Apart from the news that their deadline has been extended through Friday (at which point it will…be extended again, I would imagine), there’s not a whole lot to say about the Iran talks at the moment. But there is always something to say about how the “no deal” folks are covering the talks, because they always find some new and creative ways to do it. And when I say “creative,” I mean “creative with the truth,” because that’s how these folks have been rolling lately. Inevitably the “creative” part of the story gets corrected somehow, but as in most things the correction never quite makes up for the initial error.
Take this recent case that was highlighted by Media Matters. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes spoke with Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and now you’ve either just scored a BINGO! on your natsec wonk card or you’ve checked off the final couple of boxes on my “if you ever see me write this phrase, please take my computer away from me” list. Anyway, Rhodes said that the Obama administration thinks (hopes) that a nuclear deal would lead to political change inside Iran (“we believe that a world in which there is a deal with Iran is much more likely to produce an evolution in Iranian behavior than a world in which there is no deal”). But he also made the inarguable, if somewhat hollow, point that any Iran deal has to stand on its own merit for the duration of the deal, or in other words that it can’t be so weak that it depends on such political change for its terms to be effective.
Nobody could possibly dispute this logic, since the Islamic Republic probably ain’t going anywhere in the next decade despite our best hopes. Well, almost nobody could object; enter Very Serious National Security Wonks like the Brookings Institution’s Mike Doran, who will object to anything that anybody from this administration has to say about Iran short of an announcement that the airstrikes have commenced. On Twitter, always the place for high-minded discourse, Doran ignored what Rhodes said about how the deal can’t rely on Iran changing, then did a little artful paraphrase of the rest of his comments:
https://twitter.com/Doranimated/status/615870119655424000
The paraphrase is a tried and true Twitter joke format, and yes Doran could have made it clearer that he was paraphrasing Rhodes, but that would have been an extraordinarily dumb thing for Rhodes to have actually said. If you were, say, a journalist interested in writing about Rhodes’s interview with Goldberg, instead of relying on a single tweet about that interview, you could, you know, watch the video of the thing yourself to see if those words actually came out of Rhodes’s mouth. These guys were speaking to each other at the Aspen Ideas Festival, not in a parking garage under the Hoover Building, so the whole thing was available on YouTube. As it turns out, actually, Doran linked to the freaking YouTube video in his tweet.
Now enter the “journalists” at Breitbart.com, specifically editor Joel Pollak, who elected not to watch the video but to just cite Doran’s tweet as though Rhodes had spoken those exact words:
Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes-who lacks any prior qualifications for the post-has explained to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen Ideas Festivalon Monday that the administration believes that a bad Iran deal is worth doing because political reform inside the Iranian regime is more likely with the deal than without. Or, to use Rhodes’s own words: “We believe that the kiss of the nuke deal will turn the Iranian frog into a handsome prince.”
Those are not “Rhodes’s own words,” though, which is kind of a problem if you’re into doing journalism. Goldberg (and you know up is down when Jeffrey Goldberg is the good guy here) accused Breitbart of “manufacturing quotes,” and Doran clarified (for the especially dense) that he was making fun of Rhodes, not accurately quoting him. Pollak eventually did the literal least he could do while still pretending to do journalism, putting a strike through “own words” in the quote above, and then leaving the rest of his piece untouched.
Lazy and obtuse misquoting is bad. Also bad is deliberately ignoring the rest of what Rhodes said about the final deal needing to stand on its own, which both Pollak and Doran have done. Pollak’s lame correction doesn’t come close to undoing the harm that he and Doran have done by propagating a half-truth (or, in Pollak’s case, a whole untruth).
Something similar happened a couple of weeks ago, when the Washington Institute for Near East Policy got together a big group of Iran…oh, let’s say observers (I was going to go with “experts,” but one of them is Joe Lieberman, so no), to write an open letter to the Obama administration laying out what they believe a comprehensive deal should include. Among the signers were several folks who have worked in the Obama administration on the Iran file, most prominently Robert Einhorn, formerly the State Department’s Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control. The content of the letter isn’t horrible, but it does seem to fix red-lines to things that really don’t need to be red-lined, and adopts the posture that nothing less than a full Iranian surrender to America’s ideal deal should be accepted when the reality is that such an outcome is neither possible nor required for a “good deal” from a non-proliferation standpoint.
