President Obama’s top foreign policy aide believes Congress is incapable of “reasoned public debate,” an assumption that governed how Obama’s team sought to win support for the nuclear deal with Iran.
“I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” Ben Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser, told the New York Times. “But that’s impossible.”
That assessment was part of a profile of Rhodes that explained how he crafted an “actively misleading” story about the deal to the American public. Rhodes discussed how he takes advantage of ignorant reporters who have spent most of their careers covering campaigns — “they literally know nothing,” he says — in order to ensure that a positive message about the deal was broadcast to the public.
While Congress mulled voting down the Iran deal, Rhodes insisted that the agreement would weaken the radicals in Iranian government and empower more moderate voices. “What we saw throughout this negotiation, and what was evident through public statements, was that the hardliners in Iran actually opposed this deal,” he said last July. “They’ve been very comfortable in the status quo, where essentially large chunks of Iranian society were suffering under sanctions.”
To the New York Times, Rhodes admitted that the nuclear talks were underway long before any election brought “moderate” Iranians to power. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he told the Times. “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.”
