Tablet Annotates the News: How the Syria Echo Chamber Works

Over the past five-and-a-half years, the Obama White House has used the Syria echo chamber it created in the American press and on social media to defend and advance the president’s policy of nonintervention against the Assad regime. After the White House’s attempt to negotiate a deal to cooperate militarily with Russia in Syria fell apart last month, one of the administration’s most experienced Syria echo-chamber hands—Steven Simon—sprang into action.

To help readers understand how this inside baseball is played, I have annotated a recent article that Simon, a former National Security Council official in the Obama White House and now a supposedly impartial analyst, published, together with Jonathan Stevenson, in The New York Times. The genre of Simon’s current piece could be described as “policy advice to the new president.”

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