To newspapermen of a certain age, the course the New York Times has hewed in the past decade in the Middle East has reminded of nothing so much as the course that the Times of London pursued under Geoffrey Dawson. He was the editor who, as World War II was brewing at Europe, counseled the course of appeasement. He was for treating with the Germans. He sent his correspondents instructions to be sensitive to German sensibilities. He no doubt thought of himself — and was widely thought of — as the most well-connected of newspapermen. He echoed the views of the foreign office, and vice versa. Whole books have been written on the sad story of the editor and the government. Dawson’s tenure stained the reputation of the Times for two generations.

One doesn’t have to equate the Arabs with the Nazis to comprehend that this is what is happening to the Times of New York. It was a boastful advocate of the Oslo accord. When the American Congress finally voted to fund the democratic resistance in Iraq, the New York Times sent its most ardent Dawsonian, Thomas Friedman, to Qatar, to mock the free government-in-exile of Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress. When the enemy sent waves of suicide bombers to kill Jews in Israel, the Times rushed Mr. Friedman to sit with the crown prince of the enemy camp, Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whence the correspondent promptly sent back a dispatch saying he and the prince saw eye to eye on a peace plan. What was its central plank? That after the wave of suicide bombings, Israel should turn over to the enemy half of the Israeli capital of Jerusalem. Institutionally, the New York Times jumped right on the bandwagon. Maybe if the Saudis had funded twice as many suicide bombings, the Times would have demanded Israel surrender all of Jerusalem.

This is what New Yorkers have had from the Times for years. Only Mr. Friedman could look at President Bush’s decision to swing behind the idea of democracy for the Palestinian Arabs and conclude that it was the end rather than the beginning of the idea of a two-state conclusion to the Middle East war. The president, the Times foreign affairs columnist asserts flatly, blinked (meaning refused to demand that Israel withdraw its defense of the most exposed Jews in Judea and Samaria) because “he didn’t want to alienate Jewish voters.” The young Dawsonian not only asserts this but finds it “sad.” It is sad because, he says, “George Bush may be on Israel’s side, but history, technology and demographics are not.” And there you have it, the Dawsonian world-view in a nutshell.