NYT's Bret Stephens Blasted for 'Escalate in Iran' Column

Critics denounced New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens for advocating for escalation in Iran in a Tuesday column and argued the newspaper shouldn't give him a platform for such "dangerous" rhetoric.

Citing Iran's nuclear capabilities, Stephens, a neoconservative, called for a "direct and unmistakable American response" to the "utterly intolerable threat" posed by Iran. He wrote that the U.S. should, at a minimum, destroy an Iranian missile complex, and should not try to "rein in" Israel as its leaders consider how to respond to a barrage of nearly 200 missiles fired by Iran on Tuesday.

"Incredibly the [Times] editors let Bret Stephens publish an article advocating war with Iran, without even asking him to include a paragraph explaining how such a war would go, what the human toll would be, or how he thinks it would end," Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, a left-wing magazine, wrote on social media.

World Beyond War, an anti-war group, reacted similarly, writing on social media that "Bret Stephens' warmongering in the [Times] fuels the dangerous drumbeat for war with Iran, ignoring the devastating human cost of conflict."

"Escalating violence isn't the answer—it's time for diplomacy, not more destruction," the group added.

Some of Stephens' critics pointed to his record of support for the war in Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.

Qasim Rashid, a Pakistani-American human rights lawyer, said Stephens wanted a "repeat in Iran," arguing that Stephens is "a racist war monger who relishes in promoting war that kills innocent Muslims and people of color."

Iran said Tuesday's strikes, which were targeted at Israeli military facilities and were mostly intercepted by Israeli and U.S. forces, were retaliation for recent Israeli assassinations, including of Hassan Nasrallah, who was the leader of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. Israel bombed a residential area last week to assassinate Nasrallah, killing six others in the process, and, earlier on Tuesday, had launched a ground incursion into southern Lebanon.

Stephens, who is Jewish and whose direct family members fled pogroms in Europe, attributes the hostility to Israel by Hezbollah and Iran to antisemitism. He began Tuesday's column by citing an antisemitic quote by Nasrallah, whom he said met an "overdue demise."

The column, titled "We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran," then asked readers to imagine a scenario in which one of the Iranian missiles had carried a nuclear warhead.

The invocation of the nuclear threat reminded critics of the justifications used by neoconservatives in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Stephens himself was among the many to push the idea that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein posed a such a threat.

"Saddam may unveil, to an astonished world, the Arab world's first nuclear bomb," Stephens wrote in The Jerusalem Post in November 2002, echoing the arguments for war of then-U.S. President George W. Bush.

This prediction turned out to be flatly wrong—no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. Andre Damon, a journalist at World Socialist Web Site, said Stephens is now repeating old tricks in trying to justify a war with Iran.

"Twenty years on, it's the same script," Damon wrote on social media.

Stephens didn't join the Times until 2017, but the newspaper's coverage in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion has been widely critiqued for parroting the Bush administration's dubious assertions.

Reporting from The New York Times in September 2002. (Photo: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)

In 2014, Margaret Sullivan, then the Times' public editor, wrote that "the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not the Times' finest hour."

"Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism," Sullivan wrote. "Many op-ed columns promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous."

Robinson of Current Affairs argued Tuesday that little had changed.

"The intellectual standards at the paper are so low that you can just say 'we need a war' without answering even basic questions about the war you are proposing," he wrote. "This is precisely the kind of stuff that gave us the horrific Iraq disaster but nothing was learned."

Stephens attended boarding school in Massachusetts and has degrees from the University of Chicago and London School of Economics and Political Science. He became the editor of The Jerusalem Post at age 28, where he named Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq War, the newspaper's "Man of the Year." Stephens also worked at The Wall Street Journal for many years before joining the Times.

Critics have long assailed Stephen's judgment and called for the Times to fire him. In 2019, he received criticism for suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews were smarter than other people. In 2021, Stephens wrote a piece titled "Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York," referring to the then mayoral candidate whose actual mayoralty of the U.S.' biggest city has been riddled with scandal.

The criticism hasn't stopped Stephens from doubling down on his positions and using absolutist language. Last year, he wrote that he didn't regret his support for the Iraq War. And in his Tuesday column, he pushed for Israel's total victory over its foes.

"Wars, once entered, need to be fought through to an unequivocal victory," he wrote.