Either the press has a very, very short memory or it enjoys the abuse.
These are the only explanations for why newsgroups are giving former Obama White House staffer and admitted liar Ben Rhodes a platform to discuss the United States’ long-overdue response to recent Iranian provocations.
President Barack Obama achieved “a deal good enough to prevent his successor from having to go to war with Iran,” Rhodes asserts in an op-ed published this weekend by the Atlantic. “But now, despite all that work, a de facto state of war exists between the United States and Iran. To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Donald Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East.”
“In doing so, he has tragically proved Obama right: The choice all along was between the Iran deal or an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program and some form of war,” he adds.
I am sorry, what? Rhodes’ op-ed appeared in the Atlantic? As in, the magazine whose editor-in-chief, Jeffery Goldberg, had to do damage control in 2016 after New York Times Magazine reported that Rhodes used “handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic” to help “retail the administration’s narrative” on the Iran nuclear deal? That Atlantic? You think that publication would have Rhodes on some sort of “no-fly” list, especially after he humiliated its editor-in-chief with the suggestion that they have an all-too-chummy relationship. But you would be wrong.
The Atlantic is not the only place where Rhodes, who is quite literally famous for lying to reporters, has resurfaced following the killing of Iranian Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani. In the three days since Soleimani’s death, Rhodes has appeared on both CNN and MSNBC to offer his uniquely dishonest brand of analysis. He has also been quoted by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and many more.
There is no reason why anyone should give Rhodes a megaphone to oppose current U.S. foreign policy toward Iran.
First, Rhodes is a liar. David Samuels’s 2016 New York Times Magazine profile of Rhodes includes a passage where the Obama flunky openly bragged that he manipulated reporters and pundits into advancing his foreign policy agenda:
[…]
In the spring of last year, 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.
This is the man that national news outlets are turning to for answers to the U.S.-Iran situation. Do these newsgroups not remember that Rhodes is a liar, or do they enjoy being used and abused in this way?
Rhodes also has an obvious and specific agenda, which is to advance his own legacy via rewriting the history of the since-scuttled Iran nuclear deal. What good reason is there for anyone to believe the former Obama aide would give a fair and objective analysis of the current hostilities between the United States and Iran? There is none. There is no good reason why anyone should trust Rhodes to discuss the Iran issue clearly and plainly. Rhodes has a history of flooding newsrooms with falsehoods and misleading statements, and there is no reason to believe he won’t do it again, especially now that the nuclear deal he helped broker has fallen apart.
This is who Rhodes is, according to Rhodes.
