So the Washington Post's editorial board has decided to smear IAEA Director Mohammad El-Baradei (ElBaradei? El Baradei?) by calling him a "Rogue Regulator" because - oh my goodness gracious! - the IAEA is doing precisely what it was supposed to do by monitoring Iran's nuclear facilities and resolving outstanding issues.
Of course, this should hardly come as a surprise because it was always known that the US considers the IAEA and international law only relevant when it serves their purposes. The Bush administration never really gave a damn whether there were any WMDs in Iraq or not, and always ignored the IAEA inspectors anyway.
Glen Greenwald notes (among other interesting points) that this critical editorial about El-Baradei over the Iran issue is eerily similar to a previous Washington Post editorial which was also critical of ElBaradei over the Iraq issue - which turned out to be totally unjustified. A reader conveniently provides the full text of that editorial for your reading pleasure.
I would point out that the criticism of ElBaradei is also very similar to the beating that Hans Blix, the previous IAEA head, took at the hands of the warmongers in Washington, due to his "failure" (LOL!) to find the non-existent WMDs in Iraq. I wrote about this sort of thing previously:
And regrettably, some of the same pundits and think tanks that helped peddle the "Iraqi WMD" threat are now active in promoting the idea that an Iranian nuclear weapons programme exists. For example, during the build-up to the Iraq invasion, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control repeatedly claimed that Iraq had "an active programme for building weapons of mass destruction", though in fact the IAEA inspectors had concluded otherwise. In editorials published in the Wall Street Journal he even went so far as to repeatedly accuse Hans Blix, then-Director General of the IAEA, of being "timid"-and "irrelevant" because of the IAEA's "failure" to find the non-existent WMD in Iraq. The editorials are still conveniently posted at IragWatch.org, a special website created by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control dedicated to "accounts of Iraq's efforts to build weapons of mass destruction". There were no attempts to withdraw these statements after the IAEA was vindicated and no WMD were found in Iraq. Instead, without missing a beat, the same organisation has simply shifted its attention to Iran: it has a started a new website called IranWatch.org, which urges policies to "stop the Iranian bomb". The fact that there is no actual evidence of any "Iranian bomb" appears to be as irrelevant to these pundits today as the non-existence of Iraqi WMD was in 2003.
Of course, we all remember how Washington had tried to oust El-Baradei from his job at the IAEA after the IAEA reported in November 2003 that there was no evidence that Iranian nuclear activities had any relation to a weapons program, and later in Nov 2004 that all nuclear material in Iran had been accounted for and none had been diverted to military use (and so there was no legal basis to refer Iran's file to the UNSC under the terms of Iran's safeguards agreement.)
As Joseph Cirincione wrote in more detail in Foreign Policy, ElBaradei first upset the Bush administration over the Iraq WMD issue:
By January 2003, as the full court press for war in Iraq was reaching an apex, ElBaradei reported that his team could not find any evidence to support the U.S. claim that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. And his March 2003 findings, sent to the U.N. Security Council, refuted all of the purported evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program, including the infamous aluminum tubes, uranium from Niger, and reactivated nuclear production plants.The Bush administration was furious. Vice President Dick Cheney heaped scorn upon ElBaradei and his inspectors. Of course, ElBaradei’s intelligence ultimately proved to be much more accurate than the Bush administration’s. Everyone now agrees that ElBaradei was correct.
And if that wasn't bad enough, then came the Iran issue:
ElBaradei annoyed the Bush administration anew in September 2004 with a report on Iran. Administration hard-liners, including Bolton and Cheney, believed that they had solid evidence of an Iranian weapons program that could be used to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council—or to provide justification for military strikes against the Islamic Republic. But the IAEA report found that the traces of highly enriched uranium that U.S. officials touted as proof of Iran’s weapon activity could be plausibly traced back to Pakistan, a U.S. ally and the source of Tehran’s nuclear equipment. Inspectors from the IAEA did not find any definitive evidence of weapons-specific work in Iran
After failing to get support for the ouster of El Baradei, the US only lifted opposition to him - but only conditionally, if he promised to "get tough on Iran."
Anyway, all this is quite similar to Bush administration's (successful) effort in 2002 to oust José Maurício Bustani, the head of Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), three years prior to the end of this term. The only paper to fully & directly deal with this at the time was the Guardian, in an article by George Monbiot - though the AP reported on it much later.
This was the first time that a head of an international organization was removed from office
before the conclusion of his term. Bustani had fallen out of favor with the Bush administration (and John
Bolton) for a number of reasons, but chiefly because he had insisted that the US be subject to the same
chemical weapons inspections as other signatories, refused to play along with the accusations of an
Iranian chemical weapons program, and more significantly, because he had nearly convinced the
Iraqis to sign on to the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - which would have meant that OPCW inspectors could then get into Iraq and disprove the Bush administration's repeated allegations about the alleged "vat-loads" of
anthrax and other weapons that the Bush administration already knew didn't exist. Goes to show - again - that the existence of WMDs in Iraq was only a pretext all along.
Anyway, Bustani filed suit against the OPCW before the International Labour Organization - and won. The ILO Tribunal ruled that the dismissal occurred under US pressure for political reasons and was subject to procedural irregularities (though it didn't detail the nature/motivations of the political pressure.)
This event followed the removal of a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the
campaign against the appointment of Mary Robertson as the High Commissioner for Human Rights; it predated efforts to remove El-Baradei in 2003-2004, which seemed to have ended after El-Baradei was invited to a certain meeting with US Sec. of State Condaleeza Rice, after which Rice expressed her support for ElBaradei and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Well, I guess ElBaradei is back in the hot water again. Maybe the Washington Post will let him keep his job if he promises to get even "tougher" on Iran?
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