Israel Matzav: Iran is Bush's failure too

Iran is Bush's failure too

In the middle of ripping President Obumbler some new body parts for his handling of Iran over the past year, Jonathan Tobin lets fly some justified criticism of former President Bush.

The defense for Obama’s feckless diplomacy put forward in the Times article is that Obama had to spend at least a year trying diplomacy so as to convince the world that he tried engagement after the confrontational Bush years. Blaming Bush is Obama’s all-purpose political tactic on all issues, but it won’t wash here. Bush not only failed to confront Iran; he also outsourced our diplomatic efforts on the nuclear issue to France and Germany in his second term. The utter failure of his engagement effort was clear by Bush’s last year in office, but rather than face the issue and take action, he decided to pass it off on his successor. This James Buchanan–like approach to a critical issue was one of Bush’s genuine failures, and the fact that he spent 2008 similarly vetoing any Israel action on Iran only makes Obama’s dedication to the same cause both ironic and scary. But however badly Bush blundered on Iran, the idea that we needed an additional year of diplomatic failure to justify subsequent action is a joke.

Tobin's right on all counts. Granted, Bush was confronted with the false and misleading 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, but one had the sense throughout 2008 that the NIE was false (and Israel repeatedly presented evidence that it was false) and that the Bush administration was using it as an excuse to avoid dealing with a difficult problem.

I expect that 30-50 years from now, it will come out that the NIE was invented by forces in the intelligence agencies who did not want to see Bush act. Still, that's no excuse.

But whatever Bush did or did not do, Obama has only made things worse.

Israel Matzav: Iran is Bush's failure too