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Trump’s Iran Disinformation Campaign

The Trump administration's message isn't true, and its recipients know that better than anyone.
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The Wall Street Journal reports on the useless propaganda campaign that the Trump administration is carrying out to influence Iranian public opinion:

The Trump administration’s effort is more openly hostile to the Iranian government than previous administrations’ efforts, employing the president’s brash style. Gauging the effect of the U.S. information campaign is difficult because of the absence of reliable polling in Iran, but most Iranians seem to be dismissive of its effectiveness.

It would be difficult for any U.S. administration to gain the Iranian public’s trust, but the Trump administration is uniquely ill-suited to making the attempt. Between the travel ban, reneging on the JCPOA, reimposing sanctions, designating the IRGC, and making genocidal threats to destroy the entire country, Trump has done everything short of war to alienate and disgust most Iranians. A propaganda campaign that tries to tell the same people that have been banned from the U.S. and forced to endure greater economic hardship that all of their problems are caused only by their government isn’t going to be credible no matter what it says or what media it employs. The Trump administration’s message isn’t true, and its recipients know that better than anyone.

Iranians know that many of their country’s problems are the government’s fault. They don’t need to be “instructed” in this by American officials. The article quotes someone saying exactly that:

Others view the U.S. messaging with bemusement and anger, saying they don’t need Americans to tell them their government is inept. “Even their propaganda is one step behind what Iranians already know,” a Tehran rug merchant said.

But Iranians also know that economic conditions have deteriorated rapidly since the U.S. violated the nuclear deal and began waging economic war against their country. The Trump administration’s propaganda campaign amounts to pissing on Iranians and telling them that it’s raining.

I saw one of the videos that the State Department has put out as part of this campaign yesterday, and I commented on it:

The humanitarian exemptions Hook cites don’t work. As Jan Egeland was explaining in the op-ed I cited yesterday, sanctions have made it humanitarian aid work much harder. Making payments to obtain humanitarian goods is extremely difficult if not impossible. Barbara Slavin commented on Hook’s video as well:

Hook and other administration officials take great pride in boasting about the destructive effects that sanctions have had on the Iranian economy. They cite this pointless destruction as proof that their policy is “working.” At the same time, they are desperate to avoid the blame for the deepening misery and poverty of Iranians. When they send out their messages intended for the Iranian public, they switch to pretending that the sanctions don’t impede access to humanitarian goods when they obviously do just that. By making it practically impossible to conduct transactions to pay for these goods, the sanctions either cut off the import of food, medicine, and medical devices or they make them so hard to come by that the price is prohibitively expensive for a population that has also seen their savings and earnings destroyed by rapid inflation. The administration very much wants to have things both ways by pretending to care about and “respect” the Iranian people in one message and then celebrating how much pain they are inflicting on the people in another. The Iranian people know that the U.S. government has made things much worse for them, and sending them propaganda messages telling them otherwise just adds insult to the severe injuries that the administration’s policy is causing.

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