"Understanding the Iran Crisis" - Testimony at House Committee on Foreign Affairs
By S. Enders Wimbush
January 31, 2007
. . .If we wish to avoid having to confront Iran militarily at some point in the foreseeable future, we need to unleash other influences and instruments that can help shape Iran’s emerging landscape in ways that give Iranians a chance to step back, rethink their current trajectories, constrain the radicals among them, and recalibrate their strategies in the direction of rejoining the world community. I strongly believe that this is possible by going directly to Iran’s people, especially its young educated men and women, its intellectuals, its labor unions and business community, and other key agents of change. Yet while these diverse groups may share visions of pushing the ruling mullahs into retirement, to date little critical mass has developed amongst them that might eventually coalesce to make this happen.
During the Cold War, we faced similar obstacles in Eastern Europe and the USSR, where unconventional ideas and intense debate were considered offenses against the state. Into this void of ideas, we directed America’s powerful international broadcasting stations, now acknowledged by nearly everyone as perhaps the most important influence in shaping and accelerating change in the East. Iran is easily as resonant a milieu for idea-induced change as, say, Poland or Russia, and perhaps more so, but unfortunately both the war of ideas and the instruments that gave them life have been largely ignored by this administration. There is no better illustration of this neglect than America’s principal broadcast service to Iran, Radio Farda, which the Broadcasting Board of Governors describes as “a youth-oriented 24/7 Persian-language radio service that broadcasts political, social, and economic news, information, public affairs, and music to Iran.”
Unfortunately, the youth orientation of Radio Farda means that broadcasts are mostly music. Media consultant Bert Kleinman, the architect of musical Radio Farda, insists in a recent AP story that Iran’s large under-30 demographic offers the best opportunity for fomenting change in Iran. Kleinman notes that if you want to reach young people anywhere in the world, “this is how you do it.” This will come as a surprise to the critically important youth of Poland under Communism in the 1960s and 1970s, a youth bubble that was larger in fact than Iran’s today. Radio Free Europe gave them a little music, but it also enlivened their critical thinking with analysis and context—history, culture, religion, economics, law, human rights, labor, and cross-reporting from many perspectives—mostly missing from today’s Radio Farda broadcasts. Radio Liberty’s broadcasts to the former USSR never used music yet boasted a substantial youth audience.
Radio Farda’s confusion is elementary. Unfortunately, the same confusion increasingly infects most of our broadcast efforts throughout the world. The confusion is between public diplomacy—which features telling America’s story and advocating for America’s positions—and strategic communications, which is very different. The VOA, the official voice of the U.S. Government, has always been part of the public diplomacy architecture, but the Radio Frees, better known as “surrogate” radio stations, have not. Their mission is fundamentally different. While public diplomacy is all about “us,” the surrogate Radios are all about “them.” The surrogate radios were successful during the Cold War because they were less concerned with how or why people dislike us or with advocating for America than in spurring intelligent listeners to think about the costs to their nation of runaway ideologies and isolation from critical globalizing trends. They were intended to stir debate within societies like Iran in ways that weaken the ability of oppressive regimes to monopolize information and ideas and, hence, power.
What eventually became Radio Farda was created for exactly this purpose. In the un-adopted Radio Free Iran Act of 1995, Congress called for additional broadcasts to further “the open communication of accurate information and ideas about Iran to the people of Iran.” The language of the bill is crystal clear in its intent to create a new “surrogate” broadcast entity to compliment existing broadcasts to Iran from the VOA. In 1998 Congress appropriated $4 million for a Radio Free Iran, to be run by RFE/RL, the nation’s premier “surrogate” broadcaster. At no point did the Congress envision or approve creating another public diplomacy instrument that focused on America and pumped out popular music.
In the beginning, this worked well. Radio Free Iran, renamed Radio Azadi, was run by RFE/RL as a real surrogate station until 2002. It was an effective operation. By 2002, after only four years of operation, Azadi had become the most popular foreign broadcaster to Iran, outpacing the better-known BBC and VOA in the size of its elite audience. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that even current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a regular listener—reminiscent of the success of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in drawing in most of the critical elites in their broadcast areas during the Cold War.) But in 2002, the station was abruptly morphed into Radio Farda, and the programming changes that transformed it from the successful surrogate service aimed at critical elites and the populations that support them, as Congress had envisioned, to an airy music station aimed at kids took place.
