Hudson Institute senior fellow and former senior director of the National Security Council Michael Doran testified before Congress yesterday on the Iran Deal Scandal.  Doran’s testimony points out that President Obama has, from the beginning, described Iran as ‘the keystone of the arch’ of his foreign policy in the Middle East.  “From his first days in office, President Obama made no secret of his desire to improve relations with Tehran,” Doran told Congress. “However, he did disguise the centrality of Iran to his regional strategy.”  That strategy, in Dolan’s telling, was to withdraw the United States from the region while building a new “security architecture” with Iran in the center.  That meant licensing Iranian ambitions in the region as a show of good faith, and to give Iran the practical power to carry out its central position in the new architecture.

Perhaps the president’s greatest deception was his misrepresentation of the role that the nuclear deal played in his overall diplomacy. He sold the agreement publicly as a narrow arms control agreement, the only goal of which was to sever Iran’s “pathways to a nuclear weapon.” In actual fact, it was but one piece of a much larger regional vision. In that vision, the United States would recognize the legitimacy not just of Iran’s nuclear program but also of its interests in the Arab world. Primary among these interests, of course, was the position of Iran in Syria, where it was backing the government of Bashar al-Assad against the rebels.

To do this without Congressional approval required the sustained whisper campaign organized by Ben Rhodes.  Doran testified about how this campaign was leveraged to silence critics from “technical experts with stellar, non-partisan reputations, such as the physicist David Albright” to foreign leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu.  Ironically, Doran notes, the effect of the intense slander against critics was to push them closer together, so that the Sunni powers and Israel are enjoying a moment of improved relations — just because of their common fear of the monster Obama unleashed in Iran.

Although Ben Rhodes has been the face of this scandal from the beginning, Doran argues, the real blame lies at the feet of the President.  “First, it is important to remember that we are not talking about a rogue operation. Ben Rhodes was not acting on his personal initiative; he was, clearly, carrying out the will of the president. So if any one individual is to be held responsible, it should be President Obama himself.”  A former director of the NSC, Doran says that he nevertheless believes the council has grown too imperial and isolated from checks and balances.  In order to prevent future administrations from abuses of power on this scale, he said, “it behooves Congress to clip the wings of the National Security Council.”

But, Doran argues, such actions are not adequate without a fuller investigation of what has happened in secret.

As a result of this deception, even people who served at the highest levels of the Obama administration have begun to express doubts about the president’s true intentions. When, for example, Samuels asked Panetta if he still believed that Obama had meant it when he said he would take whatever steps were necessary to stop Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon, Panetta responded, “Probably not.”

Just as we have not fully understood what Obama was thinking, so we have also failed to understand the nature of the deal that he struck with the Iranians. The rhetoric out of Tehran and the actions of Secretary of State John Kerry now seem to suggest the existence of secret side deals about which we have heard nothing. Why is it, for example, that Secretary Kerry traveled to London last week to convince our allies to invest in Iran? No such obligation exists in the text of the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (which itself is a purposefully opaque document). And why do Iran’s leaders claim that the JCPOA promised them greater economic gains than they have thus far received? Who is telling the truth—the Iranians or the Obama administration?

Congress still has no idea just what Obama agreed to do for Tehran.  We must find out.