Bush govt fell for own Iraq 'marketing': advisor

ABC Australia "Lateline" Broadcast 10/06/03

Bush govt fell for own Iraq ' marketing': advisor
According to a report in today's New York Times, President George W Bush has decided he needs a special group to supervise the reconstruction of Iraq. According to The Times, it will be known as the Iraq Stabilisation Group and it will be headed by Condoleeza Rice. Lateline talks to retired US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who now teaches on a range of issues regarding war and logistics.

Bush govt fell for own Iraq 'marketing': advisor
According to a report in today's New York Times, President George W Bush has decided he needs a special group to supervise the reconstruction of Iraq. According to The Times, it will be known as the Iraq Stabilisation Group and it will be headed by Condoleeza Rice, Mr Bush's National Security Adviser and one of his closest confidantes. It comes at a time when polls suggest Americans are not quite as confident as they once were about the President's foreign policy skills. To discuss this, Lateline talks to retired US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who now teaches on a range of issues regarding war and logistics.

Compere: Chris Clark
Reporter: Chris Clark

CHRIS CLARK: Now back to our main story tonight.

And according to a report in today's New York Times, President George W Bush has decided he needs a special group to supervise the reconstruction of Iraq.

According to The Times, it'll be known as the Iraq Stabilisation Group and it'll be headed by Condoleeza Rice, Mr Bush's National Security Adviser and one of his closest confidantes.

It comes at a time when polls suggest Americans aren't quite as confident as they once were about the President's foreign policy skills.

To discuss this, I'm joined by retired US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who now teaches on a range of issues regarding war and logistics.

Colonel Gardiner is one of those who's been advising various arms of government on how to plan for the humanitarian fallout from war.

Sam Gardiner, welcome back to Lateline.

I want to talk in detail about Iraq a little later, but first, let me ask you ... does the strike in Syria help or hinder broader American interests in Iraq?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET), US GOVERNMENT ADVISOR: Well, I think, certainly, it will hinder it.

It's very interesting to me that even some of the words that the spokesman for the Israeli Government used to connect that strike with the Americans.

I mean, he said this was a strike on the axis of terrorism.

My goodness, that sounds an awful lot like the axis of evil that the President used.

It was pre-emption that was American policy.

It has an American connection that's not gonna bode well.

CHRIS CLARK: Why doesn't it bode well?

What's wrong with it as a policy?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): Well, you know, it's very interesting that the notion ... we went into this war being assured that the American presence in Iraq, once that's stabilised and controlled, that there would be sort of an outgoing, like a rock in a pond, that all the Middle East would somehow be more stable and more peaceful.

In fact, it happens to be ... all the indications are just the opposite and this is going to make it even worse.

And I suspect that it may even cause an increase in attacks on American forces in Iraq because there will be more in the Middle East who see the Americans as being the source of evil there.

So I think that it's a very dangerous thing, it's a very dangerous escalation we've seen.

CHRIS CLARK: Put your practical soldiers hat on for a minute.

I mean, what could the Israelis have actually hoped to achieve, assuming that they got the target they were after?

What can you do against terrorism from the air?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): You can't really.

And, in fact, if you've read the reports, maybe one individual was injured.

As Israel said, it was meant to send a message, so this was not a strike that had any military significance, that had any significance about really stopping terrorism ... it was a political statement by Israel.

So you have to take it as that and then we go back to what we were saying before about the consequences of that statement and the way it was said.

CHRIS CLARK: So what do you think Washington is saying behind closed doors to the Israelis about this?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): Well, I think that the US Government is going to say that this is not a good thing.

I don't believe that the Americans actually had any role in the decision making.

I think the Americans now have to face the consequence of the Israeli decision.

So I think that they're probably being told restraint, they're probably being told that this is not helpful, but the real issue is the loss of leverage the United States now seems to have over the situation.

Certainly the lack of leverage over Arafat is an important dimension that's occurred in the past six months.

It makes it very difficult for the US.

CHRIS CLARK: Let's focus on Iraq, though, now, for a while.

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): Sure.

CHRIS CLARK: You told us on this program six months ago that it was a bit of a mess and the administration had not done enough even then about planning for what happens after the war is over.

Is this Iraq Reconstruction Group, rebuilding group, going to make a difference?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): Well, honestly, I don't think so.

My sense of what's behind this is that what the White House wants to do, probably more than anything else, is take control of the story.

