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June 21, 2019

Ben Rhodes struggles to get his narratives straight as idiocy of Iran deal gets obvious

By Monica Showalter

After handing Iran's mullahs a billion dollars in cash to buy torpedoes and drone-killers, President Obama's former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes is in a quandary.

As a result, he's tweeting up a storm, pushing three different and quite contradictory "narratives" in a bid to blame Trump for Iran's aggression.

Start with Narrative One, which remains the pinned tweet on his Twitter feed and has been up there for weeks:

OK, so there's no crisis, and Trump's just makin' it up about the torpedoing of ships and the mullahs' recent U.S. drone shoot-down.  "Manufactured," see.  He ought to take that mess of bad prognostications down pronto.  The May 16 Washington Post op-ed he links, written by himself, has already changed its headline to something less embarrassing.

Here's another Rhodes retweet with his comment to support Narrative One that Trump is just makin' it up and there is no crisis:

OK, time for Narrative Two: There is a crisis, and it's all Trump's fault.  Trump pulled out of the Rhodes-crafted Iran deal, the one where the mullahs got a billion dollars of cash on pallets, which the Obama administration tried to cover up from the U.S. voters, and now all hell's broken loose.  Pay no attention to that little detail about how Ben's deal put the money there for the mullahs to buy torpedoes.  Orange Man Bad.  If there had been no deal pullout, the mullahs would have remained honorable to their word.  Pay no attention to that little detail that they weren't, which is why Trump scrapped the hideous make-the-mullahs-rich deal.  Here are some of Rhodes's tweets on that contradictory bit of fiction-writing (which, surprise, was Rhodes's major in college).  He pours the piety on thick:

Had enough?  Time for Narrative Three: Trump is just itching to start a war with Iran, something strongly contradicted by the actual news that...Trump isn't going to blow up the mullah hellhole at all.  Trump pulls back from the brink, as the headlines go.  But then we have Rhodes, expending all his tweet energy on promoting that idiot narrative:

For Rhodes's information, Trump ran for president on keeping the U.S. out of senseless nation-building wars.  President Obama did, too, but never managed to do what he claimed he wanted to do.  Trump blasted Obama for that but also ran as the anti-Bush, arguing that the latter got the U.S. into all kinds of wars in the name of (say earnestly) "freedom."  Trump's stance may be good, or it may be bad, but it's what he thinks; it's a fundamental element of reading his personality correctly.  His stance on Venezuela (where I think there is a case to hose the socialist hellhole out before the drug-dealers take over) is a perfect illustration.  What's more, he's got a re-election to finish, so getting the U.S. into an unpopular war probably isn't on his agenda if he can help it.  It's true he can be unpredictable, as the Syrian gassers learned, but in general, he doesn't play ten-steps-ahead speculative strategic chess for neocon-style "American power" theories.  He'll do something if there's an authentic right-here threat, such as an invasion of foreign cartels and foreign criminals killing American citizens inside their own country.  But he's very unlikely to get the U.S. into a long involved war with stone-aged barbarians who gag at the introduction of "freedom."

Now that Trump has squelched the possibility of a war with the mullahs, for now, at least (always good to keep the mullahs on their toes), Ben's out of narratives.  They've all fallen apart.  But don't count Rhodes out.  Look for Narrative Four, coming to his Twitter feed soon.

Image credit: Twitter screen shot.