Iran has in the last few years made a number of PR blunders involving photoshop fakes. There was the unlaunched missile; the drone prototype; the stealth jet flight that wasn't. And maybe the space monkey, although that seems a little more controversial.
The Iranians have not struck me as stupid or incompetent otherwise; they managed to take on an Iraqi regime backed by US help and not only fight it to a standstill but push it backwards. They are supposed to be on their way to building a nuclear weapon. And they seem to have hacked a US drone. They're smart enough to use Photoshop a bit better than that - even a heavily embargoed country would have no trouble getting copies of it to experiment with, especially one that didn't feel the need to pay for it.
They could just have a particularly incompetent PR department. They wouldn't be the first large organization with this problem. They could be a bunch of medieval religious nuts who don't appeal to the kind of smart people that would do this right - or at least tell them it wouldn't work - and yet still be dishonest enough to try it.
But I want to suggest another possibility. Saddam Hussein's Iraq had the problem in trying to avoid the second gulf war that it wanted the west to think it had no WMD (and therefore to leave it alone), but it wanted all its neighbours to think it did have them (and therefore to be fearful of it). Iran has a similar but more complicated problem: it wants the US to leave it alone, and therefore it needs nuclear weapons (having seen what happens to states that won't toe the line and don't have them). But the US also won't leave it alone if it thinks the Iranians do have them.
One solution, which the Iranians are clearly pursuing, is to build as much of the capacity as possible but not the weapons. That way, they can legitimately claim not to have them, but they can also make it clear that if they are threatened the weapons can be made quickly.
Another is to try to separate the two classes of decision makers. Iran needs to convince the US military that they have nuclear weapons, in order for them to work as a deterrent. But the people who would decide to attack Iran because they are building nuclear weapons is a much larger and more nebulous group, and it includes the US public. Somehow they need to convince the US military that they have nukes, and convince the US public that they don't.
Enter the photoshop strategy. By routinely making very public idiots of themselves - in ways that will be rapidly spread on social media - they may be hoping to convince the public that Iran isn't really a threat. After Iraq, the public will be naturally suspicious of claims that such-and-such has WMD. Channeling Comical Ali may be just the strategy they need; they can make big blustery claims and have them periodically debunked, giving an impression of a bunch of incompetents who can't possibly be building nuclear weapons.
Professional analysts will presumably not be fooled (or to be more precise, their judgements are hopefully based on more than Iranian press-releases). The military will still get the message. But the public will be very reluctant to get into a war that looks very much like Iraq but on a larger scale - easy victories on the way in, and a quagmire for years afterwards with Islamic suicide bombers killing off US troops, all for weapons that don't really exist.
It's a very flaky-sounding idea, and not something you'd want to rely on. If they really are doing anything like this it will doubtless be one part of a much larger effort. But who knows - reading the histories of Allied attempts to hoax the Germans in WWII, they did some pretty outlandish things, and some of them really worked.
I often wish there was a way to definitively know the answers to questions like this once they have ceased to be militarily relevant.
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