That is, what they did before the war, during the war was the White House Office of Global Communications, which is a group within the White House, controlled the press both in country as well as in Washington and the Pentagon, and so I think that's really what's behind it.

I think what you will see is a better spin and you will see more senior people giving press conferences and dealing with the spin.

I think you'll see some of the same sort of actors that came out during the war beginning to emerge.

Instead of what you see, interestingly now, when an incident happens in Iraq, a sergeant gets on and says, "Here is a spokesman for the central command".

You're not going to see that anymore, I don't think.

You're going to see the White House being the spokesman for what's going on Iraq.

CHRIS CLARK: And from what you understand, is it going to be anything more than just presentation?

Is it going to make any practical difference on the ground to what's done?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): Well, you know, the what's done or the real ... you know ... the leverage is in the monies that are in the Congress right now.

The haven't been approved.

And it's going to take a while even after they are approved before we see any results.

For example, the electrical system right now is still operating below what it was before the war.

And that's about half of what they need.

The money that they've asked for in the US Congress to pay for electrical improvements still isn't going to bring it up anywhere near what it was in 1991.

So all this stuff that's going to improve the infrastructure is not going to come for a while and it's not in the magnitude that is really going to show dramatic results.

There are improvements, there have been improvement, but the kind of thing people were led to believe to expect are not going to happen for a long time.

CHRIS CLARK: Without rehashing the whole history, what was the fundamental error in Iraq?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): By the United States?

I think the fundamental error was arrogance.

They believe that it would be easy, they believe that the people of Iraq would fall over quickly, they believe that most of the government structure would be in place.

They discounted people who said things were worse than they thought it would be.

They picked up on very weak intelligence.

And, I think, maybe, probably the best way to summarise all that was they became victims of their own marketing campaign.

Beginning in about a year ago this time, the US administration began marketing the war.

They said that.

"We're going to market the war to the American people", not just to the American people -- to the Brits and to the Australians, marketing the war.

And that marketing they bought, they bought their own sales line.

They bought in the fact that this was had to be done immediately, would be easy and everything would be over and we could be out quickly.

It all seems to be wrong.

CHRIS CLARK: Having gone to war, though, what did they need in addition to what they did?

Was it more people?

More money?

Both?

Or other things?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): They needed to have been prepared for the infrastructure problems right away.

You see, it was knowable before the war, for example, what state the Iraq electrical system in.

There were no ships that were waiting in the Red Sea or in the north Arabian Gulf to come in for repairs to the electrical system.

That could have been done.

The problem that they faced ... and I actually heard this in meetings with people from the US Agency for International Development before the war ... which was the United States didn't want to go to the Congress and say, "This is going to cost a lot," before the war started.

So they would have had to do that to have these ships waiting offshore with repairs for the electrical system.

So it was not until March that the administration went to the Congress with a supplemental budget request to get the money to fix this stuff.

So they started behind and they've continued behind the needs.

It's obviously having its consequence.

CHRIS CLARK: So, if the Iraq Stabilisation Group is all about better presentation and making the case in stronger terms, who is the case being made to ... Congress, the American people, both, or other interests?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): Actually if you would use their sort of analysis, there are five groups that they see as the markets that they're after ... the US, and that includes the American people and the Congress, they're after the Arab world, they're after Europeans, they're after the Australians and they're after the rest of the world.

I mean, all of this is part of the marketing process.

They're called target audiences and they've even done target audience studies the way you would in a political campaign to identify what you need to say ... I'm very careful about this because I just finished a 4-month study about saying versus doing.

The saying has tended to dominate everything that's being done and that's what I'm afraid is going to come again ... what you say, not the results.

CHRIS CLARK: From what you've described, you make it sound as though the penny finally dropped, as it were, for George Bush.

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): Well, the pendulum certainly is changing.

You know, I was an embedded retired military person on an American television channel during the war.

And I was criticised for not being patriotic because I said there didn't seem to be enough people going in to stabilise it.

What's happened is even, you know, I now get asked to come on and make those kind of statements.

The American press feels more free to criticise and not be called unpatriotic.

And now we have presidential candidates on the Democratic side who are doing the same thing.

It's not unpatriotic to say the war didn't look good at the beginning and we've really made some mistakes.

So, what's really happening is that I don't know that George Bush has changed, but the press have changed and the American people begin to feel more openness to criticise.

CHRIS CLARK: Sam Gardiner, thanks very much for talking to us tonight on Lateline.

COLONEL SAM GARDINER (RET): Certainly.

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