Here’s a tw**t Matthew sent me this morning; it comes from Matt Pearce, national reporter for the Los Angeles Times:
The tw**t suggests the the death of journalism, but the article referred to in the Washington Post, is even more disturbing. The quote is from Ben Rhodes, characterized as “one of Obama’s top national security advisers,” and refers to how Rhodes misled reporters to secure national approval of the nuclear deal with Iran (I was in favor of that, but with severe reservations):
One of President Obama’s top national security advisers led journalists to believe a misleading timeline of U.S. negotiations with Iran over a nuclear agreement and relied on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to seal the deal, according to a lengthy magazine profile.
Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told the New York Times magazine that he helped promote a “narrative” that the administration started negotiations with Iran after the supposedly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president in 2013. In fact, the administration’s negotiations actually began earlier, with the country’s powerful Islamic faction, and the framework for an agreement was hammered out before Rouhani’s election.
The quote refers to how easy Rhodes found it to dupe reporters about the timeline, as they had no experience or independent way to confirm his narrative. The reason Rhodes’s duplicity (for that’s what it was) is important is this: the deal was characterized as being struck with relatively liberal Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, but in reality the early negotiations were with Iran’s conservative theocracy. Rhodes was aided by social media, as both the White House tw**ter feed and reporters themselves echoed that narrative:
The White House, of course, stands by its narrative. The New York Times, in a long piece on Rhodes by David Samuels, “The aspiring novelist who became Obama’s foreign policy guru,” does imply that Rhodes’s aspirations as a novelist may have led him to try to create a novelistic narrative, but the facts are still disturbing:
As the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad and runs communications strategy across the White House, tasks that, taken individually, give little sense of the importance of his role. He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself. . .
The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: “Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” While the president’s statement was technically accurate — there had in fact been two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making.
The Times’ investigations generally support what Rhodes says: digital media has completely altered the way the press interacts with POTUS, and narratives can simply be confected out of thin air. An inexperienced press can simply swallow them whole.
Now maybe this doesn’t matter, as Rouhani supports the deal and, as far as I know, Iran has kept its part of that deal. (Rhodes, by the way, retains his job, but even if he’s not fired he’ll be gone by next January). But if Obama and his minions promulgated a false narrative, it’s not so reassuring. That’s politics, folks.
As I said, when the deal went though, I was wary. I still think that, down the road, Iran will have nuclear weapons. We may have put off that day a bit, but not prevented it. I hope I’m wrong.
