Iran, the US and Fake News

As the dust begins to settle on the assassination of Iranian military commander, Qaseem Soleimani, the Americans seem to have won by a knock out. The US took out a very powerful Iranian. The Iranian ballistic missiles, on the other hand, didn’t kill even a single American. In the fog of war, the Iranians now admit to accidentally shooting down that civilian airliner in Teheran.

On the other hand, Iran could still be playing the long game. They could aggravate the mess that is Iraq via action and inaction. They could ease off the anti-ISIS effort, and play the very dangerous game of allowing ISIS to rise enough to continue attacking the West but without allowing ISIS to become a threat to either Iran itself or its ally, Syria. Iran might also choose to launch very damaging cyber-attacks against Saudi Arabia, like they’ve done so successfully in the past.

Tyler Cowen looks at a different aspect to all this, namely the role of fake news:

“There is a lot of talk about the effect of fake news on domestic politics, but not enough discussion of its impact on international relations, including military operations.”

Remember how Iran claimed to have killed 80 Americans and wounded 200 in that retaliatory missile strike?

“The most likely purveyors of these fake-news casualties are the weaker sides in military conflicts. They can use fake news reports of revenge to pacify their populations. And the prouder a nation’s citizens are, the more useful such fake-news casualties will be. Fake-news casualties are also easier to fabricate in countries with censorship of the press.”

Conversely, since lying is an option, it creates second order effects:

“To use the game-theoretic language of deterrence: Threats to retaliate in a painful way are now less credible because lying about retaliation is now an alternative.”

A country with a free press is impacted by fake news in a different way:

“The possibility of fake news lowers the benefits of attacking military facilities. Imagine that the U.S. had bombed some military installations in central Iran. America might have claimed a big success, but even if that were true, Iran could counter that very little damage had been done. No one would be sure who was right, and the American public — which, it turns out, has a low level of trust in its own government — might not be convinced, either.”

And so, this is how Cowen sums it up:

“In a world of fake news, the major powers may well find fewer attacks to be worthwhile. That’s the reassuring part. What’s worrisome is that, when attacks do come, they will have to be very public and very decisive. They will have to be difficult or impossible to deny.”