How the liberal establishment and the deep state paved the way for Trump to kill the Iran nuclear deal

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It all started from a New York Times Magazine article, on May 5, 2016. It was, as it seems, a smooth starting point for a character assassination operation, orchestrated by the liberal establishment, against a key-man behind the Iran nuclear deal.

The target was a relatively young man, then Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes.

The operation starts already from the title of the article, where Rhodes was labeled as an "aspiring novelist". This was the "signal" that was aimed to make him (in the end) appear unreliable and therefore, to de-legitimize his most important work: the positive communication of the Iran nuclear deal.

Specifically, while the article presents Rhodes as a skilled communicator (apparently due to his writing skills), it ends up making him appear, more or less, inexperienced, unrealistic (especially regarding foreign policy) and even naive up to a point.

Perhaps the most impressive about this article, is that while it gives incredible details about Rhode's personality features, other people around Obama who he worked with and his relationship with them, when it comes to the heart of the target, it doesn't provide any solid argument.

Specifically, the author claims that, "The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false."

First of all, you can identify a great contradiction in the last sentence as the author claims that "Even where the particulars of that story are true", yet "the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false." Furthermore, the author doesn't give any evidence to support this final argument. That is, which of those "particulars" are "misleading or false" and why. This is the substance of the whole point, after all.

Beyond all these "peculiarities", it seems that the article also attempted to alarm the establishment about Rhodes' background and his significant influence on some aspects of Obama's foreign policy. And especially those aspects which were shaping a mild foreign policy, based on diplomacy and dialogue, rather than war.

It also focus on the fact that Rhodes was behaving as an "outsider" and that he was standing on the opposite side of the liberal hardliners, like establishment's beloved presidential candidate at that time, Hillary Clinton.

Some interesting parts [emphasis added]:

As the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, [Ben] Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad and runs communications strategy across the White House, tasks that, taken individually, give little sense of the importance of his role. He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself.  [...] Rhodes strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign, helped negotiate the opening of American relations with Cuba after a hiatus of more than 50 years and has been a co-writer of all of Obama’s major foreign-policy speeches. [...] 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. [...] when Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed 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. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred 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. [...] “He truly gives zero [expletive] about what most people in Washington think,” Favreau says admiringly of Rhodes. “I think he’s always seen his time there as temporary and won’t care if he’s never again invited to a cocktail party, or asked to appear on ‘Morning Joe,’ or inducted into the Council on Foreign Relations hall of fame or whatever the hell they do there.” [...] Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false.  [...] “We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues,” he [Rhodes] said. “We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the gulf countries don’t like it.’ It’s the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the president’s been spinning — and I mean that not in the press sense — for almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.” [...] Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. 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,” he 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.” [...] Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely.  [...] “The complete lack of governance in huge swaths of the Middle East, that is the project of the American establishment,” he [Rhodes] declares. “That as much as Iraq is what angered me.” [...] Ben Rhodes wanted to do right, and maybe, when the arc of history lands, it will turn out that he did. At least, he tried. Something scared him, and made him feel as if the grown-ups in Washington didn’t know what they were talking about, and it’s hard to argue that he was wrong.

In the end, although the author concludes that "Ben Rhodes wanted to do right, and maybe, when the arc of history lands, it will turn out that he did.", the highlighted paragraphs above became the signal that mobilized the whole establishment apparatus, in order to begin a camouflaged campaign against the Iran nuclear deal.

Indeed, already the next day (May 6, 2016), the deep state grabbed the ball from NY Times to fiercely attack Rhodes through a Foreign Policy article with an unusually offensive language. It's impressive that in the title, Rhodes was called an "asshole"!

On May 10, 2016, it was the turn of Politico to grab the ball and push forward the operation on behalf of the liberal establishment. In the related article, the author already from the first paragraphs essentially condemns Rhodes' "unacceptable" behavior against the establishment:

                         On Monday, the White House walked back deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes’ impolitic, contemptuous quotes in the New York Times Magazine about the foreign policy establishment (“The Blob”) and the Washington media (“27-year-olds” who “literally know nothing”). Press secretary Josh Earnest said he’s confident Rhodes “would say it differently if he had the chance.” Actually, Rhodes did have the chance, when I interviewed him at length in March for a Politico Magazine story about President Obama’s communications problems. He was a bit less impolitic, but just as contemptuous. 

And further down, we read about the real target, which is the mild policy that people like Rhodes were promoting and the Iran nuclear deal, against establishment's thirst for endless wars:

                         This is the kind of American non-military leadership that excites Rhodes, and presumably excites Obama—the global climate deal in Paris, the “pivot” to Asia exemplified by the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement, the coordination of the global fight against the Ebola virus, the opening to Cuba that the Times Magazine profile barely mentioned, even though Rhodes helped negotiate it in secret. Even the Iran deal is more about Obama’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation than any chessboard vision for defusing tensions in the Middle East. The basic theory is to focus on areas in which progress is possible—peace talks in Colombia, climate talks with China, an opening to Myanmar—rather than the rift between Sunnis and Shiites.

On May 17, 2016, another combined effort by the liberal establishment and the deep state was made through Washington Post. The short article focuses around Rhodes' statement about the "echo chamber" that his team was created to promote the Iran nuclear deal. As if this is something shocking and unprecedented in the American politics framework. Well, actually this is the least shocking the pro-war establishment is doing when it wants to promote a war.

Yet, perhaps the most impressive, is a short sentence in the article that shows that when it comes to deal with anti-war policies, the entire political spectrum, together with the deep state, are forming a solid front:

                         Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Oversight Committee chairman, invited Rhodes last week to make that case to his panel, where he undoubtedly would have faced hostile questioning from Republicans. 

It appears that the whole campaign (a few months before the presidential election) was aiming to pave the way for establishment's favorite, Hillary Clinton, to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal. The establishment apparatus was almost certain that Clinton would win the election.

And in fact, some had already identified that danger, like Ryan Cooper who on May 31, 2016, wrote:

                         Strangely, the picture reminded me of probable next president Hillary Clinton and her attitude towards one of America's longstanding geopolitical antagonists, Iran. I have argued that the nuclear bargain with that country provides the most promising route forward for Western nations to begin to co-exist peacefully with Islamic ones. Yet I very strongly suspect that Hillary Clinton will not seize this opportunity. Instead, she will work against it.

So, finally, despite the shock from Trump's victory, the liberal establishment together with the deep state achieved their primary goal. And they made it so much easier for Trump to kill the Iran nuclear deal, one of the very few positive things that the Obama administration left behind.

It is also worth to mention that "In 2017, it was alleged that Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube attempted to manufacture incriminating or embarrassing information about Rhodes and his wife, as well as fellow former National Security Council staffer Colin Kahl, in an apparent effort to undermine supporters of the Iran nuclear deal."

A recent MintPress News article gives us a small taste of how effective the Iran nuclear deal could become on minimizing the chances for a devastating war with Iran (as the pro-war Washington establishment and the Israeli lobby wanted):

                         ... a cyberwarfare program code named “Nitro Zeus” was developed in the early days of the Obama administration as a backup “in case the diplomatic effort to limit its nuclear program failed and led to a military conflict.” The operation was intended to take down Iran’s air defenses, power grid, and communications systems, but was “shelved” after the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) was signed.

Yet, especially after Soleimani's assassination by Trump administration, it seems that the war with Iran is almost inevitable, either with Biden, or Trump.

Read also:

Evidence that Biden will start an AI-conducted war with Iran on behalf of the new Military-HighTech complex