Wednesday, June 25, 2008

ElBaradei's New Brief, Same as His Old Brief   [Steve Schippert]

The buzz circulating now is that IAEA Director Mohammed ElBaradei said on al-Arabiya that Iran could be months away from producing a nuclear weapon, as noted by AllahPundit at Hot Air and Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly. Hot Air actually nails it in interpreting that ElBaradei is not so much making a statement about the state of the Iranian nuclear-weapons program as he is projecting himself and the IAEA as the world's only line of defense against a nuclear-armed Iran. Frankly, there is no substantiative historical reason to place faith in such a claim.

What's more, just about all analyses completely ignore Iran's pursuit of a plutonium-based weapon through external acquisition and production beyond Iran's borders and beneath the IAEA and Western international radar. With nearly ten months of scrub time, Syria is only now entertaining the idea of limited and restricted IAEA inspections of the nuclear facility destroyed by Israel last September 6.

This "only line of defense" claim comes from the same UN "nuclear watchdog" that has no enforcement mechanism and the same one that failed to detect and/or deter North Korea, India, and Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons.

This is also the same IAEA which failed to stop Saddam Hussein's domestic program, destroyed by the Israelis at Osirak. Should it be mentioned that ElBaradei and the IAEA also failed to detect and prevent or stop Saddam's outsourced program, uncovered and halted by others in Qaddafi's Libya?

And, again, the same IAEA which failed to detect the domestic Iranian program until Iranian dissidents exposed the program with irrefutable evidence the IAEA was incapable of gathering itself.

And, of course, this is the same IAEA which failed to halt A. Q. Khan's illicit international nuclear black-market enterprise, which supplied and traded with the aforementioned Iranian and North Korean programs, among many others.

This is the organization that, according to ElBaradei, is at the vanguard of nuclear security and the sole reliable buffer between nuclear arms and the Iranian state sponsors of international terrorism.

ElBaradei said in the al-Arabiya interview, "I always think of resigning in the event of a military strike," because he "would conclude that there is no mechanism left for me to defend." He went on to say, "I am doing this out of the conviction that I am defending shared values." What values are shared — presumably with the Iranian mullah regime — is unclear.

However, keep in mind that this is the same ElBaradei who told the BBC that "I have no brief other than to make sure we don't go into another war or that we go crazy into killing each other. You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say 'let's go and bomb Iran.'" That's quite a different "brief" than a role in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon through inspection regimes.

Unfortunately, ElBaradei's only actual "brief" is to make continued assessment of the Iranian nuclear program. His agency has no enforcement mechanism and thus reports to the UN Security Council when measures of enforcement are required. In fact, he and his agency have no input on enforcement or consequence at all. Monitor and report — that's the IAEA's job.

Why we should be expected to put faith in a man and organization that have yet to prevent a single determined state actor from embarking upon and developing nuclear weapons is a very fair question. If ElBaradei is hesitant to call the domestic Iranian uranium-based nuclear-weapons program what it is, it really doesn't matter much. It requires no IAEA intellectual assistance to ponder responsibly why Iran was partnered with North Korea on a plutonium project inside Syria. More Iranian medical advances, perhaps?

There is no sign — based on either current circumstance or past track record — that ElBaradei and the IAEA are able to stop the Iranian quest.

And if Elbaradei cannot prevent it, then he should stay out of the way of whatever unfortunate measures may at least have a shot, if or when it comes to that. If Elbaradei quits only after, there will have been far greater tragedies in history.

06/25 11:58 AMShare