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"We may now have sufficient global support to enact the one measure that would be genuinely crippling -- a boycott of Iranian oil. The Iranians take this threat to their economic livelihood seriously enough that people who follow the subject no longer minimize the chance of a naval confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz. It's not impossible that we will get war with Iran even without bombing its nuclear facilities."
How neat! War without even trying!
The Paper of (Checkered Record)
Guidance To All NYT Hands: Are you getting the picture? After all, what does Defense Minister Barak know? Or Defense Secretary Panetta? Or the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community? Or apparently even Israeli intelligence?
The marching orders from the Times' management appear to be that you should pay no heed to those sources of information. Just repeat the mantra: Everyone knows Iran is hard at work on the Bomb.
As is well known, other newspapers and media outlets take their cue from the Times. Small wonder, then, that USA Today seemed to be following the same guidance on Jan. 23, as can be seen in its major editorial on military action against Iran:
"The U.S. and Iran will keep steaming toward confrontation, Iran intent on acquiring the bomb to establish itself as a regional power, and the U.S. intent on preventing it to protect allies and avoid a nuclear arms race in the world's most volatile region."One day, the U.S. is likely to face a wrenching choice: bomb Iran, with the nation fully united and prepared for the consequences, or let Iran have the weapons, along with a Cold War-like doctrine ensuring Iran's nuclear annihilation if it ever uses them. In that context, sanctions remain the last best hope for a satisfactory solution."
And, of course, the U.S. press corps almost never adds the context that Israel already possesses an undeclared arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons, or that Iran is essentially surrounded by nuclear weapons states, including India, Pakistan, Russia, China and -- at sea -- the United States.
PBS Equally Guilty
PBS's behavior adhered to its customary don't-offend-the-politicians-who-might-otherwise-cut-our-budget attitude on the Jan. 18 "NewsHour" -- about 12 hours after Ehud Barak's interview started making the rounds. Host Margaret Warner set the stage for an interview with neocon Dennis Ross and Vali Nasr (a professor at Tufts) by using a thoroughly misleading clip from former Sen. Rick Santorum's Jan. 1 appearance on "Meet the Press."
Warner started by saying:
"Back in the U.S. many Republican presidential candidates have been vowing they'd be even tougher with Tehran. Former Senator Rick Santorum spoke on NBC's Meet the Press: 'I would be saying to the Iranians, you open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors, or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes and make it very public that we are doing so.'"
Santorum seemed totally unaware that there are U.N. inspectors in Iran, and host David Gregory did nothing to correct him, leaving Santorum's remark unchallenged. The blogosphere immediately lit up with requests for NBC to tell their viewers that there are already U.N. inspectors in Iran, which unlike Israel is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allows IAEA inspections.
During the Warner interview, Dennis Ross performed true to form, projecting supreme confidence that he knows more about Iran's nuclear program than the Israeli Defense Minister and the U.S. intelligence community combined:
Margaret Warner: "If you hamstring their [Iran's] Central Bank, and the U.S. persuades all these other big customers not to buy Iranian oil, that could be thought of as an act of war on the part of the Iranians. Is that a danger?"Ross: "I think there's a context here. The context is that the Iranians continue to pursue a nuclear program. And unmistakably to many, that is a nuclear program whose purpose is to achieve nuclear weapons. That has a very high danger, a very high consequence. So the idea that they could continue with that and not realize that at some point they have to make a choice, and if they don't make the choice, the price they're going to pay is a very high one, that's the logic of increasing the pressure."
Never mind that the Israeli Defense Minister had told the press something quite different some 12 hours before.
Still, it is interesting that Barak's comments on how Israeli intelligence views Iran's nuclear program now mesh so closely with the NIE in 2007. This is the new and significant story here, as I believe any objective journalist would agree.
However, the FCM -- led by the New York Times -- cannot countenance admitting that they have been hyping the threat from Iran as they did with Iraq's non-existent WMDs just nine years ago. So they keep repeating the line that Israel and the U.S. agree that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.
