Psychological Warfare

The mullahs are such experts at psychological warfare and subversion tactics that I often wondered if at least some of them weren’t graduates of the Psychological Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. If they hadn’t attended the school, they had certainly read the books because they have implemented psychological programs and executed subversive tactics with great skill and they have produced textbook results.

Then I received my latest copy of Time (September 18, 1978) with a picture of the Shah on the cover. While reading the Cover Story “The Shah’s Divided Land” my suspicions were confirmed. Some dissidents who found themselves ineffective in recruiting followers due to their inability to communicate with people on a mass scale came up with a plan to exploit the advantages enjoyed by the Mullahs. They pretended to be religious and to have a desire to study the Quran under the Ayatullah in Qum. Evidently this ruse got them in the door because, according to Time, they “went to Lebanon for training by George Habash’s radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Returning to Iran, they posed as clergymen, took code names, formed cells and provoked incidents of terrorism.”

Every society has its problems, some big and some small. A good psychological operator can take a person who thinks he is happy and making money and turn him into a revolutionary by making his little problems look intolerable and his big problems look absolutely unsolvable under the present government. With a lot of money and a good platform to deliver your message from a professional psychological subversion operation can convince anyone to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. The mullahs have all the money they could possibly need and what better platform could you ask for than being “a messenger from God”.

I have read all the analyses from the pundits of Time, News Week, and the New Yorker and they all miss the point. Yes, the Shah has problems and yes, Iran has problems; however, you can’t drop freedom onto the heads of people who have never had freedom without causing chaos. When you are dragging a group of people out of the sixteenth century into the twentieth century and trying to get them to think for themselves by weaning them from their psychological dependence on mullahs, you are going to have trouble. And, the biggest trouble you are going to have is with the mullahs who have a strangle hold on the minds of the Iranian people and do not want to loose their grip.