Israel Matzav

Former NSC official: 'Most pro-Israel administration evah' conducted whisper campaign to smear Netanyahu

According to the congressional testimony of Michael Doran — Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former senior director in the National Security Council (NSC) in the administration of President George W. Bush — the White House initiated a “whisper campaign” against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cast him “as the villain of the Middle East peace process, an arch-nationalist with unseemly ties to the Republican party who refuses to make the necessary compromises to bring about an historic reconciliation with the Palestinians,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Doran’s testimony came in response to a controversial New York Times Magazine profile on White House national security advisor Ben Rhodes, who gloated about how he was able to deceive the public to garner support for last July’s nuclear agreement. Rhodes admitted to creating an “echo chamber” among susceptible journalists, policy experts and officials to spin the White House’s narrative.

According to Doran, the Obama administration engaged in a strategy of “deception” in order to create a “detente” with Iran. Had the White House been open and honest about the true nature of the agreement, there would have been significant public backlash, Doran said.

In Doran’s estimation, Rhodes’s behavior is part of a greater problem: the growing size and power of the NSC. “Rhodes’s war room is not an isolated problem, it is symptomatic of an NSC that, according to all three of Obama’s former secretaries of defense, has grown imperial in both size and ethos. In order to protect our system of checks and balances, Congress must take action to school the White House in a healthy respect for republican values.”

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, National Security Council

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:29 PM