-By Warner Todd Huston
Remember how the New York Times went apoplectic over last December’s NIE estimate that brashly claimed that Iran had suspended their intent to manufacture nuclear arms? It was a front pager and formed the basis of claims that we had illegitimately targeted Iran for rhetorical attacks by many people who opposed the Bush Administration’s entire foreign policy regime. Well, as the New York Sun said on the 7th, “what a difference two months make.” It appears that the original NIE report was too hasty in its claims that Iran was innocent as the driven snow. So, here’s the question: Will the NYT gives us a front page story apologizing for their alarmism?
Yeah. I didn’t think so.
On December 3rd, the NYT led its front page, “News Analysis” article with this startling statement:
Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here.
And in their followup report, the first paragraph read as follows:
A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.
Well, that all sounds as if the Bush Administration badly bungled the claims that Iran was trying to get the bomb, doesn’t it?
But, we are now two months in the future from those breathless reports and it seems as if the initial NIE report that the New York Times was so exercised over turns out not to be so sanguine of Iran’s eschewing of its nuclear ambitions.
The New York Sun reported on the 7th that maybe “Iran halted its nuclear weapons program” is a claim that is a bit over blown.
Through the pessimistically, penumbrous pen of Parag Khanna, the New York Times has declared that 
The west’s current battle with radical Islam has revealed the worst in both the west and the world of Islam. Obviously from Islam we have seen the intolerance, hatred, oppression and evil in its nature. But, from the west we have seen revealed the hollowness of its soul and a complete lack of self-regard as so many western nations allow the evil of Islam to attack them from within as well as from without. The west has lost its spine to stand up for its own principles, in fact has thrown away all pretext that it even has principles worth preserving. 
Well, this strays from the usual silliness and less than credible work over at the Huffington Post and gets closer to a style of treasonous support for our espoused enemies than it does the normal fare. In a posting by one Hooman Majd, an Iranian born writer who dabbles in the music business, we are treated to the absurd conspiracy theory that the U.S. Military manufactured the incident last Tuesday in the Straits of Hormuz involving a few Iranian patrol boats and the the U.S. Navy. Majd seems to imagine that the Pentagon somehow faked the whole thing, and I’m not exaggerating. Catch the title of his posting: 
On the CBS “Early Show” on Nov. 13th, co-host Julie Chen claimed that there was “an alarming suicide rate among veterans” of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts. CBS then aired a report that went on to claim that the suicide rate for our troops had wildly climbed. Our friend at Newsbusters, 
What is it about leftist pundits and their singular inability to accept good news about Iraq — if they acknowledge any good news at all — or, when they bother to report good news, their inexcusable usage of that news to formulate illogical policy suggestions in order to prove the war in Iraq is lost? Of this no better example can bee seen than a recent column by Time Columnist Joe Klein, who, while duly reporting the extremely good news in Iraq, draws all the wrong conclusions from that info based solely on his desire to cut and run in his titled,