תפקיד לוחמת המידע במבצע נגד איראן | פרשנות

Today, wars aren't just fought on the battlefield, they're increasingly fought online. Joining us now to discuss the information warfare element of the Iran conflict is foreign policy analyst Bart McCoy. He's a former career diplomat and energy department official. And Gerard Faliti, he's a Middle East affairs analyst and an attorney specializing in international law. Thank you both so much for joining us. Bart, I want to start with you. There's a lot of focus now on whether Israel pushed the U.S. into a war. And Bart, your thoughts on that? There is a lot of disinformation out there. Some of it is genuinely believed in by Americans, most of it is bought and paid for by entities like Iran itself, like China, like other groups, other countries that mean to do us harm. Here's the thing, nobody can beat our military. Everybody in the world knows that they cannot stand up to us militarily. So what they try to do, they try to use psychological operations, PSYOPs, information warfare, to try to, what's the word, demoralize the American people and to turn the American people against the war. All these countries watched the Vietnam War and they think they learned a lesson from the 1960s. And so China, Iran in particular, have been pushing drugs into this country. They've been pushing fentanyl, they've been pushing heroin, and of course the other cartels from Latin America have been doing their part. And they've been trying to weaken the moral fiber of Americans. And now they're coming up with this ridiculous statement saying, oh, Israel dragged us into this war. Israel has been our strongest ally. They are the ones that develop the intelligence networks. They're the ones that are allowing us to do the things we want to do. Let Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly compare Israel to, say, the UK, where Keir Starmer suddenly was biting his nails and saying, we had nothing to do with this, we had nothing to do with this. And then when he saw it was popular, turning around and saying, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to let them use our bases. Gerard, looking ahead, though, say remnants of the regime remains, but Iran is isolated, still under sanctions and weakened militarily. Could that be a win for the Trump administration? Or to put it another way, what does a win look like here? I think President Trump can have different types of wins depending on how far he wants to go. A definitive win would be an end to this regime. It would be a different government in place that is willing to agree to not developing nuclear weapons, to handing over any enriched uranium that it has, to stopping enrichment efforts, to dismantling and destroying its ballistic missiles, its medium-term missiles, and stop investing in terrorism across the Middle East and across the world. That is the minimum win that would happen. I don't think, quite frankly, we really care, or given on the Venezuela example, that President Trump really cares who heads Iran, if that is what they're agreeing to. But at the end of the day, if they're not agreeing to that, we will still continue this endeavor. And I don't see this stopping. If anything, we might then push for an actual regime change because ultimately America needs certain things. We need to be able to defend ourselves and the region. And unless we have a regime or any government in Iran that's willing to agree to that, we have to keep going.