Day Two

Sorry to all who I had to send out another email to. Today I'm taking stock of where I am and what to move onto next. Also, many thanks to those who have donated to the Fighting Fund. I'm overwhelmed and will try and get to thank you all individually today.
I think what I have said in my Brand Republic blog is of fundamental importance a needs a wider airing so here's the link http://tinyurl.com/y4rca5s
The full blog is below:
A seminal moment in my life came when I was one of the first European business managers to visit Vietnam. At the time, I was the General Manager of Ogilvy & Mather in Thailand. Our US clients were embargoed from engaging with Vietnam and our European and Thai clients wanted to find potential business opportunities in the Vietnamese population of 70 million ‘consumers’ before their American competitors were allowed in.
I was told I would have a ‘guide’ but that really he was a Government employee who would report back on all of my movements. A spy.
At the War Museum in Saigon, in rows of glass jars, were the deformed embryos who had been conceived by Vietnamese mothers whose homes had been blanket-bombed by napalm dropped by American airplanes.
During this trip, I was constantly urging my guide that I was European, not American. He told me I did not need to do this. The Vietnamese held nothing against Americans. After all “we won the war” he claimed ”but what we couldn’t understand was that the Americans were bombing us in South Vietnam when our leaders told us they were on our side”.
Of course, the Americans could not tell the difference between a North Vietnamese enemy citizen from a South Vietnamese friendly citizen – so they decided to bomb the lot of them.
And I fear this rather ruthless military strategy may have caused the appalling, and unforgivable, suffering of the children of Fallajuh in Iraq.
We are told that we are in Iraq and Afghanistan to win over the ‘hearts and minds of the people’.
Yet when President Obama, who inherited this mess, wanted to win over the hearts and minds of Republican voters to win the US election, did he do it by sending in the troops, by shooting people or by dropping bombs? Of course he didn’t. He used sophisticated ‘new media’ techniques.
Do we, here in cosy Britain, with a General Election looming, know who votes Conservative and who votes Labour? No, of course we don’t. And I don’t think even our ruthless and unprincipled politicians will be blanket bombing us all in the hope that they will mop up the other side.
And now consider what happened when it emerged that thousands of Iranians felt that their election in Iran had been fixed. What did they do?
They used new media channels, especially Twitter, to protest at what was happening. In June 2009, the BBC reported: ‘Although there are signs that the Iranian government is trying to cut some communications with the outside world, citizen journalism appears to be thriving on the web.’
Yet when it comes to us communicating to them, we send in the tanks.
Where is the media strategy that we could develop, and media intelligence we could apply, to work alongside our brave Army soldiers?
In Iraq or Afghanistan, how on earth can these brave service men and women tell the Al Qaeda or the Taliban from the rest of the population?
Recently, I heard a radio report that an issue facing our brave servicemen and women in Afghanistan is that The Taliban disguise themselves as local people, enter a village, lay a few bombs, blow up some soldiers and then disappear back into the hills.
What if we provided the villagers (who presumably know who all The Taliban insurgents are but are too scared to say) with the media technology such as laptops and mobile phones to keep our soldiers, or select ‘middle men’ informed as to presence of our real enemies within?
And how differently would our Army be perceived if, instead of firing guns and parading around in tanks and dropping bombs as well, of course, as dying for the cause themselves, they handed out laptops and mobile phones and urged the people to listen to the reasons we are there?
Wouldn’t it help these poor people in these poor countries if we told them more clearly and more often what we are doing there and what we are fighting for – human rights, the difference between right and wrong, the rule of law, the importance of education, respect for others, ‘do as you would be done by’, tolerance, freedom of speech, liberty, democracy?
Quite apart from the lives lost, the BBC have reported that the ultimate size of the bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach $3 trillion ($3,000bn). That is a lot of second-hand laptops and mobile phones.
So, my proposal is to allocate just a small percentage of these vast costs to develop a media strategy to communicate what we are up to.
If millions of Americans and Europeans cannot understand why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan, how on earth can we expect the indigenous people to have a clue what we are doing there either?
I believe passionately that, as one of the great ‘creative’ countries of the world, we should be developing a more sophisticated approach. We have the expertise to persuade people to change the way they behave. It is called Behavioural Economics. But I do not believe we use our skills in this area to help overcome the really important things in our society or in the wider world.
Instead, we have our creative, media and communications experts using meerkats to sell insurance and a gorilla to sell chocolate.
Come on, we can do better than this.