Obama, Devil's Advocate For Iran...................from Dan Friedman

[This comes directly from Omri Ceren of TIP (The Israel Project), an invaluable source for learning what’s behind the news. It appears the Obama Admiration has become the PR firm for Iran. df]


Dan Friedman
NYC

 

FP article is as brutal an evaluation as you're likely to read of the administration's all-out PR campaign against skeptics of its Iran diplomacy. The PR strategy is an extension of the administration playing Iran's lawyer whenever the Iranians violate their obligations: in addition to spinning away the message, administration spokespeople have become somewhat notorious for going after the messengers. Adults in Washington have taken notice:

James Jeffrey, a career diplomat and former ambassador during the Obama administration, said he has been put off by what he considers the highhanded tone and contradictory explanations from the White House. “It’s this arrogant, you-just-don’t-know attitude that is taken by the administration,” Jeffrey told Foreign Policy. In their zeal to defend what has already been agreed under an April framework accord, U.S. officials have sometimes gone out of their way to defend Iran, insisting Tehran is abiding by its promises, Jeffrey said... David Albright, a physicist who leads the Institute for Science and International Security and who has been tracking Iran’s nuclear program for years, said he has been unfairly labeled by the administration as an opponent of an accord. He complained that a “war room” mentality has taken hold inside the White House and warned against taking a black-and-white view of the tentative deal emerging from the talks in Vienna.

The White House's pushback is that they have to act this way because they're on the side of the angels. The piece quotes Marie Harf saying "When there’s wrong information out there, the administration believes we need to push back and we need to push back hard."
But the U.S. negotiating team has a communications problem that stems from a substantive problem. The "arrogant, you-just-don't-know attitude" that Jeffrey flagged for FP is difficult to sell when they keep failing. They demand to be deferred to as if they're supremely competent diplomats and expertly informed analysts. Meanwhile the Iranians are running circles around them, and the last few times they've tried to publicly cover for Iranian cheating they've made demonstrably false claims and then tried to gaslight journalists about what words mean.
Take the controversy over Iran cheating on its JPOA stockpile obligations, which is the hook that the FP uses as its lede. On June 2 the NYT's David Sanger and William Broad published what should have been a mostly uncontroversial A6 article assessing that Iran would not meet its JPOA commitment to convert all enriched uranium gas (UF6) in excess of 7,650kg into uranium dioxide (UO2) by June 30. The State Department responded with a week-long campaign - complete with a Twitter storm from then-spokeswoman Marie Harf attacking Sanger by name - insisting that yes the Iranians would meet that obligation.
Problem 1. During the entire week of attacks, it's very likely that State's people just didn't understand the argument. They thought it was about Iran getting under the 7,650kg baseline, when in fact it was about getting under that cap by turning the gas into uranium dioxide. Harf stood at the podium for four consecutive days and basically told journalists that only idiots would be concerned about Iran not meeting the obligation, without understanding what the obligation was. On the final Friday of that week it was finally explained to her that the debate was over oxidation, and she responded that Iran had been oxidizing at various rates over the previous 6 months. Reuters journalist Arshad Mohammed then had to read her a think tank report - directly off his cell phone - informing her that actually the Iranians had stopped oxidizing their UF6 in November 2014. Her response was that she'd look into that.
Problem 2. The Iranians did not meet the oxidation requirement. When it was confirmed this week that they had fallen short - as was mathematically inevitable by the beginning of June - the administration pivoted to declaring that the requirement was never about dioxide at all, and you'd have to be an idiot for thinking otherwise. A senior official told reporters a few days ago that it's crystal clear that was never the requirement, and that critics simply didn't understand the JPOA. The claim is impossible to sustain - it was always about dioxide - but things have actually become a bit surreal here in Vienna. The public will never find out the full extent of what's being said and how it's being said, because ground rules and journalistic niceties mean that many conversations can't be published. But even from the outside looking in - just by reading between the lines of what top reporters are writing - you can tell that lots of people are frustrated by the U.S. negotiating team's weird combination of condescending confidence and being wrong all the time.
Often administration officials come off as not-even-minimally self aware, in the sense that they just don't know how badly they're getting beat on the public argument. The FP piece quotes a former administration official dismissing Congressional critics as partisan hacks:

But one former Obama administration official said no amount of engagement with Congress will ever win over entrenched opponents of a deal in Republican ranks. “When have you last seen a bipartisan consensus on anything?” said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The answer, of course, is that a few months ago the Senate voted 98-1 and the House voted 400-25 to rebuke the President on his Iran diplomacy and to demand that Congress get a vote in evaluating a final deal.
Omri.

Even if Obama Wins an Iran Nuclear Deal in Vienna, Can He Sell It at Home?