The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler often deviates from his purported role as “fact checker” to advance a political agenda, which often requires him to distort the facts or to ignore contrary evidence as he did recently regarding Iran’s nuclear talks, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
Glenn Kessler’s “Fact Checker” feature in the Washington Post performs a mostly useful service. With as many falsehoods as are customarily flying around in American political discourse, goodness knows we need as much journalistic calling to account of such dishonesty as we can get.
Kessler’s performance of this function often is deficient, however, in two respects. One is the arbitrary and unrepresentative way in which he seems to select statements to pounce upon; flagrant, serial misrepresentation doesn’t get featured any more than statements that can be considered untrue only as a matter of nitpicking. The other is that he sometimes goes beyond the checking of facts and renders evaluations that are more a matter of policy or political judgment.
Washington Post’s “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler. (Photo credit: Singerhmk)
Earlier this week, Kessler took President Barack Obama and his speech-writers to task for a line in the President’s West Point speech last month that referred to how against the background of an advancing Iranian nuclear program, the administration had since its beginning implemented a program of sanctions while “extending the hand of diplomacy” to the Iranians.
Kessler thinks this was an unfair statement because starting in 2006 the George W. Bush administration was pushing anti-Iran sanctions at the United Nations Security Council while signing on with the Europeans to the concept of eventually negotiating a resolution of the Iranian nuclear question. Kessler gives the statement “Three Pinocchios,” which certainly is unwarranted in at least two respects.
One is that the statement in the President’s speech was not untrue; Kessler just doesn’t think it was sufficiently fair politically to his predecessor. The other is that if Kessler is going to venture beyond fact-checking into judgments about policies toward Iran, he has missed completely the most important dimensions of what has transpired over the last several years.
Even after the Bush administration made its “major shift” (Kessler’s words) in 2006, it continued to eschew direct dealings with Iran as if Iranian diplomats had cooties. That is a far cry from the engagement that the Obama administration has practiced, which included the direct involvement of the Secretary of State in negotiation of the preliminary nuclear agreement last fall, and this week has had Deputy Secretary of State William Burns leading a U.S. team negotiating with the Iranians in Geneva. Observers of the nuclear negotiations nearly all agree that the most critical deal-making has to occur bilaterally between the United States and Iran.
Kessler erroneously assumes that working toward a nuclear agreement has been a constant progression in which events and policies of a few years ago built a foundation for the diplomacy of today. It has not been that. The story has instead been more one of opportunities either seized or missed, and of some events and decisions having hampered rather than helped today’s diplomacy.
An early missed opportunity came in late 2001 and early 2002, when effective cooperation between U.S. and Iranian diplomats regarding Afghanistan could have grown into something bigger, until the Bush administration slammed a door in the Iranians’ face by declaring the Axis of Evil. Another opportunity came in 2003, when Iran offered a bargain that would not only have addressed the nuclear issue (at a time when Iran had fewer than 200 uranium centrifuges, compared with 19,000 now) but also other concerns such as Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah and posture toward Israel.
But the Bush administration, around the time it was declaring mission accomplished in Iraq, wanted no dealings with Iran at all. Yet another missed opportunity was in 2005, when Hassan Rouhani, then Iran’s nuclear negotiator, offered to the Europeans to freeze Iran’s centrifuges at their level then of 3,000. The Bush administration, which refused even to sit at the multilateral negotiating table, made it known it would accept nothing other than zero.
Kessler makes no mention of the entire Iranian side of the political equation and how that has affected the coming and going of opportunities for the United States. The reformist Mohammad Khatami was president of Iran during the missed opportunities of the first five years of the Bush administration. Then came eight years of the love-to-hate President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
When Rouhani was elected president in a surprising first-round victory and succeeded Ahmadinejad last September, Obama’s seizing of this new opportunity made it possible to meet Rouhani’s goal of negotiating a preliminary nuclear agreement in his first 100 days in office.
Incredibly, Kessler describes U.S. policy toward Iran as “a model of bipartisan cooperation.” Paul Glastris at the Washington Monthly shows how ridiculous that characterization is. Much Republican opposition to the administration’s Iran policy has come to resemble, as with the obsessive opposition to Obamacare, an effort to undermine whatever would be a significant achievement for the President.
The resulting partisan pattern has been reflected, for example, in support for a deal-busting sanctions bill, S. 1881, that would violate the preliminary nuclear agreement and was beaten back, at least for the time being, with the help of an explicit presidential veto threat. All but two Senate Republicans (Rand Paul and Jeff Flake) became co-sponsors of the bill; only 17 of the 60 co-sponsors are Democrats.
The biggest problem with Kessler’s treatment of this issue, however, is not unfairness in assessing the last two administrations or the positions of Republicans and Democrats. The main problem is perpetuation of some myths and analytical shortcomings that impair understanding of what it takes to reach a satisfactory agreement with Iran today.
One myth is that what is needed to squeeze an acceptable deal out of the Iranians is more and more pressure, especially through economic sanctions. As Trita Parsi points out, the history of the pre-sanctions missed opportunities, to have gotten a deal that would have restricted the Iranian program even more than any feasible deal today, demonstrates that this proposition is false.
A major analytical shortcoming is to ignore, as Kessler does, Iranian politics. We would be making a big mistake to miss the newest opportunity that Rouhani has presented to us, to disregard the limitations he faces in terms of what would be an acceptable deal for Iran, and to ignore how much completion of an agreement would encourage still more favorable political trends in Tehran.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
The situation with regard has been ‘linear’ only insofar as that might describe the peregrinations of a drunk in a snowstorm. US policy raddled as it is with not only mis-perceptions, spurious intel and nasty attitude, has been the stuff of wishful thinking as much as it has been the result of any sort of plan. The ‘plan’ – to get the evil mullahs to stop, just stop migh be approaching fruition.
Just to be on the safe side, however, we have a ‘reminder’ how Iranian cities are particularly susceptible to atomic strikes and how a 650 kiloton war head – one like hundreds gallant little Israel has, and just might still use – could ‘liquidate’ (vaporize) more than 90 percent of the population of Teheran.
Not that that should be a problem because, see, most of the ‘nukuler’ targets aren’t in, or near cities. But things would be pretty bad!
But only if Iran attacked, say, Tel Aviv first. Gallant little Israel isn’t about to nuke somebody – without a good reason – particularly if regular munitions could do the job. Not that that might not happen because Iran is behind everything else Russia isn’t. So they could get Hamas to do it. see?
So the negotiations will run down to a deciding point and then what? Well that’s the scary part. This isn’t at all likke Ukrainian ‘gaz’, this is about imagination, fer pete’s sakes. and we can imagine horrors.
It’s all horse pellets – sonny lumiere, indicating nothing.