Suzanne Maloney drags Samuels and his Ben Rhodes profile over the coals one more time:
Samuels writes that the underlying intent of the Iran nuclear deal was to “create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey” and “effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.”
The problem with this assertion is that Rhodes never says any such thing. Nor do any of the other U.S. officials quoted in the story, or anyone else for that matter. And nowhere does the article assemble actual evidence to corroborate this provocative description of the Obama administration’s grand strategy in the Middle East [bold mine-DL]. This proposition was first and most fully articulated by my former colleague Michael Doran, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in a 2015 article for an obscure internet magazine that went viral. Its thesis clearly animates many of the deal’s opponents. But absent evidence, the premise that Obama harbors a “secret plan” to jettison America’s deep security partnership with Israel and the Gulf states constitutes pure conjecture, not fact.
The profile’s serious errors are not surprising when we remember that the modus operandi of almost all Iran hawks in the debate over the nuclear deal was to misrepresent everything about the deal and the diplomacy related to it. If the deal blocked Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, opponents of the deal said that it “paved the way” to an Iranian nuke. If it imposed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, opponents insisted that the deal “legitimized” Iranian nuclear ambitions. Deal opponents took each detail, turned it on its head, and deliberately spread falsehoods to undermine the deal’s chances of being accepted in the U.S. Similarly, opponents of the deal didn’t attack the agreement as a prelude to rapprochement with Iran because there was any proof that this was the administration’s ultimate goal, but because they knew that if they presented the deal this way it would make it a harder sell at home. “Obama abandons allies” is the story these people have been trying to push for years, and despite the fact that there is no evidence to back it up it persists because it is a useful line of attack.
The profile’s most controversial claim that the administration deceived the public on the nuclear deal is without merit, as Maloney shows once again, but it is consistent with the way that Iran hawks took unremarkable and even positive aspects of diplomacy with Iran and tried to turn them into proof of betrayal and appeasement. There has been a massive campaign of deception perpetrated by one side in this debate, and there has been an attempt to actively mislead the American public about the nuclear deal with Iran, but it wasn’t directed from the White House. It was the concerted effort of the deal’s opponents to sabotage and undermine it, to which this profile makes a belated addition.