A prevailing media narrative is that while Republicans have pitched a fit over Barack Obama’s negotiated deal with Iran over that country’s nuclear program, the seeds of such a deal were sown by the previous administration.

“Nine years ago, President George W. Bush agreed to join Europeans at the negotiating table with Iran,” wrote the New York Times‘s Alan Rappeport in July. Rappeport also quoted former Bush State Department official Philip Zelikow: “It’s conceptually a deep irony because this diplomatic outreach was originally designed and engineered by President Bush.” Zack Beauchamp at Vox.com said the same thing in a headline reading, “The Iran deal began with George W. Bush.”