Lieut. Commander Steve Tatham, former head of the British Royal Navy's Media Operations in the Northern Arabian Gulf, was involved in the media planning for Iraq invasion. He's written a book -- Losing Arab Hearts and Minds: The Coalition, Al Jazeera and Muslim Public Opinion -- and spoke about it Monday with Democracy Now!

An excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: What is your position in the British military exactly? If you could explain what you did around the invasion of Iraq.

STEVE TATHAM: Sure. I was the head of the Royal Navy's Media Operations in the theater of battle in the Northern Arabian Gulf, so I was responsible for the embedded war correspondents that were with the Royal Navy and for responding to the many media inquiries that went on during that war, and I was the spokesman, the pubic spokesman for the British Air Royal there.

AMY GOODMAN: Where were you based?

STEVE TATHAM: I was based with the United States Navy in Bahrain. That was our headquarters. But, of course, we were all over the northern Gulf and southern Iraq as the war progressed.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your book, Losing Arab Hearts and Minds, with a quote, a quote of the President of the United States, George Bush: "Either you're with us or with the terrorists." Can you talk about that?

STEVE TATHAM: Well, I put the quote in, because that quote seemed to apply, after a while, not just to nation states but to the world's media, and that's why I became concerned during my tenure there as Royal Navy spokesman. And what prompted the book, really, was the way that the relationship with the world's media and the Arab media, in particular, changed during the few short weeks of the invasion phase.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the British military's approach to the invasion and compare it to the US military's approach?

STEVE TATHAM: To the invasion or to the media?

AMY GOODMAN: To the invasion, in how it presented it to the media.

STEVE TATHAM: Well, in terms of the Western media, we had very similar ideas. We embedded a huge number of correspondents. The Royal Navy had thirty-one members of the Western media embedded with them; in total there were over five hundred members of the media embedded with coalition forces. And we tried to be as open and honest in our engagement with them as we possibly could within the confines of a military operation. The difficulty was that of those five hundred journalists, less than three percent of them were from the Arab world, for a whole host of reasons. And it's interesting to me, in my research, to chart the way that opinion towards the Arab media waxed and waned during that period. Initially, the United States at the very highest levels was very enthusiastic that we should engage with the Arab media. Donald Rumsfeld himself said, "I'm concerned that this might be perceived as a war against Islam." And there was lots of higher level direction to engage with the Arab media, whereas on the British side we were much more focused on the tremendous domestic battle that was going on at home. And you'll recall that there was terrible indecision and angst in the United Kingdom over our involvement in that war. As the war progressed, it's interesting the way that the United States pulled back from that engagement with the Arab media, but that the British forces, often at unit and command level, were concerned enough to reengage with the Arab media, because we recognized the importance of that, to coin that dreadful phrase, "hearts and minds."

AMY GOODMAN: Which Arab media was embedded, and why was most of the Arab media not?

STEVE TATHAM: Well, for the United Kingdom, the reason that we didn't embed, not just Arab media, but any international media, was because we were so focused on the domestic scene here in the United Kingdom and the need to win over public opinion in support of British forces. And that's quite an easy reason. We simply overlooked the Arab media. The United States was a little more thoughtful. They embedded, for example, the Al Jazeera TV channel, but for a very short period of time, a matter of hours, because during the course of those embeds, the Arab media actually found themselves to an extent -- and I’ve used the word in my book -- “demonized” by the organizations that were looking after them, and that became entirely counterproductive.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain further. How were they demonized?

STEVE TATHAM: Well, there's a fairly good quote in my book, when there's a press briefing with American forces where all of the media are invited to attend. It's a sitrep on the operational situation, but as Al Jazeera go in to that briefing, they're stopped by a US officer and said, "No, sorry, not you guys. You're a channel with a reputation." Now, perhaps it's my British sense of fair-mindedness, but it does seem paradoxical that we're inviting the rest of the world's media in, and we’re not too concerned about them, but the Arab media can't come in, because we're concerned about their reputation or about what became the new four-letter word, their “bias,” one way or the other, and that struck me as entirely counterproductive to trying to win this war of ideas and explain who we were.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was the US approach to monitoring the Arab media, or did they? Did they know what the Arab media was saying?

STEVE TATHAM: I can only go from my research, which was at a particular point of the US military media machine, which was CentCom headquarters in Doha in Qatar, so I can't speak for the wider US military. But certainly, the media monitoring that went on in Doha was pretty sparse. I remember the head of the US media operations there saying to me, "No, I didn't see any analysis, but I know they were biased."