The Bush administration has tried to have Mohamed ElBaradei removed from his position as the chief of the United Nations atomic agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEA. They obviously weren’t thrilled with his reports prior to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein did not have a working nuclear program.
The White House bristled in 2003 when ElBaradei reported there was no evidence to support claims that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. Later, the administration tried to oust ElBaradei from his job.
They are probably even more upset with his reports that suggest Iran does not have the current capability to produce atomic weapons and has failed to fully master the technology to enrich uranium on a large scale, because that gives the lie to their justification for a future attack on Iran, and because he is actively working to head off such an attack by the US military:
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United Nations atomic agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei called on Iran and the U.S. to give inspectors a chance to reduce tensions over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear work.
“I see war drums that are basically saying that the solution is to bomb Iran,” ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said today in an interview in Vienna. “It makes me shudder because some of the rhetoric is a reminder” of the period before the Iraq war.
ElBaradei reiterated expectations that Iran’s atomic program, subject to IAEA inspectors’ scrutiny since 2003, may be cleared by the end of this year of suspicion that the project was used as cover for nuclear weapons development.
“We have not come to see any undeclared activities or weaponization of their program,” ElBaradei said. “Nor have we gotten intelligence to that effect.” […]
The IAEA and Iran published an agreement on Aug. 27 that gives inspectors greater access to Iranian atomic facilities. Three days later, in a report, the agency cleared Iran of suspicion surrounding experiments with plutonium and the discovery of highly enriched uranium particles.
The IAEA-monitored nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, allows the enrichment of uranium or the reprocessing of plutonium for power plants while banning weapons production.
No wonder administration spokespersons frequently denounce ElBaradei and the IAEA rgearding Iran’s nuclear program. He’s a thorn in their side, a truth teller who has a record of pointing out publicly when the Bush administration is lying about the alleged WMD threats posed by “rogue” nations Bush wants to bomb. Furthermore, he’s one of the few impediments to the coming conflagration with Iran that the Bushies are so eager to ignite despite the Iranians willingness to acquiesce to the UN’s demands:
Iranian willingness to reach formal agreement in three separate meetings with ElBaradei in July and August to resolve all remaining issues on its past nuclear research by November was clearly aimed at moving the Iran nuclear dossier from the United Nations Security Council back to the IAEA and averting a military confrontation with the US. […]
The administration of US President George W Bush is furious with ElBaradei for taking the steam out of its campaign of pressure on Iran. The IAEA report that Iran had made “a significant step forward” by agreeing to a work plan for addressing remaining nuclear issues by the end of the year makes it more difficult for the US administration to get support for ratcheting up pressure on Iran at a meeting of the IAEA next week.
Indeed, many European diplomats are already operating under the working assumption that Bush will attack Iran before the end of his term in office, regardless of the “facts on the ground.”
[E]xperienced European diplomats, from Paris to the European Union headquarters in Brussels, confess their helplessness and impotence. They also confirm off the record that Bush’s brand-new European poodle, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is convinced the US president will order the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites – not to mention general infrastructure. A number of chancelleries are already working under this premise.
Of course, when has the US media ever let reality get in the way of good stenography. Too many of our journalists are only too willing to catapult the propaganda on behalf of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. One example is the publicity being extended to the wretched Michael Ledeen’s new book “Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealot’s Quest for Destruction” which makes the case for an American attack on Iran as soon as possible. Ledeen argues that for the absurd position that Iran = Al Qaeda. No matter that Ledeen doesn’t speak Farsi, and has never visited Iran. He’s part of the neocon campaign to push the war with Iran, and a member of the American Enterprise Institute, so he will be accorded the status of an expert on the Middle East by all the media outlets that interview him, despite the fact that his book is 99.9 % pure unadulterated horse manure.
Let’s hope that ElBaradei and some of the the saner generals and admirals in the Pentagon can forestall what looks to be a runaway trainwreck waiting to happen. Certainly we can’t rely on the Democrats in Congress to do anything about it. Sadly, they have been missing in action for quite some time.
The Democrat-controlled US Congress, for its part, has elevated its irrevocable irrelevance to the starry skies by virtually – and ignominiously – playing itself out of the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iran. In the unlikely event Congress would object, Rice already has the anti-virus vaccine: the stamping out of the Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami – known in the West as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – as a “terrorist organization”.
It doesn’t even matter – from the point of view of the Bush administration – if the whole 125,000-strong IRGC or just its elite Quds Force is branded as terrorists. The transition will be covered by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force issued on September 18, 2001. Moreover, the US Senate has already approved – by a Stalinist 97 votes to 0 – an amendment accusing Iran of committing acts of war against the US.
