If you don't want to read a 9,500 words article but wish to
learn what goes on inside the White House at the foreign policy level, you have
a shorter alternative. It is a 1,060-word article discussing the long article.
The long one came under the title: “The Aspiring Novelist
who became Obama's Foreign-Policy Guru” and the subtitle: “How Ben Rhodes
rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age.” It was written by David
Samuels and published in the New York Times Magazine on May 5, 2016.
Lee Smith of the Weekly Standard then wrote a 1,060 words
article reviewing the long one. It came under the title: “Obama's Foreign
Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal,”
published on May 5, 2016 in the Weekly Standard. I read both articles and felt
compelled to make a few comments of my own about the entire subject matter.
The foreign Policy Guru that's mentioned in the title of the
Smith article is Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes who is responsible
for the success of the messaging that was done by the White House regarding the
Iran Nuclear Deal. He is such a gifted man, says Samuels, he did a magnificent
job selling the deal to the public by throwing off those who could have opposed
it because they were mostly of the media and mostly clueless.
Thus, David Samuels has asserted, and Lee Smith has agreed
that the American public was sold on the deal at the time that it was signed,
sealed and delivered. Because nothing has changed since that time, we must
accept the reality that the public continues to support it. This being the
case, it is mystifying that Lee Smith should end his presentation the way that
he did. Here is what he says:
“For seven years the America public has been living
through a postmodern narrative crafted by an extremely gifted and unspeakably
cynical political operative whose job is to wage digital information campaigns
designed to dismantle a several-decade old security architecture while lying
about the nature of the Iranian regime. No wonder Americans feel less safe –
they are”.
That passage is self-contradictory in several places, and
should make the Smith presentation suspect in the eyes of readers. This is
because, deceived or not, a public that has accepted the Rhodes
narrative could not feel unsafe thinking that the deal was a bad one.
Moreover, neither Samuels nor Smith took the trouble to
explain how a lone White House operative – no matter how unspeakably cynical he
may have been – could tell lies about the Iranian regime, and fool thousands of
media types as well as millions of Americans by framing “the Iran deal as a
choice between peace and war,” and then set up “a messaging unit that created
an 'echo chamber' in the press”. This is unreal.
When you look closely at what Samuels and Smith have said,
you begin to realize that the media types and the American public knew exactly
what was going on, and have contributed mightily to the success of the nuclear
negotiations. Here is the passage that says this much: “Rhodes
is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a
time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of
the traditional media”.
That is, faced with the public desire for an accommodation
with Iran
– as expressed by a tsunami that came through the social media – the operators
of the traditional media stepped aside and let their sand castles be washed
away by the wave. For this reason, it makes sense for us to think that Ben
Rhodes did nothing cynical, but that he rode the wave of the public's desire to
see the negotiations succeed, and used that reality to subdue the voices that
opposed the deal.
No wonder Ben Rhodes feels good about his work as revealed
by David Samuels: “He is proud of the way he sold the
Iran
deal. ’We drove them crazy,' he said of the deal's opponents.'” The truth is
that Rhodes could not have accomplished that much if the public was not with
him, or if the traditional media had bought the opposition's narrative rather
than the one advanced by Rhodes and by the
White House.