Digital Hezbollah.

• Author: Pahlavi, Pierre

"Do not try to do too much with your own hands," T.E. Lawrence advised in an essay from August 1917. "Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly." This is a key tenet of insurgency warfare that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been keen to apply in its relationship with Lebanese Hezbollah--especially as their collaboration has expanded into cyberspace. When it comes to influence strategy, Iranian leaders have long known that, in an era of increasingly vocal nongovernmental players and deregulation of information exchanges, governments can no longer rely solely on their own official communication channels to win the heart and minds of foreign populations. Diffusing ideological content through indigenous networks is likely to have a deeper impact than through national channels. In today's hypermedia age, working with local friends and allies, with and through local medias, is certainly one of the most crucial and delicate aspects of any credible cyberinfluence strategy.

Ever since its establishment in 1982 with Iranian subsidies and with the support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Lebanese Hezbollah has been a crucial surrogate for allowing Iran to break its diplomatic isolation and extend its footprint throughout the Middle East "by other means." The Party of God has acted as a platform of influence through which the Islamic Republic projects its ideological doctrine regionally and prolongs its other-than-war strategy. Engaging with this non-governmental actor, often described as a state within a state, and taping into its networks is a way of filling the gaps between official efforts and effectively reaching out to Lebanese and Middle Eastern youth, consumers, politicians, journalists, businesses, and opinionmakers. By relying on the Lebanese Shia movement to amplify the echo of its message in the proverbial Arab street, it is also a matter of compensating for Iran's weaknesses in the conventional realms while establishing a virtual border with Israel and challenging Saudi Arabia and Gulf Cooperation Council countries in their strategic depth.

Since the early 1980s, Hezbollah has devotedly reproduced the Iranian modus operandi by combining the classic methods of insurrectional warfare with sophisticated propaganda campaigns to carry out a fullspectrum fight against its American, Israeli, and Saudi adversaries. Blending irregular warfare and high-tech psychological methods, Hezbollah is a pioneer in the art of multifaceted influence strategies enabling the promotion of strategic interests while avoiding head-on combat with militarily superior adversaries: "Inspired and refined with the help of Iran," notes Ben Schaefer, "Hezbollah is shifting its coercive tactics from urban streets and battlefields to the routers of their Western adversaries." After initially using it as a simple guerrilla auxiliary, Iran helped it grow into a powerful cyber-proxy capable of magnifying the scope of Iranian ideological power. Over the past decade, this maleficent group has developed into one of the main cyber-protagonists of today's global arena.

In the years following the 1979 revolution, the Iranian regime started relying heavily on its standing as beacon of the Shia world to galvanize support from pockets of Shia populations in a Sunni-dominated Middle East. With 140 million followers forming an almost uninterrupted string of communities stretching from the Mediterranean to the Ganges Valley, the Shia world constitutes a formidable pool of influence that is all the more strategic for Tehran as three-quarters of the region's oil reserves are concentrated in areas two-thirds populated by Shia denizens. In the Lebanese context, Tehran's religious outreach policy has included spreading pro-regime messages through a network of mosques and husseiniyyas (religious meeting locales), as well as through medias linked to the Islamic Republic information agency known as Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. One of the spearheads of Tehran's audiovisual diplomacy with regard to local Arab-Shia populations is the satellite channel Al-Alam (the Arab World) conveying to its Arabicspeaking and Shia audience favorable views on the Islamic Republic. Launched in 2003 during the U.S. invasion of Iraq and having offices in Teheran, Bagdad, and Beirut, the Iranian TV station...