Melhem:
The world according to President Barack Obama described recently in the Atlantic Magazine and the portrait of Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, in the current issue of the New York Times Magazine reveal an insular White House suspicious of the foreign policy establishment entrenched in Washington and New York, including senior members of Obama’s cabinet, contemptuous of traditional allies and friends in Europe and the Middle East, and disdainful of what they see as the very gullible American Media they became very adept at skillfully manipulating and ventriloquizing its narratives.
Some of
the president’s relatively young men, particularly Rhodes and Jon Favreau a
former speechwriter, are like him, gifted wordsmiths who see the skillful use
of “messaging” and the way the “narrative” is advanced, as important as the
content of the policy, and at times the “narrative” supersedes everything else.
In Obama’s universe words sometimes are synonymous with policy and action. In
these two lengthy articles, Obama’s universe is cold, unsentimental,
calculating, deceitful, and its inhabitants are willing to live comfortably
with horrendous tragedies like Syria’s “where more than 450,000 people have
been slaughtered.” What is so egregious in these two lengthy articles is that
the President and his men did not even come close to questioning a single
decision or position they have taken in the Middle East in more than seven
years. There was no hint of an attempt at introspection or honest self-criticism;
only naked, unbridled arrogance and self-righteousness.
A portrait of the advisor as a young man
The
portrait of Ben Rhodes as “the single most influential voice shaping American
foreign policy aside from Potus (Obama) himself” is stunning. Rhodes channels
and mirrors the President. The two are inseparable. The braggart Rhodes boasts
“I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.” Rhodes and Denis
McDonough, White House Chief of Staff, and others who constitute Obama’s inner
circle of advisors are more powerful and influential than Secretaries of State
and Defense. Obama insists on controlling national security issues and foreign
policy from the White House. Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel found that
out in a humiliating way when he was asked to step down because he was out of
step with the White House on Syria and ISIS, and because the inner circle never
warmed up to him. One of Obama’s most consequential and most controversial
decision was taken, after he took a walk and consulted Dennis McDonough at the
height of the Syrian crisis in the summer of 2013, when Obama decided to
retreat from his announced decision to punish the Syrian regime after its use
of chemical weapons and killing 1,400 civilians.
It was
after the walk, that Obama called his Secretaries of State and Defense, to
inform them of his decision. Obama did not even bother to consult them first.
When Obama began his secret contact with Cuba, via the Vatican, he assigned
that mission to Ben Rhodes, who began his contacts without the knowledge of
Secretary of State John Kerry. Rhodes was tasked with selling the Iran deal to
congress and the American people. When Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007
he was 30 years old, and he brought with him “a healthy contempt for the American
foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York
Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first
applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his
merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour.” Rhodes derisively refers
“to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes,
the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and 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”. One would suspect that Obama
shares this sentiment with his young guru.
Rhodes,
the morally dubious and masterful manipulator concocted a deceptive “narrative”
about the evolution of the negotiations with Iran, and successfully sold it to
the American Media. This tale of the deal alleges that negotiations became
possible in the wake of a new political reality in Iran following the elections
that brought the moderates, including President Hassan Rouhani to power. But
that narrative “was largely manufactured”. When Obama claimed in 2015, that the
deal was struck “after two years of negotiations” he was technically correct,
but “actively misleading because the most meaningful part of the negotiations
with Ira had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate”
camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme
leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” Obama’s advisors always understood that he
was eager for a deal with Iran since the beginning of his first term; “It’s the
center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to the New York Times Magazine.
In
describing how he manipulates the media, Rhodes and one of his aides drip with
derision towards the reporters they spoon feed the narratives and the messaging
they want. Rhodes’ in your-face cynicism screams in the following passage: “Rhodes
singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is
a hallmark of his private utterances. ‘All these newspapers used to have
foreign bureaus,’ he 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.’” This passage is
full of ironies. Rhodes was in his twenties when he was a congressional aide
writing reports, and he expressed his brutal contempt of reporters to a
journalist.
Obama’s bargain
President
Obama and his men come across in the two articles as insurgents trying to
disrupt the “Washington playbook” written by the despised “foreign-policy
establishment” with its dangerous “credibility” fetish, which according to
Obama tends, as a default position to prescribe militarized options to settle
international crisis. After all this is the President who was elected to end
the “dumb” war in Iraq, and terminate the longest war in America’s history in
Afghanistan; and who extended a hand to Iran’s clenched fist in his first
inaugural speech. For all of Obama’s declarations and speeches about a “new
Beginning” with the Muslim world, his intentions to settle the Arab-Israeli
conflict in his first term, his supposed sympathy with Arab and Iranian
reformers, his central interest –bordering on obsession- was to strike a
strategic bargain with Iran leading to a historic opening, hence his dogged
determination to reach a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. To that end
Obama and his men used subterfuge and misled the American people and their
representatives about the negotiations, and betrayed his promises to the Syrian
people when he refrained from seriously challenging Iran’s predations in Syria
fearing that such posture could undermine the prized nuclear deal.
Now in
the twilight of his presidency, with the nuclear deal with Iran behind him,
Obama and his men feel liberated enough, to voice their criticism of and to
express their disdain for their traditional friends and partners in the Middle
East who are seen as “free riders” or entitled to unqualified American support.
With the exception of Iran, and the imperatives of fighting al-Qaeda and the
“Islamic State” (ISIS) Obama did not exhibit serious and sustained intellectual
curiosity in the societies of the Middle East, or the kind of genuine sympathy
with the plight of the numerous victims there that would require effective
support. Reading Obama and his unscrupulous foreign policy guru Ben Rhodes one
could easily sense their disdain for things Middle Eastern, and their eagerness
to abandon the region and never look back. As related by Ben Rhodes to the New York Times Magazine, the deal with
Iran “would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its
established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel
and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the
process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.”
Betraying Syria
Syria
hovered over the negotiations with Iran. Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s
head of the C.I.A. and later Secretary of Defense said that Obama was obsessed
with avoiding a conflict with Iran, even if it was at the expense of ignoring
Syria’s tragedy, “If you ratchet up sanctions, it could cause a war. If you
start opposing their interest in Syria, well, that could start a war, too.”
When the author of the article asks Rhodes about the ability of White House
officials “to get comfortable with tragedy” in reference to Syria, Rhodes’
answer is startling; “Yeah, I admit very much to that reality,” he says.
“There’s a numbing element to Syria in particular. But I will tell you this,”
he continues. “I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make
things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of
what happens when we’re there — nearly a decade in Iraq.”
When
the author asks Rhodes why the Obama administration is “spending so much time
and energy trying to strong-arm Syrian rebels into surrendering to the dictator
who murdered their families, or why it is so important for Iran to maintain its
supply lines to Hezbollah.” Rhodes mumbles something about John Kerry, and then
says something to the effect, “that the world of the Sunni Arabs that the
American establishment built has collapsed. The buck stops with the
establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess.” This
cowardly denial and the claim that Obama is absolutely blameless in the slow
death of Syria, is the most jarring in the article.
The
Obama administration’s claims that Syrian tyrant Assad and his cohorts should
have no place in the new Syria that emerges after the negotiations rings
hollow. When the author describes Rob Malley, Obama’s senior advisor on ISIS
and Syria as the official “currently running negotiations that could keep the
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power” the circle of deceit and the betrayal
of Syria is complete. Les enfants
terribles of Obama are like him; conceited, arrogant, contemptuous and
proud of it.
