Ed Lasky over at the American Thinker points out a real shocker–nearly a year out of office, the New York Times is still taking pot shots at President Bush…
In the Friday editorial “10 Weeks,” about U.S. policy toward an ever increasingly nuclearized Iran, the editors start out pretty even-handed–even sounding vaguely hawkish. They state:
The world’s wealthy nations have given Iran until late September to agree to restraints on its nuclear program. If there is no progress, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France declared at this week’s Group of 8 summit, “we will have to take decisions” on imposing tougher sanctions. We hope Mr. Sarkozy and the other G-8 leaders mean it. For seven years, the world powers have pursued a feckless strategy that failed to halt Iran’s efforts to master nuclear fuel production, the hardest part of building a weapon. More deadlines, without any real follow-through, will send a dangerous message to nuclear wannabes who already see Iran and North Korea defying repeated demands from the United Nations Security Council to cease and desist.
But then it starts to go south, with this predictable anti-Bush jab (emphasis added):
We don’t know if there is any mix of incentives or sanctions that would work. Certainly President George W. Bush, for all his tough talk and bullying ways, never tried to find it.
Never? Really? Never tried? Alright, I’ll admit, the Bush administration might not have found that magic “mix of incentives or sanctions” but to assert that Bush officials at the State Department and the Defense Department didn’t try…well, as Lasky points out, that’s just a silly dismissal of the Bush Administration’s tireless diplomatic efforts to reign in Iran. To remind readers, Lasky links to Washington Post and Al AlArabiya articles which delineates Bush era sanctions against Iran.
I know the Times has a few other items on their mind…like keeping the lights on, but perhaps their writers might take a moment to brush up on recent history.