Hugh Hewitt flags the latest hit job on IAEA Chief Mohammed el Baradei from AEI’s Michael Rubin and Danielle Pletka, who have had elBaradei in their cross hairs ever since the Iraq war. (You see, while the hawkish duo was drumming up support for a U.S. non-proliferation strategy predicated on invading and occupying Iraq, elBaradei warned anyone who would listen that his agency has no evidence of nuclear weapons in Iraq.) Now, for having the audacity to once again to render a judgment on the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program based on evidence available to him (incidentally, a judgment backed up by the American intelligence community) elBaradei gets subjected to fusillades like this:
Mr. ElBaradei’s report [on Iran] culminates a career of freelancing and fecklessness which has crippled the reputation of the organization he directs. He has used his Nobel Prize to cultivate an image of a technocratic lawyer interested in peace and justice and above politics. In reality, is a deeply political figure, animated by antipathy for the West and for Israel on what has increasingly become a single-minded crusade to rescue favored regimes from charges of proliferation.
Glen Greenwald has done a masterful job documenting how time and time and time and time and time and time again, Elbaradei has been vindicated against charges that he is some sort of stooge to rogue proliferators. Meanwhile, it is hard to see how Elbaradei can be accused of anti-Americanism when all along his agency has been supplying to the United States correct information about the nuclear weapons programs of America’s potential rivals. It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing that the United States would want from the world’s nuclear watchdog.