This attempt at massaging the narrative for preemptive damage control may be slightly subtler than Obama’s recent, absurd disavowal of his once-celebrated troop withdrawal from Iraq. But it’s being done on the same principle. It’s part of a pair of patterns observable with the Obama administration from its earliest days.
Team Obama’s methods
One of those patterns is “leaking” intricate, fully formed narratives to an obedient press. Where the George W. Bush administration could barely make its most open and categorical statements heard over the cacophony of skeptical caveats advanced by the mainstream media, many in the same MSM act today as mere repeaters for whatever tortuous tale the Obama administration wants to broadcast anonymously.
This often results in internally contradictory narratives like the one in the arms-shipment story, which confirms that there wasn’t anything sneaky in Israel’s application to the Pentagon for a resupply of arms, but leads off with the unmistakable suggestion that there was.
John Podhoretz concludes at Commentary that the Obama administration is essentially just having a hissy fit.
These transfers were taking place through entirely traditional, legal, and uncontroversial means. Israel is an ally. It’s at war. War depletes stocks. So why is this happening?
Simply put: It’s a gigantic hissy fit, an expression of rage against Bibi Netanyahu, by whom the administration feels dissed. The quotes in this article are almost beyond belief. In the annals of American foreign policy, no ally has ever been talked about in this way.
And I think there’s a good deal to that. But it’s not the only thing going on. The Obama administration’s highest priority is always the community organizer’s: tending its constituency base. As discussed above, that’s part of the purpose.
The administration has also shown a preternatural aptitude for exploiting the political opportunities afforded by a gigantic, often unaccountable federal bureaucracy: from holding tax-exempt status over the heads of rival political groups to implementing regulations on the sly and distributing favors to Obama’s constituencies. Leveraging anonymous bureaucratic activities is a great way to get around political opposition – and sometimes to paint a political picture with obscure data points the public won’t really understand – and Team Obama makes an art of it.
This method has been used against Israel a number of times. An early instance was one I wrote about four years ago, when Israel was expressing concerns about design features in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The collegial practice with allies – any allies – is to at least give such concerns a hearing, and try to find common ground. The Obama administration instead simply stonewalled Israeli concerns, because it could. As a problem at the bureaucratic and technical level, one the general public never heard about, the administration had the leeway to ignore it. Call it passive-aggressive maneuvering.
Team Obama is also good at creating lists of policy accomplishments out of regularly scheduled programming. The public doesn’t pay much attention to joint military exercises or military sales in general, nor does it know the first thing about military-to-military exchanges (e.g., in intelligence, or consultation on tactics and common warfighting issues). These activities make excellent fodder for superficial “resume enhancement,” and that’s exactly how the Obama administration has used them to bolster its image vis-à-vis Israel.
(It also tried to “leak” false information in 2011 that it was the first U.S. administration to supply Israel with 5,000-pound bunker-buster bombs.)
There’s no telling how many little bureaucratic whacks Team Obama has taken at Israel in the last six weeks. The beauty of these measures is that they can be taken without fanfare by executive fiat, and can even be attributed conveniently to autonomous bureaucratic processes, as the FAA flight ban against Israel was.