Investigating and elucidating the psychological warfare strategies in the Sacred Defense from Imam Khomeini’s (May God bless his soul) viewpoint

Psychological warfare is the systematic and precise use of propaganda and other means to influence the thoughts and behaviors of different groups of allies and adversaries to achieve objectives. With the onset of the imposed war, the Western media empire and its regional proxies made extensive efforts to conduct psychological warfare to affect the Iranian people and government. Imam Khomeini (May God bless his soul) delivered various speeches and messages to counteract the enemy’s psychological warfare and also to inform the Iraqi military and people, which can be named as psychological warfare strategies. Accordingly, this research aims to examine and elucidate “psychological warfare in the Sacred Defense” from Imam Khomeini’s (May God bless his soul) perspective. The research method is a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) content analysis method and Imam Khomeini’s Sahifeh (May God bless his soul) text during the Sacred Defense was studied with two approaches of analogy and induction. In this framework, 9 concepts related to the component of “psychological warfare in Sacred Defense” were extracted and their frequency status and also their change trend were investigated. In addition, based on the process of “coding and categorization”, the most important psychological warfare strategies were calculated. The findings of the research indicate that three concepts of “interpreting the imposed war as a symbol of the struggle between truth and falsehood; explaining war as a Sacred Defense and enlightening about propaganda and false claims of Iraq’s Ba’athist regime and its allies” had the highest frequency. Also, content analysis of Imam Khomeini’s (May God bless his soul) statements shows that he had three specific strategies in mind, including “presenting a dualism of Islam and disbelief, confronting the enemy’s psychological war (distortion, doubt and discord) and ultimately enlightening and inviting Iraqi military and people”.