The role and function of psychological operations in the 2003 war with emphasizing on the persuasion

AIMS. Victory in war requires the support of public opinion. The aggressive states are forced to use the psychological operations to grant legitimacy and acceptance to their performance the issue that in the minds of the majority of the thinkers, especially the Americans, has been more effective in the 2003 war. So the aim of this survey has been determining the effect of psychological operations at persuading Americans, regional states, the world and international organizations to support the war and ultimately isolating Saddam and demoralizing its military forces. METHODS. This research used content-analysis and trend analysis and after that analyzed the news agencies and media's messages by choosing purposeful sampling (from 11 September 2001 to 20 march2003) RESULTS. The results showed that: Question 1: the effect of psychological operations at persuading America’s public opinion has been ascending from 31 percent in 2001 to 75 percent at the threshold of war.Question 2 and 3: the effect of psychological operations at persuading regional states, the world and international organizations has led to the collapse of Arab states´ unity, coordination and cooperation of some of them with America and also direct coordination of some European countries, because of fear instillation of Saddam by different accusations. This effect finally imposed some kind of confusion to France and Russia, so that they couldn’t do anything especial for deterring the war. Finally the 1441 resolution of Security Council was approved against Iraq and paved the way for attacking to it. Question 4: the effect of psychological operations isolated Saddam at the threshold of war and demoralized its military forces completely. CONCLUSION. The results of the studies have shown the deep effect of psychological operations, especially at the persuasion context. The precise and coherent process at implementing keywords for instilling and persuading, especially Americans, governments and organizations, has extracted from two major routes i.e. central route and peripheral route. Methods such as communication source, communication nature and the characteristics of addressees have been produced by precise designing and organizing the psychological operations by Americans after 11 September and especially after the fall of Taliban.