Other leaflets, dropped from American aircraft, instruct Iraqi forces how to tune into radio broadcasts that give them specific instructions in Arabic on how to surrender.

For all the combat that Americans have witnessed over the past week, there is another, subtler war being waged that will largely go unseen–the war for the hearts and minds of Iraqi soldiers and citizens. In dropping leaflets and launching radio stations as one of the largest psychological operations (or “psy-ops”–known at the Pentagon as “Information Operations”) ever, coalition forces are attempting to strike a happy balance between scaring Iraqis into surrendering and convincing Iraqis to trust them. “I view communications as even more important than the bombs and bullets,” says Anthony Pratkanis, coauthor of the 2001 book “Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion” (Worth Publishers). “If you don’t win the hearts and minds of people, you can win the military war and lose the big war.”

Pratkanis, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about the objectives of these psychological operations, how effective they are and whether they’ve evolved much since the last gulf war.

NEWSWEEK: What are psychological operations?

Anthony Pratkanis: The objectives in terms of the U.S. military are twofold. One is that you want to weaken morale of the opposition and get them to surrender as fast as possible. That’s a traditional psychological operations objective that the military knows how to do quite well. The second objective is a little more difficult and one that doesn’t come up in many wars–the United States military also has to develop trust with the people of Iraq so that they feel confident in the military, that they trust them. It serves as a platform for reconstruction and for laying democracy and also for surrendering.

These objectives seem to be in conflict with each other. How do you instill trust at the same time you weaken morale?

You’ve got the dilemma right there. Weakening morale is the part that the military has the most experience with. During the first gulf war, a typical tactic would be to leaflet an Iraqi tank unit and say “tomorrow at noon we’re going to issue an attack.” Then at 12:01, send in a guided missile and take out a tank. All the other Iraqis see this and it creates massive surrenders. Fear appeals work under certain conditions: You have to have maximum fear and feel that whatever it is can happen to you. The second thing is that the response has to be doable–a simple easy response to overcome this fear. You’ll notice on many of the leaflets they drop, there’s very clear and simple instructions on how to surrender. The reason it has to be simple is that you’ve got an incredible amount of anxiety and the cognitive capacity’s chewed up. You just want to give a very simple way to deal with that fear.

How is this being done in the current campaign?

I think the basic idea with “Shock and Awe” was to raise high fear levels. One of the problems, I think, that’s happening is that military planners wanted a lot more troops in there. And to the extent that the coalition forces are going up to Baghdad and not securing areas behind them, that reduces the fear level a little bit. The other component to surrendering is that coalition forces want to create the perception that regime change is inevitable and that there’s absolutely no reason to fight, Saddam is losing control. The more they can create the perception that he’s losing control, the better. One reason is people say “why fight, it’s over.” The other is that it’s important for developing trust. If Saddam can come back and bite them later, they’re less likely to want to surrender and less likely to turn on him.

Saddam is pretty good at this game himself.

Exactly right. Saddam is playing it right back–bringing out [Iraq’s deputy prime minister] Tariq Aziz, creating major or even minor skirmishes, showing videotape of people searching a river for downed pilots, claiming that a farmer brought them down. That’s where the communications battle is taking place right now.

So how does the United States build up trust in an environment like that?

First of all, you don’t do anything that would damage trust–for instance, military atrocities. It’s very important to get that humanitarian aid in as fast as possible. That shows control, and that shows compassion. It would have been very useful had there been a larger coalition going in, especially with countries of an Arab background. That would have really contributed to building that trust.

Can you give concrete examples of how the military is building fear on the one hand and trust on the other?

The fear, you can see that in the flyers. You can see the kind of inevitability and fear tactics being used in the simple instructions. Trust–I haven’t seen flyers on that one. The way to do that is through action such as humanitarian aid. The other area the military works on is in establishing radio stations. They usually play pop music, music that Iraqis would enjoy, and give as much information as possible to get people to listen. It’s kinda like a regular radio station–people tune in for the music or the information or whatever. Embedded in that is information on how to respond in a war situation and also some positive messages about America. That has to be done very gently.

Are there any comparisons that you can draw with the use of psy-ops in the last gulf war?

The one thing that’s a little more elaborate this time is the cell-phone campaign where the military has been contacting Iraqi leaders and Republican Guard leaders and upper echelons of Iraqi government, trying to encourage surrender. That would have been a little more difficult in 1991, and it has the potential to be very effective. You may get surrenders, you may get information that you hadn’t previously gotten, and you now have back channels open that you can communicate in. Plus, imagine you’re in the Republican Guard and everybody’s getting phone calls. If there’s any doubt about your comrade next to you, that’s going to aggravate that doubt. The more doubt you can raise in a military situation the better. In World War II they dropped leaflets saying “don’t show this leaflet to your buddy” just to create that distrust.

How effective are these psy-ops in the current situation?

It’s hard to say because we don’t have focus groups, which, if you were running an advertising campaign or any other communications campaign, you would have. There are some successes. The fact that Saddam has to come out every so often or send out Tariq Aziz and has to respond to the rumors and to the notion that his regime is collapsing, that’s very positive. And it at least shows that he’s at least worried about it. I think that the fact that the battle is going a little more difficult than some people expected in the beginning, that tends to weaken the fear appeal. The other side of this is that it’s often hard to judge the effectiveness is because what often happens is a contagion effect. There’s a lot of wearing down of the morale and a lot of psychological change inside the individual that you might not see. If you look at the example from the first Persian Gulf War, the fear appeal worked. The Iraqi troops sat there and looked at each other for a few minutes and as soon as one person made a break for the line to surrender, it was just masses after that. The fear appeal can be working. The question is does it need a trigger to create that contagion effect? That’s something that hasn’t happened yet.

Does the military prepare these psy-ops in laboratories? Is there hard science behind this?

My understanding is that it’s less labs and more basic tradition. They’ve dropped millions of leaflets–the first leaflets were dropped during World War I and it really picked up in World War II, so they’ve had extensive experience at this sort of stuff. Some of them have backfired because of language, but for the most part I’ve been very impressed with the ability of the military to conduct this part of the battle.