May 13, 2016
The senior White House aide who organized the campaign to win approval of the Iran nuclear deal is in deep political trouble after he suggested he fooled key stakeholders into not questioning the pact.
Ben Rhodes was forced to explain himself in a blog post Monday after he suggested in an interview with The New York Times Magazine that the White House successfully spun journalists and think tankers to accept key arguments in favor of the deal with Tehran.
Conservatives are having a field day asserting that the Rhodes’s interview shows the White House lied consistently about the deal to win public approval.
Rhodes responded Monday, “We believed deeply in the case that we were making: about the effectiveness of the deal, about the value of diplomacy, and about the stakes involved. It wasn’t ‘spin,’ it’s what we believed and continue to believe, and the hallmark of the entire campaign was to push out facts.”
Rhodes raised eyebrows when he boasted in the interview that he created a liberal “echo chamber” of support for the nuclear deal.
Rhodes derided the White House press corps as gullible stooges and said cutbacks in media houses have made it all but impossible for them to effectively cover foreign news objectively. The profile portrayed Rhodes as cleverly exploiting the gaps in coverage to push President Obama’s agenda, especially on Iran.
Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, meaning that he is the spokesman for the White House national security team, said he helped promote a “narrative” that the administration started negotiations with Iran after the supposedly moderate Hassan Rohani was elected president in 2013.
That has become a key element in the assertions that Rhodes created a big lie. Critics note that the administration’s negotiations actually began earlier, while Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad was president. But those earlier talks were well-publicized in the media in recent years. And nothing substantive really occurred until Rohani became president. What the pre-Rohani talks showed was that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi was prepared to negotiate, contrary to everything he was saying publicly, but that point has largely been missed in the West.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest Friday disputed the growing belief that there was something misleading about the administration’s campaign supporting the agreement.
“I haven’t seen anybody produce any evidence that that’s the case,” he said at his daily briefing. “I recognize there might be some people who are disappointed that they did not succeed in killing the Iran deal. Maybe these unfounded claims are the result of sour grapes. The truth is, the administration, under the direction of the president, engaged in an aggressive campaign to make a strong case to the American people that the international agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon enhanced the national security of the United States.”
Rhodes, 38, said in the article that it was easy to shape a favorable impression of the proposed agreement because of the inexperience of many of those covering the issue.
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes himself came to the National Security Council staff with no background in foreign policy. He had been a speech-writer for Obama in the 2008 campaign.
In the White House, Rhodes set up a team of staffers who were focused on promoting the deal, which included the feeding of talking points to foreign policy experts who were favorably disposed toward it. “We created an echo chamber,” he told the magazine. “They [the seemingly independent experts] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
This is hardly a new tactic; it dates back to the George Washington Administration when rival factions had their own newspapers to sell rival policies.
In the interview, Rhodes speaks contemptuously of the Washington policy and media establishment, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, referring to them as “the blob” that was subject to conventional thinking about foreign policy.
He also said: “I would prefer that it turns out that Rohani and [Foreign Minister Moham-mad-Javad] Zarif are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.”
That was billed in many news accounts as a revelation that the Administration had lied in its characterization of Rohani’s government. But Obama has repeatedly said he hopes Rohani takes Iran in a new direction but isn’t betting on it. So Rhodes’s comment didn’t indicate any disconnect between public remarks and private beliefs.
The magazine article notes that Rhodes is a published short-story writer and aspiring novelist who is a skilled “storyteller.” In fact, the basic theme of the article was that Rhodes was working in the White House as a “storyteller.”
The author of the magazine piece, David Samuels, said of Rhodes: “He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives.”
But conservative critics have modified that construction to assert that Rhodes story is entirely fiction and that the campaign to support the Iran deal was based on lies.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said the administration “can spin it any way it likes, but this was a bad deal…. Before this president leaves office, we must do everything possible to prevent his administration from making further concessions to Iran.”
