O’s Iran aide backpedals
A top White House aide has backtracked from his boast that President Obama’s foreign-policy team manipulated the public and press to sell the Iranian nuclear deal.
Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser and close Obama aide, had bragged in an article published last week that the administration had pushed the accord by getting experts to parrot its talking points.
“We created an echo chamber,” he told The New York Times Magazine. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
But Rhodes was in damage-control mode after the profile, which went online Thursday and in print on Sunday, ignited an uproar.
“Every press corps that I interacted with vetted that deal as extensively as any other foreign-policy initiative of the presidency,” he wrote on the Web site Medium late Sunday night.
He added that if he were trying to be a puppet master, he did a poor job.
“Indeed, I hardly remember last summer as a time of glowing reviews about the Iran deal,” Rhodes wrote.
“Opponents of the deal were more than capable of ensuring that their arguments were given prominent attention online, on opinion pages, and on television. And that only made it more of an imperative for us to answer hard questions,” he added.
His new spin was a far cry from the Times’ piece.
The profile, by writer David Samuels, characterizes Rhodes as “storyteller” who “largely manufactured” a tale that the nuke deal came together only after Iranian “moderates” came to power in 2013. In fact, talks were under way well before.
“He is adept at constructing overarching plot lines with heroes and villains, their conflicts supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks,” Samuels wrote.
Rhodes is quoted in the piece gleefully detailing the press corp’s naivete.
“They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo,” he said. “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 . . . They literally know nothing.”