NYT pushes confrontation with Iran

Apparently having learned no lessons from the Iraq WMD debacle, the New York Times is pushing for a heightened confrontation with Iran, slipping into the same kind of hysteria that it and other major U.S. news organizations displayed in 2002 and 2003. In its latest neocon-styled editorial–commenting on a new critical report about Iran's growing truculence toward nuclear inspectors–the Times concluded with this judgment: "Tehran, predictably, insists it is not building a [nuclear] weapon. Its refusal to halt enrichment and cooperate with the I.A.E.A. [International Atomic Energy Agency] makes that ever more impossible to believe." Beyond the grammatical point that "impossible" like "unique" is an absolute adjective that can't be modified, the Times misses the point that its previous over-the-top hostility toward Iran–evidenced in its news columns as well as its opinion pages–has helped create the dynamic that is driving the standoff over Iran's nuclear program to a crisis point. Amazingly, the Washington Post, usually an even more reliably neocon bastion than the Times, offered a more thoughtful assessment in its own Friday editorial on the same topic. The Post noted that the most promising area for negotiation with Iran was its past willingness to swap some of its low-enriched uranium for more highly enriched isotopes for medical purposes. But the Post observed that delays in reaching an agreement over a proposed swap of 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium–combined with the steady increase in Iran's stockpile–"has greatly complicated the prospects."