pat themselves on the back, etc. If only there was a pertinent example of how such short-sighted policies can backfire, leading to virtually the opposite outcome that one had hoped for. o wait.

Posted by Mr. Todd | December 27, 2006 1:18 PM

Is it the internal guidance itself that you think is inept? Or is the PR training failure you have in mind manifested in the undisciplined leak of the guidance to the press? Of course a media strategy doesn't work if you give the New York Times the playbook!

Posted by Dan Kervick | December 27, 2006 1:31 PM

Is it the internal guidance itself that you think is inept? Or is the PR training failure you have in mind manifested in the undisciplined leak of the guidance to the press? Of course a media strategy doesn't work if you give the New York Times the playbook!

This was my reaction to the post too. Spin doesn't work, usually, if you go out and tell everyone "this is how we plan to spin".

Posted by Al | December 27, 2006 1:42 PM

Judging from fairly reliable news sources such as the PBS Newshour, the U.S. is backing an Ethiopian dictator's invasion of Somalia to support a U.N. backed government of unelected, feeble and corrupt warlords, that is threatened by a rebel government of Islamic moderates that have broad popular support. Somali experts say that the rebel government wants to reduce corruption and repair the country. The U.S. government says that rebel government is infested by Al Queda terrorists, without giving any evidence-- a view that is disputed by everyone else who has reliable knowledge about the rebel government.

It looks as if the U.S. is sticking to tradition -- the same tradition that has guided our actions in Latin America and South East Asia.

Posted by Peter Eggenberger | December 27, 2006 2:01 PM

Paper,

The US isn't backing the Ethiopian invasion. The Ethiopian invasion is likely to increase, rather than decrease, popular support for the Islamists.

The TFG contains no warlords. Rather, it was a power-sharing arrangement worked out between clan leaders. The clan is the basic element of Somali society, and there is no way an interim government could ignore this fact. The warlords, what's left of them, have been marginalized by the TFG and the Islamists.

The Courts do contain some "moderates" and some "hardliners," but it's important to remember that these terms are relative to the situation in Somalia. ICG did a great report on this a year or two ago, titled, I think, "Understanding Somalia's Islamists." They do not have broad popular support. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why they have tried repeatedly to provoke Ethiopia into a war (not that it would have taken all that much in any regard) - because being seen as the vanguard of a struggle against a hated enemy is a great way to bolster support for an unpopular cause. Somali Islam is very moderate - most women don't veil, both men and women serve as religious authorities, etc etc etc. The Islamists, on average, are more conservative than this and are popular only so far as they can fight external enemies.

Again, the US is not using proxy forces to fight the Islamists. Just a week or two ago, the US pushed for and got a UNSC resolution on a regional peacekeeping force - one which excluded Ethiopia - to create the buffer necessary for both sides to negotiate in good faith. The TFG was too weak to do so - every negotiated agreement was quickly violated by the Courts. If the TFG were composed of warlords, don't you think they'd be fighting back a little harder?

The Courts, or at least some elements of the Courts (it's difficult to talk about such a diverse group as a unitary entity) are suspected of harboring elements of the al Qa'ida cell responsible for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The ICG, no friend to the US government, has made this claim as well.

Ordinarily, I agree with Matt roughly 99% of the time, and he's a source of valuable insight. But this time, he's wrong - he's wrong because he just isn't getting the facts. This is one time when I actually know more than he does, and can say that what you're getting from the media is skewed horribly because they don't really know what's going on, either. It's a complicated situation that people want to paper over with cliches and elementary frameworks. And yet, when I come in here and say that, people wonder if I'm in fact a paid agent of the US government - as if underpaid and overworked civil servants didn't have anything better to do with their time. It's funny - it's the same sort of thing I get when I criticize conservatives on their blogs - "you and every other liberal commenter must be the same person, and a paid agent of some guy named 'The Left'." I guess I expected better from Matt's readership, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. It's the nature of blogging, isn't it? Latch onto a few scraps of information, fit them into an ideological framework, and then congratulate each other on how right you are and how awful your opponents are. Ugh.

Posted by Anon | December 27, 2006 3:14 PM

Thank you P Eggenberger for bringing forth the true facts of the situation which should be fairly obvious from any sane and sensible reading of reports coming out of East Africa by the international press over the past year or so.

The frightening thing is how quickly folks writing on this site and elsewhere, who should have become chastened by the propaganda war over Iraq, have fallen for the delusional strategy of the Bush regime, in pursuing the so-called “war on terror”, of backing corrupt, autocratic regimes with a notorious record against human rights, like the Meles Zenawi government of Ethiopia, ostensibly to get rid of so-called “Islamic extremists.”

It seems that we never learn the lessons of our history and so are destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Posted by Jim Dandy | December 27, 2006 3:31 PM

Anon: Look, I'm not accusing you of secretly being anyone. Obviously, though, it would be easier to trust the assertion that I should believe you and regard other sources of information (newspapers, etc.) as unreliable if I . . . knew who you were and why you're someone whose take on these matters should be trusted. If you're not comfortable commenting 'nymously, but really do have crucial insights into the situation, send me an email or something and we can talk privately.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | December 27, 2006 4:12 PM

Everything in the spurious claims mounted by "Anon" is refuted in today's report by Stephanie McCrummen, a highly reliable reporter in the field for the Washington Post Foreign Service.

For instance, she writes:

"Ethiopia and the United States have accused the Courts movement of harboring terrorists, a charge the organization has denied. Opposition groups in Ethiopia have said Meles, who supplies intelligence to the United States on Somalia, has exaggerated the terrorism claim to win U.S. support as his increasingly authoritarian government stands accused of human rights violations.
"The United States and Ethiopia have been of one mind that a complete takeover of Somalia by the Islamic Courts is unacceptable, because of fears that the country could become a base for Muslim extremists.
"Yet U.S. policy in Somalia has been widely criticized for having the opposite of its intended effect, often encouraging the expansion of the Courts movement.
"This year, the United States supported warlords who called themselves an "anti-terrorism" coalition. The warlords generally bribed and terrorized ordinary Somalis, who came to despise them. The Islamic Courts came to power as an alternative to the hated warlords, establishing order based on Islamic law village by village and earning widespread support from beleaguered Somalis tired of 15 years of near-anarchy."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/26/AR2006122600285.html

In order to have any credibility at all, this "Anon" must declare equally impeccable sources for the claims being made.

Posted by Jim Dandy | December 27, 2006 11:21 PM

In order to have any credibility at all, this "Anon" must declare equally impeccable sources for the claims being made.

anon needs to prove a massive conspiracy involving the State Dept, the Pentagon, and the Bush administration who would be telling everyone lies about their intentions and goals.

Posted by Ed Marshall | December 28, 2006 12:11 AM