Wise words from the New York Sun on the utter idiocy of Tuesday’s New York Times editorial (a Times editorial which was also reproduced yesterday in the International Herald Tribune for all the world to see):
So the New York Times editorialists think a military attack on Iran aimed at dismantling its nuclear program “would be a disaster.” Back in 1981, the Times asserted Israel’s attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor, ordered by Prime Minister Begin, was also a disaster. The Times termed it “an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.” Years later, the man who was the paper’s editorial page editor at the time, Max Frankel, conceded in his memoir that the editorial had been a “major mistake.” This time around, instead of a military attack, the Times is recommending slowing gasoline deliveries to Iran. This would do nothing specifically to slow Iran’s efforts to build an atomic bomb for use against the Jews in Israel, though it would affect everything from Iranian newspaper delivery trucks to ambulances. It’s doubly odd, because a Times editorial on Sunday assailed Israel’s “economic blockade” on the “civilian population” of Gaza as “collective punishment.” Suddenly the Times is recommending the same method for use against by America against the civilian population of Iran.
It’s certainly possible that a military attack on Iran could be a disaster; there’s no way to know for sure until one happens. What’s definite is that it would be a disaster were Iran’s regime to build an atomic bomb. Even Senator Obama has refused to take the military option off the table in respect of stopping the Iranian nuclear program. So have Senator McCain and Prime Minister Olmert. That the Times is willing pre-emptively to eliminate the military option is a sign of just how outside the mainstream the paper is on matters of national security. And of how little its editors have learned from the errors of the earlier generation….
(For background on Iran’s nuclear program, see here and here.)
(For background on the New York Times’s appalling record of covering the Middle East, see here; and for the Times’s lamentable record during the last holocaust, see here.)