John E. Sray

The Foreign Military Studies Office publishes a piece by Army Lt. Col. John E. Sray who writes that advocates of a US intervention in Bosnia have formed a “prolific propaganda machine” to increase public support for deploying NATO forces to Bosnia. The propaganda machine is made up of a “strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations (PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the US State Department,” he says, who use “[d]iffering styles, approaches, and emphases” to advance their views. He notes how some of them have gone so far as to attack anti-interventionists as harboring “pro-Serb” or even “Nazi” sympathies. The United States’ European allies, who do not favor an intervention, are informed “from different information and a more realistic historical perspective,” he says. “They retain the advantages of more in-depth, professional, and probing journalism and better reporting from their embassies. Furthermore, they pay less attention to the constant propaganda themes emanating from the Bosniacs [Bosnian Muslim government] and their agents—the PR firms.” [Foreign Military Studies Office, 10/1995]