Is there any truth behind Tehran's propaganda billboards?

In the last few weeks billboards have been popping up (and down) across Tehran depicting scenes that portray the United States government in what can only be said to be a less than positive light.

Amidst waxing international optimism for rapprochement, the message they send is jarring to say the least. However, the boards are not just empty propaganda, as they might initially appear, and as they will certainly be dismissed by many as. On the contrary, I would argue that some of them depict the situation rather accurately.

Let’s take the image of an American and Iranian sitting across from each other at a table, pictured above. On one side of what we can assume to be the nuclear negotiating table, you have an American wearing military fatigues on his bottom half, resting a pump-action shotgun on his leg; on the other, a goateed Iranian negotiator. Another variation on the same theme shows a different American at the table, this time with a slobbering Doberman at his side.

Either way, by the billboards, an oft-overlooked characteristic of this feud is visualised well: the Americans are not simply dovish victims of Iranian belligerence, but can also be understood – easily from an Iranian perspective in particular – as aggressors themselves. It goes without saying that the picture we are left with by this imagery is not completely accurate. However, it is not to be discounted completely. 

After all, it is the Americans who are leading the way in thrashing Iran’s economy, just as it is the Americans who are forever warning Tehran that military action remains firmly on the table.

Though Obama officials have often referred to theirs as a “dual-track approach”, many of Washington’s policymakers make no attempt to hide the fact that the US strategy of coercion against Iran is in fact three-pronged. The first prong is the sanctions; the second, the credible threat of military action; the third - to date, by far the most unenthusiastically engaged in - is the diplomatic prong.

As such, the half-military attire of the billboard’s American negotiator is not, in this sense, too much of an exaggeration: as Senator Charles Robb and General (ret.) Chuck Wald wrote last year, a ‘credible, visible’ military option to deter Iran’s nuclear programme is central to the United States’ negotiating strategy.

So yes, these billboards may be anti-American and yes, they may also be propaganda. However, the elements of truth in them cannot be denied and, certainly, they should not be cast aside simply as more crazed irrationality from the ultraconservatives of the Islamic Republic.