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What David Samuels Wants: Better Readers

I will try to oblige.
new york times

I have to admit, I found David Samuels’s defense of his now-infamous New York Times Magazine article to be delightfully amusing. From my perspective, the important paragraph of his defense is this one:

But why were any of them [Rhodes and his fellow staffers] talking to me? I soon surmised that Rhodes’s motivation in allowing me to peek behind the curtain came from a disquiet he felt at the possibility, or the likelihood, that the machinery he managed so brilliantly would soon be in the hands of his successors, who might use it to do things that he thought could be quite dangerous — like goading the United States into another pointless, bloody foreign war. Rhodes readily admitted to me that the work he does is a potentially dangerous distortion of democracy, but he also felt that it had become a necessary evil, caused by the fracturing of the 20th-century mass audience and the decline of the American press. He expressed a deep personal hopelessness about the possibility of open, rational public debate in a brutally partisan climate. But didn’t the country deserve better? I kept asking him. Over time, our conversations around this point evolved, without either of us directly mentioning it, into a kind of gentleman’s bet: My article would go as hard as I could at the truth as I saw it, The Times would publish it, and one of us would be proved right while the other would be proved wrong.

So, let’s unpack this rich paragraph, with a view to the context of the defense as a whole. Samuels is writing a profile of Rhodes. Rhodes is suspiciously cooperative. Samuels wonders: what’s his motive for cooperating? What message does he want Samuels to get across? His answer: Rhodes is trying to expose his own successful manipulation of the press in order to prevent his successor from doing the same. Samuels, concurring that Rhodes manipulated the press and that this is a problem, basically gives Rhodes the spin Samuels thinks he wants. This, supposedly, is totally different from what the journalists Samuels criticizes do when they give administration officials the spin they ask for.

Meanwhile, Samuels wraps that critique of the press around a fierce indictment of the Iran deal itself – an indictment Rhodes can reasonably expect because he knows Samuels and where he is coming from. Nowhere in Samuels’s self-defense does he acknowledge that this is what he is doing in the piece – on the contrary, he protests that he wasn’t ever really an opponent of the deal, but appeared on a panel about how to fight the deal because he and the organizer share interests in literature and sports. He says that his critics are engaged in “fever-dream caricature” when they call him a neocon, but neglects to note that the neoconservative press has latched on to Samuels’s piece as proof that they were right in their complaints about the Iran deal all along.

In other words, Samuels wrote a sly, sophisticated skewering of a man he calls “the bravest person I’ve ever met in Washington,” and of his boss’s approach to foreign policy, a piece that requires the delicate peeling of multiple onion skin layers to fully appreciate – and, when attacked from all sides for shoddy journalism, defends it by saying, “I wrote a piece about how the press can no longer engage in open debate, which leaves them open to partisan manipulation – and see? These attacks on me prove it.” I can only conclude that Samuels’s real complaint is that his rivals and opponents just aren’t playing the game at a level that can keep him from getting bored. Though, I really can’t blame him for that – they mostly aren’t playing the game at a level that keeps me from getting bored either.

Samuels’s original piece, which is all about the manipulation of narrative to persuade, invites to be read with the sophistication that Samuels brought to his reading of the White House’s sales job. On the surface, Samuels’s indictment is that the Iran deal was sold deceptively to the public – the secret negotiations that pre-dated the Iranian elections were kept secret, and the deal was linked to the promise of internal reform in Iran that the administration never really believed in. These surface indictments are readily refuted – indeed, they are largely refuted in Samuels’s own article.

The deeper indictment, though, is that the deal represents a larger tilt toward Iran in American foreign policy and/or a strategic withdrawal from our existing commitments in the Middle East, and this secret agenda was never explained in public. Moreover, the important people who were deceived, in this reading, were not members of the American press, but the leaders of countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia – and former members of Obama’s own administration like Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta. The deception involved convincing them that the administration was committed to using force to prevent Iran from going nuclear if that proved necessary, and thereby making it unnecessary for Israel to launch a far-riskier strike of their own, when in fact the administration did not have any such commitment.

