A tweet by Ben Rhodes, a former top national security aide for US President Barack Obama, on May 7 could have been shrugged off as a harmless encapsulation of the Democratic administration's many Middle East policy misjudgments. But with Joe Biden, Obama's vice president for eight years, launching his bid for the party's nomination for the 2020 presidential race, a comeback by the woolly-headed brain trust of the "hope and change" administration cannot be entirely ruled out.
As the Trump administration announced it was sending a carrier strike group and bombers to the Middle East in preparation for a possible attack by Iran or Iran-backed militias, Rhodes said on Twitter:
"Saudi Arabia:
- Violates human rights
- Oppresses women
- Murders journalists
- Has citizens who have financed / engaged in terror
Why is that OK but Iran is in US crosshairs?"
For those who have followed Rhodes' political career, the tweet was not surprising because he now sits on the board of the Ploughshares Fund, believed to be the largest grant-making US organization with a focus "exclusively on peace and security issues." The fund is reported to have played a major role in building US media and public support for Obama's diplomatic efforts that culminated in the signing of the nuclear accord by Iran, the so-called P5+1 powers and the European Union in July 2015.
According to a May 2016 New York Times magazine feature entitled "The aspiring novelist who became Obama's foreign-policy guru," Rhodes "strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign." The article further said the Obama administration hoped elimination of "the fuss about Iran's nuclear program" would "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."
It is one thing to see such commentators appear on TV shows to rail at US President Donald Trump's policies with regard to Iran and Venezuela. It would be another thing altogether if the same commentators were to call the shots at the State Department and the Pentagon come January 2021.
Given the state of tension between the pro- and anti-Islamist camps, it is tempting to impute the reflexive hostility of many US pundits towards an assertive Saudi Arabia and the UAE to lobbyists for Iran, Qatar or the Muslim Brotherhood. But that would be giving these lobbies too much credit. Chalking up the animosity to the blurring of the ideologies of Western "progressives" and Islamists (of both the Sunni and Shia varieties) since the collapse of communism makes more sense. But, again, only up to a point.
Whatever the explanation may be the fact is, a simple-minded US approach to the complex problems of the Middle East, or any other region for that matter, is not cost-free. The all-too-common American fixation with the perceived imperfections of stalwart allies has almost blinded Democratic Party "progressives" to the manifold geopolitical threats posed by "malign actors and strategic competitors", to borrow a phrase from former US Defence Secretary James Mattis' farewell letter.
Thus Rhodes and his ilk are unlikely to vent their spleen at Iran's theocracy and its "deep state" for their meddling in the affairs of weak, war-torn and multi-sectarian Middle East countries. Equally unlikely would be outright criticism of the many ways in which the Iranian regime and Turkey's Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been persecuting and hounding their secular domestic critics and Kurdish dissidents. Put simply, the credo of Rhodes and like-minded Democrats is: You may be a friend of America, but that doesn't automatically make you our friend.
To be certain, the American left has a long history of disagreeing with mainstream US foreign policy, especially during its more militaristic phases. Indeed, only those with a shallow understanding of how democratic governance operates would expect all members of the US foreign-policy establishment to think alike. Besides, for every wide-eyed once and future Democratic national security official like Rhodes, there is also a clear-sighted Brett McGurk, who served as Obama's special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter the Islamic State (ISIS) group.
But that being said, there are no good excuses for confusing ally with adversary as egregiously as Rhodes did in his tweet. The amount of reliable reporting on the Yemen conflict, Iranian links to botched terrorist plots in Europe and the Saudi liberalization process is sufficiently large to dissuade a former senior US administration official from telegraphing his simplistic, one-dimensional thoughts on what the late Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami called "a Hobbesian world of perpetual strife and menace".
In hindsight, those who accuse officials of the Obama administration during its second term of having winked at Iran's hegemonic ambitions in pursuit of a nuclear deal are hardly being disingenuous. Few of those officials, including Rhodes, have publicly expressed remorse for their implicit acceptance of Iran's projection of power as a quid pro quo that, among other things, helped turned the tide of Syria's war in favour of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship at an astronomical human cost and deepened sectarian divisions across the Middle East.
But then again, the Democratic Party is no longer the party of liberalism as the rest of the world understands the term. With its two Muslim Congress members known more for their antipathy towards America's closest partners in the Islamic world than for their advocacy of women's rights in Afghanistan or civil rights in Syria, it is no surprise that a number of Democratic lawmakers have been revealing an unhealthy obsession with the policies and politics of a changing Saudi Arabia in view of its potential for pleasing their "progressive" base.
Interestingly, notwithstanding his oft-stated loathing for the kingdom and his apparent soft spot for its regional rival, Iran, Rhodes probably has few illusions about the essential nature of the Tehran regime. In the 2015 New York Times magazine feature, he was quoted as saying: "I would prefer that it turns out that [President Hassan] Rouhani and [Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad] Zarif are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in ... But we are not betting on that."
Judging by this comment, Rhodes knows full well the answer to the question — Why "Iran is in US crosshairs?" — that he raised in his seemingly jejune tweet of May 7. Nevertheless, by ticking all the right political boxes using Twitter's 280-character limit if he can land a job as a national-security adviser to one of the many Democratic presidential hopefuls, perhaps even Biden, Rhodes can hope to complete the unfinished business of American declinism — to enable the US to "disentangle itself from its established system of alliances" and "to begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East."
