Here’s an editorial from March 10 of this year from the New York Times. I reprint it today just to show that what president Bush is now doing has been long in the works and was once supported by the paper of record. Here’s what the Times wrote:
President Bush’s tough talk on Iraq may be working. Russia and the Arab world are now urging Saddam Hussein to readmit United Nations weapons inspectors to avoid a large-scale American attack. Pressure on Baghdad needs to be sustained, a point Vice President Dick Cheney will make on his trip to the Middle East that begins today. The journey will feature discussions about possible future military action against Iraq.
Last week Iraq held its first serious discussions with the United Nations about resuming investigations of Iraqi facilities, oversight that was suspended more than three years ago. The positive tone of the talks justifies a second meeting next month.
Meetings are not a substitute for inspections. No one knows what Iraqi scientists have been up to for the past three years, but there is good reason to fear the worst. Baghdad must not be allowed to drag out these discussions while moving ahead with the development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Nor can there be any negotiations about diluting the inspections and arms control requirements. The team of tough, independent professionals assembled by the United Nations’ new chief inspector, Hans Blix, must be allowed to do its job unhindered, as Washington insists. Iraq’s latest effort to divert trucks imported under the oil-for-food program to military use shows that Mr. Hussein has hardly given up on his military ambitions.
This time, a show of compliance will not do. More than a decade ago, at the end of the Persian Gulf war, Iraq agreed to turn over and destroy its medium- and long-range missiles, poison gases, germ weapons and nuclear bomb materials to the satisfaction of the United Nations’ weapons inspectors. It has still not done so. Unless it fulfills those cease-fire requirements now, Iraq invites the kind of coercive actions Mr. Bush has threatened.
If the Times is in any way consistent, it will therefore applaud president Bush’s tough stance at the U.N. today when it editorializes tomorrow. In fact, I fail to see how any reasonable person who isn’t a supporter of Islamism or terrorism or pacifism can disagree with the president’s message. My suspicion is that the canards about the president’s upping the ante in Iraq as a way to distract from al Qaeda failures or a sagging economy (the smears regularly spat out on the Times op-ed page) are a strange form of projection. My suspicion is that it is the New York Times that has abandoned its once principled position of enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq by force if necessary because of partisanship and cynicism. Their hatred of this president has led them to leave the world at risk of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. We’ll see tomorrow if they have any integrity on this matter, won’t we?
SONTAG AND LINCOLN: A reader makes a telling point about Susan Sontag’s grasp of history:
You quote Susan Sontag (in your Salon piece) mentioning Lincoln, and she says that he made “bold statements of new national goals in a time of real, terrible war.” Funny thing, though, that the North never declared war against the South in the Civil War – only the South declared war. Why? Look to Lincoln’s address to Congress on July 4, 1861, where he specifically states that the action of the southern states is one of rebellion, NOT secession. To declare war would require acknowledging that the South was a legally separate and sovereign entity. Therefore Lincoln merely called for force to be gathered and used to suppress the unlawful rebellion. How interesting that Sontag would ignore Lincoln’s warmongering-without-formal-war while criticizing Bush for the same.
Additionally, in taking on the Civil War Lincoln took for himself a vast array of power (even dictating to Congress when they should meet) that Bush and Ashcroft have never even dared consider, even with their occasional overreaching granted. Of all presidents, Sontag picks a mighty odd one to try to make her points with. Seems like if she were a writer at the time of the Civil War, her own arguments would demand that she lay even more caustic venom at Lincoln’s feet than Bush’s.
The Dish 