فصلنامه مطالعات عملیات روانی
پیاپی 33 (تابستان 1391)

The impact of cyber PSYOP on future wars has found more clarity and its various dimensions and types have been observed in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq. If these wars are considered as a criterion, future wars will have personal, deceptive and civil-military nature and will involve forces from all over the world. All these issues will be managed and tackled by cyber elements. This paper analyzes cyber PSYOP as a currently-evolving phenomenon and examines it in the context of the Zionist regime’s attacks against Hezbollah. It also describes the types and content of cyber PSYOP and evaluates its impact on improving the infiltrative operations on both sides of the battle.

The Islamic Revolution has challenged the interests of global powers due to its anti-hegemonic nature; hence, it has come under their massive military, security, cultural and psychological attacks. For instance, they have attempted to create artificial crises and civil turmoil in some cities during the last few years. Therefore, since creation of crisis and turmoil in light of ethnic, religious, political and factional differences is high in the enemy’s agenda, it is of great importance to see how to confront this plot. Under a crisis situation, it is of great importance for managers to know how to inform, psychologically influence, persuade, guide anddirect the stakeholders, in short how to influence the public opinion in order to generate positive or negative consequences, utilizing their management skills and the media. In fact, the essential question to be raised in this regard is: What role do the media, in visual, auditory or printed forms, play in creating security and managing urban crises? The present case study is focused on the role the media, particularly the press and the satellites, played in aggravating the July 8th, 1999 riots in Iran.

Today, the media are considered to be among the main soft war tools. Advanced technologies impose themselves on human communities without considering the legal and ethical rules and regulations. Meanwhile, satellite networks make their way into societies crossing all borders and ignoring all kinds of restraints. This phenomenon has become a chief soft threat instrument particularly in political and cultural arenas. Satellite networks are of political, cultural, social, religious and economic types. The present papers deals with the importance of equipping and utilizing satellite networks as a modern global communications mechanism, on the one hand, and confronting these networks as means to help prevent the likely cultural, political and technical consequences and threats, on the other.

Public diplomacy is of great important in today’s world which has found a new structure based on globalized information. Meanwhile, the revolution which has taken place in the field of information and cyber technologies has made world nationsincluding the Americans employ modern cyber technologies along with conventional public diplomacy strategies in order to fulfill their foreign policies more successfully because in the 21st century, which is named cyber era, countries compete with each other in a network warfare arena and public diplomacy has found a novel nature, tools, techniques and methods. Furthermore, the U.S. follows the objectives of cultural imperialism under the cover of public diplomacy and employs cyber warfare techniques to overthrow governments. In fact, cyber warfare serves as a modern public diplomacy mechanism of the U.S. which is utilized to impair the legitimacy of political systems and the unity, integrity and confidence of nations. Following this strategy and disrupting the vital and cyber infrastructures of the target nations, they can decrease people’s satisfaction with the efficacy of the political systems and creating legitimacy crisis for them, they can pave the way for overthrowing them without resorting to military strategies. Therefore, we can say that, today, cyber warfare, as one of the modern public diplomacy strategies, is utilized to manipulate the minds and hearts of the target audiences in line with the U.S. foreign policies. In this context, the present paper seeks to answer the following main question: How has the information and cyber revolution served the U.S. public diplomacy and cultural imperialism to overthrow the rival governments? To answer this question, besides drawing on the theories dealing with the U.S. public diplomacy and its relationship with cultural imperialism, it has been hypothesized that using public diplomacy strategies in cyberspace and disrupting the vital infrastructures of nations, the U.S. targets vision, insight, understanding, trust and satisfaction of people and the legitimacy of the political system by making use of persuasion techniques.

