America Humiliated: Iran’s Propaganda Victory Doubles As A Secrecy Breach

America Humiliated: What Iran got from detaining and debasing U.S. sailors two months ago could fill a book. In fact, Tehran boasts 13,000 pages of information from their computers and plans a book on the incident.

We as Americans, blessed to live in the greatest — and for over a century the most powerful — country in the world, are inclined to regard images, symbolism and propaganda as having little ability to harm us. But the world’s lone superpower over seven-plus years of the Obama presidency has been in an aerodynamic stall; visuals like the photo of the Iranians pointing guns at our naval personnel are the klaxons in the cockpit sounding warnings to the deaf ears of an incompetent pilot: the commander-in-chief and author of U.S. decline.

Some symbolic incidents that America’s enemies sought to exploit melt away and are today largely forgotten. In 1984, during the sound check before his weekly radio address, President Reagan joked: “I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever; we begin bombing in five minutes.” Moscow called the humor “incompatible with the great responsibility borne by heads of nuclear states” and Western Europe’s left had a conniption fit.

But Reagan’s actions over eight years proved he was no joker. And far from being the warmonger he was so often called, he proved he was actually a peacemaker — through strength, of course.

The viral video of 10 American sailors, one a woman, held at gunpoint by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Jan. 12, with one of them later taped while in custody apologizing for U.S. actions, is something that might have been expected to melt away out of the collective memory by now. It is not.

Read the rest of this IBD editorial HERE.

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