Americans Duped by White House on Iran Deal, Top Adviser Boasts

By Al Perrotta Published on May 7, 2016

President Obama played the American people when it came to the Iran nuclear deal and used the easily pliable media as his instrument. That’s the take-away from a New York Times Magazine profile of the man who says he orchestrated the con, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.

The oft-repeated mantra from the Administration was that Obama opened up negotiations with Iran on a nuclear deal with “moderates” after the election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013. Obama also repeatedly said the only choice was between the deal and war. In truth, according to this new report, negotiations began when the Holocaust-denying hard-line fanatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in power, with the groundwork beginning much earlier. And the White House, says Rhodes, is “not betting on” the current regime being moderate either.

As the NY Post reports, “In a revealing article posted on The New York Times Web site Obama’s foreign-policy guru Ben Rhodes bragged about how he helped create the false narrative because the public would not have accepted the deal had it known that Iranian hard-liners were still calling the shots.”

Rather than trust the American people or even try to convince the American people, Rhodes chose to craft a misinformation campaign. Obama would be, in the Times’ phrasing, “actively misleading” the public. As The Weekly Standard notes, “It was Rhodes who framed the deal as a choice between peace and war, and it was Rhodes who set up a messaging unit to sell the deal that created an ‘echo chamber’ in the press.”

The idea was for the media to repeat whatever the White House or their hand-picked surrogates would say. As Times author David Samuels writes, “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.” Rhodes was playing on ignorance.

“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.”

Another possible reason for the media to play: political allegiance. Rhode’s assistant, Ned Price, told the Times how he’d feed narratives to the administration’s “compadres” in the press and watch the narrative spread through social media. “I’d give them some color,” Price says, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’d be putting this message out on their own.”

One example was reporter Laura Rozen, now of Al-Monitor, which covers the Middle East. “Rosen was my RSS feed,” says aide Tanya Somanader. “She would just find everything and repeat it.”

And the media is still playing along. As the Washington Free Beacon observed, the White House press corps had the opportunity today to ask President Obama four questions. Not a single question was about his foreign policy guru admitting the White House lied about the Iran deal. However, there were three questions about Donald Trump.

As for Ben Rhodes, it may not be the first time he’s chosen deception over truth. It was Ben Rhodes who shaped the Obama administration’s Benghazi talking points, peddling the notoriously false narrative that the terrorist attack was “rooted in an Internet video and not a failure of policy” In that case, he apparently lied about what led to the death of four Americans, and did so to protect Obama.

Here he lied about who we were dealing with in Iran and what was at stake. With nuclear weapons now destined for the future hands of Iran’s mullahs, God help us all.

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