This indictment is impossible to prove or disprove because what’s being claimed is that the real motive behind the deal is still being kept secret. But it’s certainly possible for Samuels to prove that key players believe they were deceived, because they told him so:

As secretary of defense, he [Panetta] tells me, one of his most important jobs was keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, from launching a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They were both interested in the answer to the question, ‘Is the president serious?’ ” Panetta recalls. “And you know my view, talking with the president, was: If brought to the point where we had evidence that they’re developing an atomic weapon, I think the president is serious that he is not going to allow that to happen.”

Panetta stops.

“But would you make that same assessment now?” I ask him.

“Would I make that same assessment now?” he asks. “Probably not.”

Whether Samuels thinks the Obama administration was honest in its intent with the Iran deal is of secondary importance. Whether the press repeated Obama administration spin is of secondary importance. The story is that Hillary Clinton’s people are now saying that they were duped, and they are going on the record about that. Samuels is doing something very similar to what Jeffrey Goldberg does when he recounts conversations with Netanyahu and Obama and so forth. The only difference is that Samuels believes he knows exactly what he is doing, and believes that Goldberg doesn’t, because he believes Goldberg doesn’t understand the way the world really works.

And how does Samuels understand it? Well, to get a handle on that question, it’s worth actually reading that old Slate piece of his predicting (inaccurately) that Israel was going to bomb Iran. Far from being a piece of advocacy, as is being claimed in some quarters, it is a consummate – and consummately cold – piece of analysis. The argument, with substantiating quotes, runs as follows:

1. The Israeli-American relationship is rooted in Israeli power, and the threat that power poses to stability in the region, and hence to American interests.

By shattering the old balance of power in the Middle East with its spectacular military victory in the Six Day War, Israel announced itself to America as the reigning military power in the region and as a profoundly destabilizing influence that needed to be contained.

2. What Israel gets from the alliance – which truly dates from after 1967 – is American protection in the event they are existentially threatened. In exchange, what they have given up is a degree of freedom of action.

Israel traded its freedom to engage in high-risk, high-payoff exploits like the Suez Canal adventure or the Six Day War for the comfort of a military and diplomatic guarantee from the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. As a regional American client, Israel would draw on the military and diplomatic power of its distant patron in exchange for allowing America to use its control over Israel as leverage with neighboring Arab states.

3. What America gets from the alliance is the ability to threaten other regimes with a more unrestrained Israel if they don’t accede to American demands – demands that mostly relate to . . . making peace with Israel.

With each American-brokered peace move—from Camp David to the Madrid Conference to Oslo and Annapolis—the United States has been able to hold up its leverage over Israel as both a carrot and a stick to the Arab world. Do what we want, and we will force the Israelis to behave. The client-patron relationship between the United States and Israel that allows Washington to control the politics of the Middle East is founded on two pillars: America’s ability to deliver concrete accomplishments, like the return of the Sinai to Egypt and the pledge to create a Palestinian state, along with the suggestion that Washington is manfully restraining wilder, more aggressive Israeli ambitions.

The success of the American-Israeli alliance demands that both parties be active partners in a complex dance that involves a lot of play-acting—America pretends to rebuke Israel, just as Israel pretends to be restrained by American intervention from bombing Damascus or seizing the banks of the Euphrates. The instability of the U.S.-Israel relationship is therefore inherent in the terms of a patron-client relationship that requires managing a careful balance of Israeli strength and Israeli weakness. An Israel that runs roughshod over its neighbors is a liability to the United States—just as an Israel that lost the capacity to project destabilizing power throughout the region would quickly become worthless as a client.

4. To retain America as a patron, Israel must periodically demonstrate its independent strength and capabilities, because if it ever became a docile vassal America would have no more use for the relationship.

