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.
On Tuesday, Revolutionary Guard naval commander Ali Razmjou boasted that Iran grabbed hold of 13,000 pages of information from the computers, GPS devices and maps on board the two small U.S. Navy CB-90 fast assault craft. The Pentagon isn’t disclosing whether any of it was classified, but it’s hard to imagine that a U.S. patrol operating near the world’s foremost terrorist state wouldn’t have sensitive materials aboard. The Defense Department had previously claimed that all the Iranians secured were two digital SIM cards from satellite phones.
Has the White House ordered that a security breach be covered up? We may find out if the Iranians share some of the 13,000 pages. Nevertheless, the image of Iran having the upper hand over our military so soon after President Obama’s nuclear appeasement deal refuses to fade out.
The details cry out for investigation. How could a U.S. vessel have been allowed to break down in Iranian waters? Is our Navy that badly equipped? Why would a U.S. Navy officer apologize, especially with cameras rolling? How, in spite of Navy training, could a briefly detained sailor be videotaped crying by the enemy?
Razmjou added that the Revolutionary Guard will publish a book on the episode — in other words yet more bang for the Iranian rial is on its way from a single incident of U.S. humiliation.
This image-based propaganda victory is symbolic of something very concrete: ongoing American decline.