By David French
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
For much of the last week, the very small world of
pundits and policy wonks has been buzzing about the New York Times’s extended profile by David Samuels of Obama
foreign-policy guru Ben Rhodes, the “aspiring novelist” (as the headline put
it) with a master’s in fine arts who sneers with contempt at the president’s
foes and has helped helm American foreign policy in the age of ISIS.
The story is rich with detail that should scandalize
anyone who is concerned with either truth or humility in American policymaking.
Rhodes apparently lied to sell the Iran deal to the American public, counting
on ignorant, sympathetic leftist journalists and activists to peddle the
administration’s foreign-policy line and dominate the public debate. The Obama
administration has become inured to tragedy, Rhodes confessed, adding, “There’s
a numbing element to Syria in particular,” where 450,000 lives have been lost.
And, of course, when it comes to failures and disappointments, the buck stops
with the traditional foreign-policy and military “establishment” that Obama
(and Rhodes) despise.
For men like Rhodes, his “entire job” (according to
former speechwriter Jon Favreau) was assisting in a “larger restructuring of
the American narrative.” In other words, Obama and Rhodes and Jarrett had a new
story to tell about our nation and the world; all facts and circumstances were
shaped to fit that story. And so — to use one illustration from the piece —
Iran’s capture and humiliation of American sailors wasn’t really a story of
American weakness but in reality a
story of American strength.
There is nothing unique about Rhodes. In fact, he’s a
perfect stand-in for America’s arrogant, incurious elite — the class of
brilliant fools who populate the upper echelons of government, academia, and
media. Last week, Minding the Campus’s
John Leo interviewed Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, the lion of campus
conservatism, and Mansfield noted:
Students doubt that there really is
anything fundamentally that they need to learn. And they look at themselves and
say, if I don’t need to learn anything fundamentally, my attitudes deserve to
remain as they are right now.
These Harvard undergraduates, allegedly the best of the
best, of course defend those values and “attitudes” zealously, and they do so
with all their considerable intellectual and rhetorical gifts. But their
attitudes are impervious to facts. And so it is in the Obama administration,
where neither consistent failure nor bloody disappointment can alter his view
of the world. In the memorable phrase of an unnamed official, “Clearly the
world has disappointed [Obama.]” It stubbornly refused to conform to his
expectations.
We all form and hold strong beliefs well before they’re
tested by experience. We reflect the views of our parents and peers —
buttressed by selective readings and reinforced by antipathy towards our
ideological enemies. But the wise person not only tests his views constantly
against the best expressions of the other side; he also examines them in the
cold light of reality.
There was a time when reality bested my beliefs. In
January 2005, I listened to George W. Bush’s second inaugural and nodded right
along as he declared that the “best hope for peace in our world is the
expansion of freedom in all the world.” And while I wasn’t quite in agreement
that the “call of freedom comes to every mind and soul,” I believed that the
desire for freedom crossed cultures, faiths, and national boundaries.
Then I went to Iraq, and I saw what I should have known
from the start, that there are desires that are much stronger than the desire
for freedom — the desire for vengeance, for example, or the desire to follow
Allah even through the oblivion of a suicide bomb. In the face of this reality,
I had a choice: Shape the narrative to defend my beliefs, or surrender to the
facts and adjust my worldview. I chose the latter.
There are modest signs that Obama has learned at least
some bitter lessons. We’re back in ground combat in Iraq. We’re not leaving
Afghanistan before the end of his term. But in all the larger ways, Obama,
Rhodes, and the vast majority of the Left’s elites have stared reality in the
face and have not only refused to acknowledge it, they’ve actively worked to
deny its existence.
The Obama administration has famously walled itself off
from military officials — confident that it knows more about the Muslim world
than the men and women who’ve been fighting in its midst for more than 14
years. It extols the virtues of the Muslim world against all available
evidence. It dismisses thoughtful critics and has open contempt for the
opposition. As one anonymous source said of Obama himself, “He has a real
problem with what I call the assignment of bad faith.” In other words, “he
regards everyone on the other side at this point as being a bunch of
bloodthirsty know-nothings from a different era who play by the old book.”
That’s the left elite in a nutshell. Their virtue is
presumed, their critics are despicable, and a self-flattering story always
trumps the truth.
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