Iran and the Times
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
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.
RELATED: Next ‘Weapon’ Against Iran May Be Gasoline.
And of how little its editors have learned from the errors of the earlier generation. What Mr. Frankel said in his memoir is that he’d never felt comfortable about the “effort of the so-called major powers” to “monopolize the word’s supply of nuclear weapons.” Israel, he felt, “seemed to me to be invoking an impermissibly aggressive right of ‘self-defense.'” But over the years, he concluded that, while his principle was sound, it was also “piously unrealistic,” as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and Saddam’s use of Scud missiles against Israel demonstrated. The advice the Times gives today only increases the chances that someday its editors will have to issue the kind of rueful confession that Mr. Frankel had the integrity to issue when he looked back on the major mistakes of his own Times.
