Within a few hours on September 17, a pressure cooker bomb exploded in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York injuring 31 people, a man stabbed 10 people in a Minnesota mall, and bombs were found near the site of a Marine Corps charity race in New Jersey. The following Monday morning, White House press secretary Josh Earnest appeared on CNN and explained, “We are in a fight with ISIS—a narrative fight.”
There was much guffawing at the suggestion that, to paraphrase The Untouchables, the Obama administration is bringing a narrative to a gun fight, much less the global war on terror. However, the old Washington saw that a gaffe is when you accidentally tell the truth certainly applies here. Americans who don’t follow politics obsessively would likely be stunned to learn that this is an official White House talking point. At least five times in the last year, Earnest has publicly fretted that ISIS is advancing its “narrative.”
And while liberals were once appalled by George W. Bush saying “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” the Obama White House has taken his cowboy Manicheanism a step further and explicitly applied it to all public criticism. On more than one occasion, Earnest has suggested that doubt about White House terror policies, such as the stubborn insistence on shutting down Guantánamo despite an alarming number of released detainees who have resumed their terror activities, “only serves to advance the narrative that ISIL is seeking to write.”
It’s true that in foreign policy, a narrative does matter, to some extent. On this point, the White House is in agreement with the terrorists. “The war of narratives has become even more important than the war of navies, napalm, and knives,” observes the Alabama-born Omar al-Hammami of the al Qaeda affiliate al Shabaab. However, there’s a crucial difference between the narrative being put out by Islamic terror groups and the narrative being put out by the White House. When terrorists say they want to kill us, their actions give us ample reason to believe them.
The White House keeps lying to us. In recent weeks, we’ve learned that the White House made $1.7 billion in payments to Iran in cash and a $400 million payment specifically contingent on the release of hostages. (The -administration unconvincingly disputed the characterization that this was a ransom.) The White House further claimed the cash payments were necessary because it was strictly adhering to sanctions policy and America had no banking relations with Iran. But after the reporting of The Weekly Standard’s Jenna Lifhits pointed out two U.S. bank transfers to Iran in the last 14 months, the White House couldn’t explain itself. It is now admitting that it has no way of ensuring cash given to Iran isn’t financing terrorism.
The obvious explanation for the White House’s incessant dishonesty is that telling the truth would arouse opposition from Congress and the public at large. The only thing keeping a tenuous lid on that outrage is the media’s willingness to spin for the administration. Recall that the architect of Obama’s spectacularly ill-advised Iran nuclear deal, Ben Rhodes, bragged to the New York Times that the success of the Iran deal hinged on creating an “echo chamber” among an easily manipulated media. Rhodes graduated from NYU with an MFA in creative writing, so he certainly qualifies as an expert in crafting narratives.
But the truth tends to emerge, and the 41 people injured on September 17 are certainly inconvenient for the White House’s ongoing terror narrative. Even a pliant media are struggling to imbue the White House’s preferred metaphors with authority. On CNN, Reuters terror expert David Rohde, downplaying fears of coordinated terror attacks, explained that multiple terror attacks on the same day could simply be the result of “two or three lone wolves who somehow got together and radicalized online.”
If you want to put out an effective, truthful political narrative, actions speak louder than words. The White House has next to no tangible successes they can point to in response to aggression by terror sponsors and increasing domestic terror attacks. Instead of redoubling their efforts to win a literal war with literal bombs, their conception of reassurance involves going on television to talk about how to win a “narrative fight.” This is humiliating and more than a little insulting. If the White House weren’t so oblivious, they’d realize they can spout their preferred narrative, such as it is, until they’re blue in the face. Because no one believes them anymore.