Still, there’s nothing really wrong with producing a letter like this. It reminds everybody what the goals should be with respect to the talks and it can even send a message to the Iranian side just as Ayatollah Khamenei utters hard-line missives partly to send a message to the P5+1. So OK, cool. But the fact that WINEP got former Obama people who are otherwise pro-deal, like Einhorn, to sign its letter alongside people who have shown themselves to be utterly opposed to any deal, like Lieberman and, well, nearly everybody else at WINEP, is a bit of a head-scratcher. Unless, that is, if you’re fellow deal-opponent (in the guise of a humble journalist) David Sanger of The New York Times. Sanger took that WINEP letter and ran with it, under a headline blaring that “Ex-Advisers Warn Obama That Iran Nuclear Deal ‘May Fall Short’ of Standards”:
Five former members of President Obama’s inner circle of Iran advisers have written an open letter expressing concern that a pending accord to stem Iran’s nuclear program “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement” and laying out a series of minimum requirements that Iran must agree to in coming days for them to support a final deal.
Several of the senior officials said the letter was prompted by concern that Mr. Obama’s negotiators were headed toward concessions that would weaken international inspection of Iran’s facilities, back away from forcing Tehran to reveal its suspected past work on weapons, and allow Iranian research and development that would put it on a course to resuming intensive production of nuclear fuel as soon as the accord expires.
The public nature of the announcement by some of Mr. Obama’s best-known former advisers, all of whom had central roles in the diplomatic, intelligence and military efforts to counter Iran’s program, adds to the challenge facing Secretary of State John Kerry as the negotiations head toward a deadline of next Tuesday.
…
The substance of the letter is less notable for what it says — the positions were frequent talking points for the Obama administration before it faced the inevitable compromises involved in negotiations — than for the influence of its signatories.
Among them is Dennis B. Ross, a longtime Middle East negotiator who oversaw Iran policy at the White House during the first Obama term; David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director who oversaw covert operations against Iran until he resigned two years ago; and Robert Einhorn, a longtime State Department proliferation expert who helped devise and enforce the sanctions against Iran.
Oh man, even Obama’s own people think he’s caved too much! Sound the alarm! Except, wait, here’s Einhorn telling Foreign Policy that Sanger missed the point entirely:
The White House insists that the five demands outlined by the group match the priorities that U.S. negotiators are seeking in Vienna. Yet media coverage of the letter has led many to believe that Obama’s former advisors have lost trust in the president’s negotiating team. Two signers of the letter say that’s patently false.
“That’s not at all what the statement was about,” said Einhorn, a nonproliferation expert and a co-signer of the letter.
“The key thing is not that there were some former Obama officials raising questions,” he added. “The key thing is you have this diverse group coming together on a set of reasonable and achievable recommendations.”
Reasonable people may argue about WINEP’s intentions in drafting the letter in the first place, though with their track record on this issue I can’t personally see giving them the benefit of the doubt, and reasonable people may argue about whether Einhorn is being disingenuous in that FP piece or if he was really naive enough to sign that letter without realizing that somebody would use it just the way Sanger did. But it is inarguable that Sanger, who has to be deal opponents’ favorite beat writer at this point, took the letter and dutifully ascribed to it the harshest and most critical interpretation possible. Anyone reading that article in the NYT would come away convinced that even Obama’s former advisers have abandoned him as he desperately gilds Iran’s pathway to a nuclear bomb, an interpretation that is clearly refuted by Einhorn in the FP piece. But since most people who read the initial error (or in this case, falsehood) don’t read the correction (in general, and specifically in this case since more people read the NYT than read FP), the damage in terms of public support for the talks is done. Mission accomplished for Sanger and (arguably) WINEP.
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