By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, March 03, 2026
Congressional progressives must be as disoriented as the
Iranians as what remains of the Islamic Republic’s regime convulses in its
violent death throes. After all, they seem to be getting their information
about the conflict over Iran’s skies from the same sources as the outgoing
regime in Tehran.
The Jewish Insider reported Monday that the Congressional
Progressive Caucus organized an emergency briefing for its members on the war
designed to rid the world of Iran’s terror masters. The figures they tapped to
clear up their members’ confusion included the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi
and Barack Obama’s controversial former national security adviser Ben Rhodes.
Presumably, the progressives who attended this briefing
emerged from it no better informed about the nature of the conflict, the stakes
involved, or its prospects for success than they were going into it.
In an amusing spectacle earlier this month, a political
debate broadcast on Iranian TV criticized
Parsi and the group he co-founded, the National Iranian American Council,
for being an ineffective lobby for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s interests.
Today, Parsi is still demonstrating his inefficacy by insisting that this war can
only be understood as an Israeli project. As Phil Klein convincingly argued, that outlook is
contemptuous of America’s 47-year history of conflict with Iran, takes no
account of the precursors to this war, and ignores Trump’s record of holding Jerusalem in check when he deems it necessary.
All that must go by the wayside to maintain the narrative
that Trump is under the mesmeric sway of the crafty Jews. But if you genuinely
believed that falsehood to be true, you’d not take the world as it is. Rather,
you’d force events to comport with your preexisting conspiracy theory.
Presumably, the Democrats who took Parsi’s advocacy seriously are less informed
as a result.
Likewise, Ben Rhodes — a figure whose anti-Israel bona
fides were so sterling in the Obama years that his colleagues referred to the
NSC analyst by the moniker “Hamas” — also foresees disaster ahead for the United States. But Rhodes’s
track record of being wrong about the nature of events in the Middle East and their consequences is all but unrivaled. His misconceptions
about Iran contribute mightily to that record.
Ushering the Islamic Republic in from the cold was
Rhodes’s primary objective during his tenure in Washington. It was Rhodes who,
among others, successfully convinced Obama to ignore the 2009 “Green
Revolution” inside Iran. In even Obama’s estimation, that was a “mistake.” So,
too, was Obama’s Rhodes-inspired contention that the Iran nuclear deal would
transform the Islamic Republic into a responsible member of the international
community. Iran could become a “very successful regional power,” Obama told the
New Yorker in 2015. Perhaps Tehran could be persuaded
to maintain an “equilibrium” in the Middle East in which it would take the
power Obama was bequeathing to its military proxies in Iraq and Syria and not
use it. There would be a new day in the Middle East — one in which “there’s
competition, perhaps suspicion, but not active or proxy warfare,” Obama
forecast.
It was not to be. Iran would remain as committed to the
destruction of America and Israel as it always had been. Tehran would continue
the practice it had perfected throughout this century — supporting insurgents
and exporting terrorism throughout the Middle East, first in the form of Shiite and Sunni militants in Iraq and, later, the ISIS
caliphate through its vassal, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
Progressives are betting that the fall of the Islamic
Republic will beget more chaos and instability in the Middle East. They have
not accounted for how that chaos materializes in the absence of the foremost
supporter, funder, and promoter of insurgent militancy and terrorism.
Nevertheless, progressives remain assured that their pessimism is warranted.
And why wouldn’t they be? All the smartest people agree.
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