A President That Learned Nothing

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Commentary Magazine:

Ben Rhodes, a 38-year-old former creative writing major, has emerged as one of President Obama’s closest foreign policy aides in spite of his almost complete lack of any qualifications in international relations, defense, area studies, or any related field. As deputy national security adviser, he travels with the president, sees him all day long, and not only writes his speeches and communications strategies but also shapes the content of policy.

 

As an eye-opening New York Times Magazine article by David Samuels notes, he is “the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from POTUS himself”–a judgment that will no doubt rankle National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Secretary of State John Kerry but that is probably accurate. So close are they that Rhodes is said by his colleagues to have a “mind meld” with the president. “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends,” Rhodes himself says.

 

So it is worth parsing closely this high-revealing profile of the callow young man who is in de facto charge of American foreign policy. For a start he obviously shares with his boss a predilection for overly revealing on-the-record interviews. American allies were shocked in April to read Obama’s disparagement of them in an interview with Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic. Just as embarrassing are the revelations in the Samuels piece.

 

Most of the initial reaction has focused on the revelations about how Rhodes has manipulated the facts to sell the Iran deal. Samuels notes, for example, that the administration claimed that the nuclear talks got under way in 2013 because of the election of a supposed moderate, Hassan Rouhani, as Iran’s president. This “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal,” he writes. The reality is that Obama was “eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency.”

 

Moreover, the administration claimed that the deal would help “moderates” in Iran to oppose a “hard-line” faction even though Leon Panetta, Obama’s former CIA director and secretary of defense, is quoted as saying that the CIA analysis did not support the contention that the “Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between ‘hard-line’ and ‘moderate’ camps.”

 

There is much more along these lines in the article, including Rhodes’ boasts about how he feeds the White House propaganda line to Washington journalists who faithfully parrot his talking points.

 

But what really struck me about the article is the supreme arrogance that grips this White House.

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The non-education of the President.