A corollary of this basic point is that the weaker and more dependent Israel becomes, the more Israeli interests and American interests are likely to diverge. Stripped of its ability to take independent military action, Israel’s value to the United States can be seen to reside in its ability to give the Golan Heights back to Syria and to carve out a Palestinian state from the remaining territories it captured in 1967—after which it would be left with only the territories of the pre-1967 state to barter for a declining store of U.S. military credits, which Washington might prefer to spend on wooing Iran.

The untenable nature of this strategic calculus gives a cold-eyed academic analyst all the explanation she needs to explain Israel’s recent wars against Hezbollah and Hamas, its assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers, and its 2007 attack on the Syrian nuclear reactor. Israel’s attempts to restore its perceived capacity for game-changing independent military action are directed as much to its American patron as to its neighbors.

5. Therefore, Israel should attack Iran not primarily as a way to permanently end Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but as a way to keep America from taking Israel for granted.

The parallels between Israel’s rise to superpower client status after 1967 and Iran’s recent rise offer another strong reason for Israel to act—and act fast. The current bidding for Iran’s favor is alarming to Israel not only because of the unfriendly proclamations of Iranian leaders but because of what an American rapprochement with Iran signals for the future of Israel’s status as an American client. While America would probably benefit by playing Israel and Iran against each other for a while to extract the maximum benefit from both relationships, it is hard to see how America would manage to please both clients simultaneously and quite easy to imagine a world in which Iran—with its influence in Afghanistan and Iraq, its control over Hezbollah and Hamas, and easy access to leading members of al-Qaida—would  be the partner worth pleasing.

Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities is the surest way for Israel to restore the image of strength and unpredictability that made it valuable to the United States after 1967 while also eliminating Iran as a viable partner for America’s favor. The fact that this approach may be the international-relations equivalent of keeping your boyfriend by shooting the other cute girl he likes in the head is an indicator of the difference between high-school romance and alliances between states—and hardly an argument for why it won’t work.

This is, as I said, a very cold bit of analysis. I don’t know that Samuels believes only in this – that is to say, he may also believe that America and Israel share important common values, that Israel is a moral cause worth supporting for its own sake, that the alliance benefits America through shared intelligence-gathering, and benefits American defense contractors through the required purchases of American military equipment, and so on. But I find it hard to believe that he wrote the piece entirely as an exercise. It reads as something he actually does believe. In which case, one of the things he believes is that American and Israeli interests diverge profoundly, and that Israel’s grand security strategy is focused on blackmailing their superpower patron.

If you believe that, then surely you believe that it would be irrational for the Obama administration to initiate a war with Iran in order to prevent Iran from going nuclear. On the contrary, the rational course would be to deceive Israel into believing that the administration really would risk doing that if necessary, while, in fact, using a mix of carrots and sticks to get Iran to the table to sign the most restrictive deal that Iran could plausibly agree to (since a nuclear Iran would also be a threat American interests, albeit not nearly as profound a threat to America as it would be to Israel, or the Gulf monarchies), and thereby foreclose the possibility of preemptive military action by either America or Israel. Which is precisely what Samuels believes the administration did.

As I cannot reiterate often enough, what’s interesting to me about the piece is the relationship it reveals between the outgoing Obama administration and a possible Clinton administration waiting in the wings. I’m very skeptical that Rhodes was out to cripple a potential Clinton administration’s propaganda machine, simply because I don’t see how cooperating with Samuels would achieve that objective. (Would Twitter suddenly shut down? Would major newspapers triple their spending on foreign correspondents?) Rather, what seems clearest is that both the President and his former Secretary of State wanted to telegraph to the world their deep mutual distrust when it comes to matters of foreign policy, and they used Samuels’s profile as a convenient vehicle for doing so.

My question for Samuels is: does he think Clinton and her team are sincere? Or are they spinning him – and us? And if they are sincere, is it because they are more soft-headed about the way the world works, as he thinks Jeffrey Goldberg is, or more hard-headed about the responsibilities of power?

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