Over the weekend the Washington Post published a review of Jay Solomon's book, The Iran Wars, written by New York Times reporter Elaine Sciolino. That one of America's top three remaining newspapers assigned a review of a book written by a reporter from another of the big three (Solomon is a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal) to a reporter at the third, illustrates how much the media environment has shrunk.
Even more telling was the nature of the review, which concludes with the observation that "Those who hope to sabotage the nuclear agreement under a new administration will find this book useful."
That's weird. On Sciolino's telling, it is not just a bad book; not, for instance, a helpful account of the Obama administration's Iran policy. Rather, it should be ignored on political grounds by readers who join the reviewer in supporting the Iran nuclear agreement. It is a use of costly newsprint to tell readers to ignore a book. So why not just ignore it? It is unseemly, to say the least, to use the editorial space in an effort to erase the work of a journalist at a rival publication.
Solomon's sources aren't good enough, Sciolino complains, and he doesn't ask the right questions. These are odd technical criticisms of a national security correspondent who has broken many important stories about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, most recently concerning how the administration sent pallets loaded with cash to Iran to secure the release of American hostages.
But the point isn't really about Solomon's reporting, or his sources, why, for instance, he spoke with this official and not another. Rather, as the conclusion to Sciolino's review makes plain, the main issue is to defend the nuclear deal—and not just against ideological opponents, columnists, and pundits. No, the much more dangerous threat to President Obama's signature foreign policy initiative and its supporters comes from those who have no ideological axe to grind at all—the wide array of experts and journalists who are simply relaying facts. They have to be silenced because there is too much at stake: money, prestige, and from the most paranoid corners of the pro-JCPOA community, world peace.
Sure, Sciolino is also protecting what she perceives to be her turf. She has written about Iran since the 1970s and is keen to sound the depths of her expertise. "It is challenging to understand Iran from afar," writes Sciolino. She knows Iran very well. She interviewed the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, and his successor, Ali Khamenei. But her published work on Iran at this point has little bearing on national security. She's a travel writer.
"Isfahan boasts tilework so dense and seductive that if you gaze at it too long, you feel slightly drugged," Sciolino writes in an article about tile work for Travel & Leisure. "Swirling calligraphy and precise geometries are often unexpectedly paired with bright floral patterns."
She has a tendency to excuse the regime's depredations. "Unlike ISIS and the Taliban," she continues, "the founders of the Islamic Republic did not destroy their country's heritage or the symbols of empire and monarchy for the sake of a distorted vision of Islam." This must come as little consolation to the families and friends of those who have been jailed or tortured or murdered by the regime since its founding in 1979.
Sciolino is a member of the Times' "Tales from Persia" team, which includes other Times men, like opinion columnist Roger Cohen. "Tales From Persia" is one of the Times's luxury travel packages that offers readers a chance to visit the places they read about, led by the people who write about those lands. The travel business is part of an arrangement between the Times and the clerical regime that the paper of record, especially its Tehran correspondent Thomas Erdbrink, not to go too hard on the ruling clique in Tehran, or it will shut down the business.
In other words, Sciolino has a stake in painting a favorable picture of the clerical regime. Exactly how much she is paid to lead tours of Iran the Times would not confirm by press time, nor would the Post confirm if its editors were aware it was assigning a review to a writer with a conflict of interest that touches on personal and corporate finances.
How did this happen? Or what had to happen to the media environment that a travel writer was given space in one of America's last remaining newspapers to attack, on what the reviewer herself acknowledges are ideological grounds, a book written by a top national security reporter?
The White House perceived a general collapse of the media, which from its perspective made it easier to sell the Iran Deal to the American public. In place of what used to be known as the Fourth Estate, the administration created what Obama lieutenant Ben Rhodes called an "echo chamber." As Rhodes told David Samuels for his New York Times Magazine article, "We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively," said Rhodes, "and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares."
Why not just tell the story straight? Because everything had already gone off the rails, said Rhodes. Newspapers that once had foreign bureaus now covered everything from Washington with 27-year-olds. Therefore, as Rhodes explained to Samuels, "In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this."
However, there was rational discourse about the Iran deal, lots of it. Nuclear experts like David Albright and Ollie Heinonen criticized aspects of the agreement and were attacked on Twitter and other social media venues by organizations that Ploughshares funded. There was plenty of rational discourse—like the reporting of a host of national security correspondents, including not just Solomon, but many others, like the Associated Press's Matt Lee, Bradley Klapper, and George Jahn. When Jahn broke a story reporting that the administration agreed to let the Iranians inspect their own facilities at Parchin, the "echo chamber" jumped into action. Jeffrey Lewis of the Monterey Institute for International Studies, where he is funded by Ploughshares,* and White House "force multipliers" Vox and Al-Monitor's Laura Rozen attacked Jahn's article. Rozen went full-on conspiracy, casting a long Zionist shadow over the Jahn story when she tweeted that "Netanyahu has used "Islamic State of Iran" for IRI, as it's oddly called in draft AP [Jahn's article] reported on."
Iran experts who warned about the nature of the clerical regime were challenged by pro-JCPOA publicists, like the National Iranian American Council's Trita Parsi. NIAC is a welcome guest at the White House. Rhodes gave the keynote address for the organization's annual gala earlier this month. How well does America's pro-Iran deal Iranian lobby really understand the politics of contemporary Iran? Its co-founder Siamak Namazi was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison by the regime he advocated for.
The "echo chamber" was created not as a substitute for rational discourse but rather to drown out facts with noise. Genuine experts and real reporters were pushed to the margins by the White House's "force multipliers," some of them ideologues and others with a financial stake. Many, like Sciolino, fit in both camps. That a reporter who is now a tour guide in a business venture with the Iranian regime dismisses the work of a national security journalist is simply a version of what we've seen repeatedly over the last several years. That the Post should provide space for her campaign to defend the deal camouflaged as a book review is a symptom of what emboldened Rhodes and the White House to undermine the American press and rational discourse in the first place.
The problem for the "echo chamber" is that everything that critics of the JCPOA warned against has come to pass. Iran has not been restrained by the deal. Rather, the nuclear agreement has unleashed the regime. Because Obama does not want to endanger his chief foreign policy initiative—the marketing for which he enlisted large parts of the American intelligentsia—it seems there are few circumstances under which he will push back against Tehran. Not when the Iranians test ballistic missiles, destroy diplomatic facilities, take American sailors hostage, or fire on American ships from Yemen.
The pro-JCPOA advocates won the deal but lost the national security debate. Insofar as rational discourse does matter, they were wrong. And thus they now have no choice but to keep peddling pretty, delicate, and colorful fictions, or the political equivalent of Persian tile work.