Yet, that’s exactly what we have in the extraordinary piece New York Times Magazine recently published about “the aspiring novelist who became (Barack) Obama’s foreign-policy guru”. The profile of Ben Rhodes supposedly suggests that he and the president work in concert to shape a helpful narrative around that commitment, in order to justify the pursuit of an agreement and to more easily pass that agreement through the US Congress. And Earnest said he suspected Rhodes would take back his description of the White House press corps.
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The profile credits Rhodes with helping to create that narrative, which portrayed the negotiations as a product of newfound moderation within the Iranian regime following the 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani. We know them well.
Watch above, via the White House. “And he did so without disclosing that he holds a longtime personal grudge against me”. But again, as I said in the earlier email, since this was a story about Rhodes primarily, we didn’t elect to go into this material.
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus”, said Rhodes on the apparent inexperience of reporters.
“I assure you that’s not how it was intended, and based on that reaction I’m confident he would say it differently if given the chance”, he said.
Goldberg also contacted the Times, requesting a correction for the characterization that he helped “retail” the deal.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that Iran is no more a friend of the USA now than it was before, as a vignette with Rhodes being quite upset that news of Iran taking JS Navy boat crews captive broke so quickly in January while the White House touted the Iranian nuclear deal makes clear.
Ben Rhodes speaks in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington in February. For those of you who have read the Times piece-And don’t lie! The pledge, repeated over and over by senior officials, was, in her words, just “popular rhetoric” used to persuade the public to accept the deal.
With Rhodes as his witness, Goldberg seeks a correction from the Times.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, said the administration “can spin it any way it likes, but this was a bad deal”. I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. “Samuels seems to mischaracterize that to say the opposite”. Journalists and foreign policy wonks of all political leanings have expressed their disdain for the condescending manner in which Rhodes explained his manipulation of the media, think tanks and other figures friendly to the Iran deal cause. Rhodes boasted in the article about creating an “echo chamber” in the press to sell the administration’s landmark Iran nuclear deal to the public.
Cirincione objected to Samuel’s characterization that the administration crafted an “onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal”.
Rhodes’ comments also angered Washington reporters, who he characterized as “27-year-olds” who “literally know nothing” or as “handpicked Beltway insiders” who report on the White House uncritically.
Cirincione goes on to mention the hundreds of experts who came out publicly in support of the deal, saying “It is absurd to believe that all these officials and experts were duped”. The Iran deal was always going to happen, because Obama’s vision of his own foreign policy legacy required it.
“No potential negative comment passed without a tweet”, noted Samuels.
“Every press corps that I interacted with vetted that deal as extensively as any other foreign policy initiative of the presidency”.
“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“, wrote Rhodes, contradicting his own prior admissions to Samuels and Panetta’s interview. Failing to address his critics, he ends his piece with a defense of the deal: “today, Iran verifiably can not obtain a nuclear weapon”. Opponents of the deal were more than capable of ensuring that their arguments were given prominent attention online, on opinion pages and on television.
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“There was not much question that the Quds Force [a special forces unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards ] and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm, and there was not much question that this kind of opposing view could somehow gain any traction”.
