ARTICLE: Report: U.S. rejected Israeli plea to attack Iran, CNN, January 11, 2009

Two ways to look at this: Sanger has a book coming out and so he needs to provide "revelations" galore. This will be the first of many efforts on his behalf by the NYT, just like WAPO sells Woodward. There's been no secret about Israel's desire to strike and its request that we do so as well. That's been reported going back a couple of years. As Starr points out in the piece, also no secret our "covert" attempts to f--k their program up. Also no secret that we're failing miserably. In some ways, given the success of the Bush admin to cover up, any such "revelations" tend to favor them, making Sanger a bit of a pawn if he's not careful. The name of his book is "The Inheritance," so the sale is continuity, which the Bush people love because then they can claim that Obama is the Bush third term, when, in truth, as I recently argued in a column, the Bush agenda destroyed itself by early in the second term. What we ended up with was Kerry's first term in the last months, all thanks to the massive incompetency of the neocons and Bush's (and especially Rice's) weak leadership. Second way: The Bush admin has already begun its historical rehab. We will be treated to many such "revelations" that Bush-Cheney were actually so much more reasonable and careful in their diplomacy than we were led to believe--in large part because these efforts were so "sensitive" and the American public couldn't be told about them while they happened. Take all this salesmanship as just that, and realize that this administration has done more to ramp up secrecy, kill history-telling, and deny the American public a true reading of their time than any administration in American history--surpassing that of even Nixon's (whom they resemble in their aggressive efforts to sell a new reading of history ex post facto). It stuns me how the Bush admin hides so much and then has no problem revealing secret programs whenever it suits their political purposes--even outing spies as need be.