A profile of one Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, running in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is not unsympathetic, which makes it all the more devastating, Thomas Ricks writes for Foreign Policy.
Perhaps the key sentence is this: “His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.”
Rhodes led journalists to believe a misleading timeline of U.S. negotiations with Iran over a nuclear-disarmament agreement and relied on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to seal the deal, The Washington Post adds:
The deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, told the New York Times magazine that he helped promote a “narrative” that the administration started negotiations with Iran after the supposedly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president in 2013. In fact, the administration’s negotiations actually began earlier, with the country’s powerful Islamic faction, and the framework for an agreement was hammered out before Rouhani’s election……
He also cast doubt on the moderate nature of Iran’s regime: “I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and [Iranian foreign minister Javad] Zarif are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.”