As the Trump administration announced it was sending a carrier strike group and bombers to the Middle East in preparation for a possible attack by Iran or Iran-backed militias, Rhodes said on Twitter:
"Saudi Arabia:
- Violates human rights
- Oppresses women
- Murders journalists
- Meddles in the affairs [of] Middle Eastern countries
- Is fighting a war that endangers millions in Yemen- Has citizens who have financed / engaged in terror
Why is that OK but Iran is in US crosshairs?"
For those who have followed Rhodes' political career, the tweet was not surprising because he now sits on the board of the Ploughshares Fund, believed to be the largest grant-making US organization with a focus "exclusively on peace and security issues." The fund is reported to have played a major role in building US media and public support for Obama's diplomatic efforts that culminated in the signing of the nuclear accord by Iran, the so-called P5+1 powers and the European Union in July 2015.
According to a May 2016 New York Times magazine feature entitled "The aspiring novelist who became Obama's foreign-policy guru," Rhodes "strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign." The article further said the Obama administration hoped elimination of "the fuss about Iran's nuclear program" would "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."
Still, the tweet of May 7 was shocking due to its lack of tact and nuance and what is said about the worldview that people who until 2016 held, to all intents and purposes, the reins of US foreign policy. Even if Rhodes, in keeping with social media's spirit, was being extra provocative for the sake of it, there is little doubt that the pool of foreign-policy mavens which Democratic presidential nominees are sure to tap in the coming months have trouble making a distinction between the West's all-weather friends and implacable foes.
It is one thing to see such commentators appear on TV shows to rail at US President Donald Trump's policies with regard to Iran and Venezuela. It would be another thing altogether if the same commentators were to call the shots at the State Department and the Pentagon come January 2021.
Given the state of tension between the pro- and anti-Islamist camps, it is tempting to impute the reflexive hostility of many US pundits towards an assertive Saudi Arabia and the UAE to lobbyists for Iran, Qatar or the Muslim Brotherhood. But that would be giving these lobbies too much credit. Chalking up the animosity to the blurring of the ideologies of Western "progressives" and Islamists (of both the Sunni and Shia varieties) since the collapse of communism makes more sense. But, again, only up to a point.
Whatever the explanation may be the fact is, a simple-minded US approach to the complex problems of the Middle East, or any other region for that matter, is not cost-free. The all-too-common American fixation with the perceived imperfections of stalwart allies has almost blinded Democratic Party "progressives" to the manifold geopolitical threats posed by "malign actors and strategic competitors", to borrow a phrase from former US Defence Secretary James Mattis' farewell letter.
Thus Rhodes and his ilk are unlikely to vent their spleen at Iran's theocracy and its "deep state" for their meddling in the affairs of weak, war-torn and multi-sectarian Middle East countries. Equally unlikely would be outright criticism of the many ways in which the Iranian regime and Turkey's Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been persecuting and hounding their secular domestic critics and Kurdish dissidents. Put simply, the credo of Rhodes and like-minded Democrats is: You may be a friend of America, but that doesn't automatically make you our friend.
To be certain, the American left has a long history of disagreeing with mainstream US foreign policy, especially during its more militaristic phases. Indeed, only those with a shallow understanding of how democratic governance operates would expect all members of the US foreign-policy establishment to think alike. Besides, for every wide-eyed once and future Democratic national security official like Rhodes, there is also a clear-sighted Brett McGurk, who served as Obama's special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter the Islamic State (ISIS) group.
But that being said, there are no good excuses for confusing ally with adversary as egregiously as Rhodes did in his tweet. The amount of reliable reporting on the Yemen conflict, Iranian links to botched terrorist plots in Europe and the Saudi liberalization process is sufficiently large to dissuade a former senior US administration official from telegraphing his simplistic, one-dimensional thoughts on what the late Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami called "a Hobbesian world of perpetual strife and menace".
In hindsight, those who accuse officials of the Obama administration during its second term of having winked at Iran's hegemonic ambitions in pursuit of a nuclear deal are hardly being disingenuous. Few of those officials, including Rhodes, have publicly expressed remorse for their implicit acceptance of Iran's projection of power as a quid pro quo that, among other things, helped turned the tide of Syria's war in favour of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship at an astronomical human cost and deepened sectarian divisions across the Middle East.
But then again, the Democratic Party is no longer the party of liberalism as the rest of the world understands the term. With its two Muslim Congress members known more for their antipathy towards America's closest partners in the Islamic world than for their advocacy of women's rights in Afghanistan or civil rights in Syria, it is no surprise that a number of Democratic lawmakers have been revealing an unhealthy obsession with the policies and politics of a changing Saudi Arabia in view of its potential for pleasing their "progressive" base.
Interestingly, notwithstanding his oft-stated loathing for the kingdom and his apparent soft spot for its regional rival, Iran, Rhodes probably has few illusions about the essential nature of the Tehran regime. In the 2015 New York Times magazine feature, he was quoted as saying: "I would prefer that it turns out that [President Hassan] Rouhani and [Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad] Zarif are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in ... But we are not betting on that."
Judging by this comment, Rhodes knows full well the answer to the question — Why "Iran is in US crosshairs?" — that he raised in his seemingly jejune tweet of May 7. Nevertheless, by ticking all the right political boxes using Twitter's 280-character limit if he can land a job as a national-security adviser to one of the many Democratic presidential hopefuls, perhaps even Biden, Rhodes can hope to complete the unfinished business of American declinism — to enable the US to "disentangle itself from its established system of alliances" and "to begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East."
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Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw. |
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