Today, what passes for broadcast strategy at Radio Farda features an indiscriminant audience-maximizing formula that measures success by the number of listeners who tune in, not by the quality of those listeners or by the critical positions of influence and authority they occupy. If that metric had been applied to Radio Liberty, it would have been abolished before it came into its own in the 1970s, becoming a powerful instrument of change. This dumbing down respects the needs and intelligence of neither the traditional change agents nor critical younger audiences, especially Iran’s powerful student movement. Apparently distrustful that Iranians can handle anything but “news products,” many of which they already receive from other sources—and only if enticed to listen with feel-good music—Radio Farda offers little other substantive programming.
In Radio Farda’s defense, its manager insists in the AP story I cited earlier that Iranians will tune Radio Farda out if it ceases to be “believable.” Credibility is indeed the currency of strategic communications, which is why substituting music for powerful ideas is so confused. Any sentient Iranian can see that it’s the music that lacks credibility, that it’s a trick, a gimmick. They also see that filling up the airwaves with Britney Spears and Shania Twain says that America has no ideas of value and that we don’t trust Iranian listeners to distinguish intelligent debate from pop culture pap. What else could they conclude but the obvious: America is just trying to make us like them, it’s public diplomacy all over again. A far better and tested strategy would be to level with them, and help them level with each other.
The notion that we must not offend Radio Farda’s Iranian listeners throws that station’s reason for existing into question. As you know better than most, Mr. Chairman, while stressing balance, the Radios have never been neutral. To the contrary, they were created to shape political landscapes in ways that favor our desired outcomes, and our listeners have always known it. Calling for the overthrow of any regime has never been permitted by broadcast guidelines, and shouldn’t be. But as the Cold War experience demonstrated beyond question, the Radios can contribute momentum towards political change by stimulating and encouraging the right audience.
During the Cold War, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks and many others tuned in to RFE/RL to receive ideas they hungered for and to hear support for unpopular, often dangerous, platforms for change. These audiences started small, grew large, and eventually encompassed most critical elites. Iran, with a strong cohort of educated young people, including the most educated women in the Middle East, is probably a more resonant milieu than Russia ever was. Yet, while the Russians received serious analysis, commentary, context—all from within their society—and the views of others elsewhere in the world grappling with similar challenges, Iranians get Madonna.
Mr. Chairman, shielding Iranians with pop music from a reality they already understand is a losing strategy. Radio Farda should scrub much of the music and replace it with serious programming. It should not function simply as another news organization in an increasingly globalized information universe. Indeed, Iran, like most of the Middle East, is awash in news from hundreds of sources. What Iranians lack is internally generated discussion and debate on what the news means and how they should incorporate that knowledge into their view of themselves and the world.
This approach may draw a smaller audience, at least in the beginning, but it will be an audience that counts for something.
Mr. Chairman, public diplomacy—that is, telling America’s story and emphasizing American values—will not lure Iran back from the nuclear threshold. Strategic broadcasting by the Radios —that is, seeding Iran with ideas from within Iran and stimulating debate—on the airwaves, on the Internet, and on emerging technologies—is a far more powerful and proven weapon. Shielding Iranians with pop music from a reality they already understand is a losing strategy, but it is the strategy Radio Farda has adopted. My recommendation, Mr. Chairman, is simple. Radio Farda should scrub its broadcasting of music and replace it with serious programming. This approach may draw a smaller audience, at least in the beginning, but it will be an audience that counts for something. Moreover—and I can’t stress this strongly enough—we know how to organize and implement such a strategy. We have done it before, and we are good at it. But we are not doing it now. Although not the subject of this hearing, I recommend taking a similar hard look at the extremely expensive BBG Arabic-language investments Al Hurra TV and Radio Sawa.
The knowledge and the art of strategic communications is being lost, nearly all its traditional instruments, including Radio Farda, are currently degraded, their successful strategies have been polluted and discarded, and their missions are badly garbled. Added to this, we are in late innings with Iran. It is with a sense of some urgency, therefore, that I urge you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, to make fixing America’s strategic communications a top priority.
