Isaiah
8:20 KJV To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not
according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.
"For
the last seven years the American 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." - Excerpt
from following article:
Obama's
Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the
Iran Deal
weeklystandard.com
2:48 PM, May 05, 2016 | By Lee Smith http://j.mp/0IranDealLiesO
aka http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2002252
Ben
Rhodes and the blob. / It’s hardly any wonder that Deputy
National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has a "mind meld" with
his boss, the president. According to a David Samuels New York Times
Magazine article to be published Sunday and already posted to the
website, Rhodes, like Barack Obama, is contemptuous of "the
American foreign-policy establishment." What Obama calls the
"Washington playbook" dictating the sorts of responses
available to American policymakers, Rhodes calls the "Blob."
The
Blob includes "editors and reporters at The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The New Yorker," etc. It also encompasses,
according to Rhodes, Obama's former secretary of state Hillary
Clinton, and the administration's first defense secretary Robert
Gates. Presumably Leon Panetta, former Pentagon chief and CIA
director, who goes on the record to criticize Rhodes and the
president, is also part of the Blob, alongside "other Iraq-war
promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the
collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle
East." In other words, the emotion driving the administration's
foreign policy is contempt—contempt for allies, colleagues, and the
generations of American policymakers who built the post-WWII
international order, ensuring relative global stability, and peace
and prosperity at home.
Samuels's
profile is an amazing piece of writing about the Holden Caulfield of
American foreign policy. He's a sentimental adolescent with literary
talent (Rhodes published one short story before his mother's
connections won him a job in the world of foreign policy), and high
self regard, who thinks that everyone else is a phony. Those readers
who found Jeffrey Goldberg's picture of Obama in his March Atlantic
profile refreshing for the president's willingness to insult American
allies publicly will be similarly cheered here by Rhodes's boast of
deceiving American citizens, lawmakers, and allies over the Iran
deal. Conversely, those who believe Obama risked American interests
to take a cheap shot at allies from the pedestal of the Oval Office
will be appalled to see Rhodes dancing in the end zone to celebrate
the well-packaged misdirections and even lies—what Rhodes and
others call a "narrative"—that won Obama his signature
foreign policy initiative.
"Like
Obama," writes Samuels: / Rhodes is a storyteller who
uses a writer's tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as
politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing
overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and
motivations 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,
at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the
sand castles of the traditional press.
As
Rhodes admits, it's not that hard to shape the narrative. "All
these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus," Rhodes 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."
In
Rhodes's "narrative" about the Iran deal, negotiations
started when the ostensibly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected
president, providing an opening for the administration to reach out
in friendship. In reality, as Samuels gets administration officials
to admit, negotiations began when "hardliner" Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad was still president. It was Rhodes who framed the Iran
deal as a choice between peace and war, and it was Rhodes who set up
a messaging unit to sell the deal that created an "echo chamber"
in the press. "[Al Monitor reporter] Laura Rozen was my RSS
feed," says Tanya Somanader, the 31-year-old who managed
@TheIranDeal twitter feed. "She would just find everything and
retweet it."
"In
the spring of last year," Samuels writes: / "legions
of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social
media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless
reporters. "We created an echo chamber," [Rhodes] admitted,
when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts
cheerleading for the deal. "They were saying things that
validated what we had given them to say."
When I
suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed
from rational debate over America's future role in the world, Rhodes
nodded. "In the absence of rational discourse, we are
going to discourse the [expletive] out of this," he
said. "We had test drives to know who was going to be able to
carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like
Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew
the tactics that worked." He is proud of the way he sold the
Iran deal. "We drove them crazy," he said of the
deal's opponents.
It's
not clear whether or not Panetta supported the deal,
but he admits he was wrong about Obama's willingness to take
all measures to stop Iran from getting a bomb.
As
secretary of defense, he tells me, one of his most important jobs was
keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defense
minister, Ehud Barak, from launching a pre-emptive attack on Iran's
nuclear facilities. "They were both interested in the answer to
the question, 'Is the president serious?' " Panetta recalls.
"And you know my view, talking with the president, was: If
brought to the point where we had evidence that they're developing an
atomic weapon, I think the president is serious that he is not going
to allow that to happen."
Panetta
stops. / "But would you make that same assessment now?" I
ask him. / "Would I make that same assessment now?" he
asks. "Probably not."
Rhodes
tells Samuels that Don DeLillo is his favorite novelist. "That's
the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of,
you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast
currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics,"
he tells Samuels. "And that's what it's like to work in the U.S.
foreign-policy apparatus in 2016."
So
that's it. For the last seven years the American 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.
[My emphasis.] / Web Link:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2002252
I2C
160506aa Isa8v20 O Lie Machine | I2C | 160506 1328 et
