The Iran Deal Wasn’t About Nukes At All

[Geee]

The Federalist:

Remember the Iran deal? Of course you do. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was one of the greatest diplomatic agreements of our time, a last-ditch effort to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb and thus avert inevitable military action by the United States and its allies. Hard negotiations provided a verifiable inspections plan that would keep Iran walking the straight and narrow for at least a decade, if not longer. The media, of course, served only as the impartial platform for analysis and debate.

Anyone who doubted this narrative or raised almost any objections to the deal was just a hater, maybe even a racist with a personal grudge against Barack Obama. (Also against the deal, of course: Jews with divided loyalties.) After all, the experts—non-partisan, of course—assured us that everything was in order.

 

This was all nonsense. What really happened was that the White House put out a set of talking points, not all of them true or accurate, to a trusted circle of journalists and advocacy groups. Those groups worked with experts in other groups, who then supported those talking points in media already friendly to the White House narrative. Asked for comment, the White House agreed with the experts it had primed, then fed more talking points back into the loop.

 

We no longer have to speculate about this. As anyone paying attention now knows, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes—it’s so hard to type those words—couldn’t help but take a victory lap in front of The New York Times. Rhodes named names and organizations, crowing that the White House had created “an echo chamber” mainly composed of journalists who are “27 years old and…literally know nothing.”

 

Follow the Money, Indeed

 

Critics of the Rhodes story have pushed back, in some cases with justification. Rhodes’s shot at Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic, for example, was inexplicable and gratuitous; Goldberg is neither 27 nor a greenhorn. On the other hand, Rhodes also named Al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen, to absolutely no one’s surprise. As Mark Hemingway has noted, “Rozen’s slavish devotion to Obama’s Iran policy has been something to behold,” and Rhodes naming her seems almost beside the point now.