Since the late 2010, some movements have arisen in North Africa and the Arab world. In some counties such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, these movements have led to revolutions and in some others like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia they are still going on. This issue has drawn the attention of many experts and analysts inside and outside the region. Specialists have mentioned various causal factors for these domino-like developments including the role of modern media, nations’ movement towards the globalization process,; the existing social and class gaps in Arabic countries, dictatorship and authoritarianism ruling over the Arab world, the beginning of Arabs’ seeking democracy, the rise of the wave of Islamic awakening due to people’s dissatisfaction with the marginalization of religion, violation of their religious rights by the rulers and dysfunctional political systems. What these movements have in common is the role that modern electronic media, i.e. satellites and electronic virtual environments such as social networks, cell phone messages,. .. , have played in their inception. Though the media may not be considered the main cause of a revolution, they have been mentioned as one of the important factors affecting the occurrence of these revolutions. The role these media played in informing and organizing people was so influential that titles such as media revolution, laptop revolution, Facebook revolution and Twitter revolution,. .. are used to refer to some of these revolutions. Surveying some of these revolutions, this paper attempts to examine the role modern media played in their inception.

The Middle East Islamic awakening developments influenced by the universal norms of the Islamic Revolution of Iran have significant features and dimensions. One of the noteworthy issues related to the inception and expansion of the developments in the Arabic Middle East is the role of modern media, the Internet, and virtual and social networks. The role of the media, particularly social networks, in these rapid revolutionary developments in the region is undeniable. The media, the Internet, and virtual and social networks raised the information among different groups of people, particularly the youth, and facilitated and accelerated the developments in the region. Directing public opinion in social networks took place in two steps: creation of networks in cyberspace and creation of networks and partnership in real space. This paper evaluates the role of the media and social networks in the developments in the Arabic Middle East focusing on Egypt and Tunisia. In fact, the paper seeks to explore the impact of social networks on the political and social developments in Egypt and Tunisia. Our hypothesis is that social networks weakened the authority of the totalitarian and unpopular Arabic governments and expansion of public movements in Egypt and Tunisia. In general, it can be pointed out that globalization and virtual media left huge impacts on the developments in the countries in North Africa and the Arabic Middle East.

Beginning with the Crusades, it was considered necessary to pay attention to Islam in the West. As time passed and as a result of the changes, religion was not considered as a part of the political and social life in the Western society. As an outcome of this process, a gap was created in the society. Following the Islamic Revolution of Iran, signs of reviving religion were observed but the West considered this revival a threat from the Muslim world. The age of enlightenment, since its inception, and the ideologies arising from it such as liberalism have imposed irreparable harms on moral and spiritual values and human virtues and created major crises in the world. On the other hand, the influence of Islam and people’s inclination toward religious and spiritual messages have made Western governments anxious. Following the disintegration of communism, the West considered Islam its major challenge and raising the subject of the clash of rival civilizations, it regarded the confrontation between religious and secular values as the historical rivalry between Islam and Christianity. After the Sept. 11, 2001 incident, Islam was introduced as the main source of terrorism. Western people believe that those who caused the Sept. 11, 2001 incident had lived in the West for months and even years but had not learned anything from the Western civilization and had merely retrained their anger. Therefore, they say, it is wrong to believe that Muslims are changeable since they still insist on such terms as jihad, murder and martyrdom.

The change in the political and security discourse after the Cold War has changed the concept of power too. Today, hard confrontation approaches have been replaced with soft approaches in the international political system. Soft power is currently considered an influential element and all countries would like others to have a positive attitude toward them; hence, they attempt to reinforce this positive image and avert formation of any negative attitude. Therefore, the measures taken by the U.S. against the Islamic Republic of Iran include a range of political, economic, security, social and psychological pressures which are aimed at blocking the expansion of Iran’s influence, containing Iran, changing Iran’s behavior and transforming the political system of the Islamic Republic of Iran. To provide a sound understanding of the U.S. soft power against the Islamic Republic of Iran, this paper defines soft power and examines the practical features, strategies, political objectives and exploitation tactics of the U.S. soft power against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Our findings indicate that the U.S. has become an international decision maker in the international arena through exerting increased pressure by state and non-state actors and by infiltrating into international institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Security Council and economic institutions such as the World Trade Organization. The findings also suggest that the U.S. soft power may be utilized to expand its interests and establish the U.S.- desired global norms and create international coalition against Iran.