In keeping with the Nobel committee’s penchant for making a political statement by honoring critics of American foreign policy, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize ridiculously went to Mohamed El-Baradei, the Egyptian barrister-turned-bureaucrat, whose decision to oppose a U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship won him the international Left’s enduring adoration. El-Baradei will share the prize with the organization he runs: the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the hapless UN nuclear watchdog whose successes on the nuclear non-proliferation front have been most conspicuous by their absence.
Of El-Baradei’s anti-American credentials there can be little doubt. In January 2003, as the U.S. was gearing up for a military intervention against Saddam Hussein, El-Baradei undertook a one-man diplomatic mission on behalf of the embattled Ba’athist, pleading on CNN that Saddam – after years of flouting the UN Security Council’s resolutions on disarmament – be granted “one final chance.” El-Baradei's desperate efforts to prevent Saddam’s ouster did not stem from a belief that the dictator was in compliance with the UN Security Council’s resolutions on disarmament; in January 2003, El-Baradei acknowledged before the Security Council that Iraq had run afoul of as Security Council Resolutions as 687, banning the procurement of aluminum tubes. El-Baradei nevertheless maintained that he and the IAEA was going “to do our damn best to disarm Iraq through inspection.”
Nothing in the IAEA’s recent past indicates that it can act as a reliable brake on the nuclear ambitions of rogue states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It failed to discover Iraq’s nuclear program prior to the first Gulf War – initially lauding Saddam for his compliance with non-proliferation resolutions. In 1998, when he had been on the job for half-a-year, India and Pakistan held joint nuclear tests before announcing their abrupt entrance into the nuclear powers. Since that time, El-Baradei and his agency have failed to detect Pakistan’s covert nuclear program, the brainchild of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The IAEA’s scrutiny of North Korea’s nuclear program has done nothing to check the nuclear aims of that Stalinist dictatorship, which is widely suspected of having already developed nuclear warheads. The “watchdog” watched as Libya labored on its WMDs program, only to halt progress after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
When, over El-Baradei’s strenuous objections, Coalition forces commenced Operation Iraqi Freedom, El-Baradei lamented that it “was the saddest day of my life.” Today, with Iraq an emergent democracy, El-Baradei and the IAEA have put their sympathies at the service of Iran. American diplomats have signaled that El-Baradei remains the primary obstacle to U.S. efforts to place the obstinate mullahs in Tehran before the UN Security Council. Faced with their intransigence, El-Baradei asserts that even rogue states like Iran have an unassailable right to develop a “full nuclear fuel cycle.” When Iran’s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced in September that Iran has an “inalienable right” to produce nuclear fuel, he was echoing El-Baradei.
However, the IAEA chief is not without enemies: he spent most of the summer of 2004 railing against Israel. On one occasion, he even blamed Israel for the fact that Middle Eastern rogue states were bent on its destruction. Unless Israel gave up its nuclear program, El-Baradei declared, “there will continue to be incentives for the countries of the region to develop weapons of mass destruction to match the Israeli arsenal.” El-Baradei did not trouble to ponder the moral distinction between Israel’s nuclear deterrent and the weapons expressly designed to hasten the extinction of the Jewish state.
Equally guilty, in El-Baradei’s eyes, is the United States. “The U.S. government demands that other nations not possess nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, it is arming itself,” goes one of his more common refrains.
Against that background, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Nobel committee’s decision to award its peace prize to El-Baradei and the IAEA is grounded more in politics than in merit. Which would be par for the course. The only shared trait of most of its recent awardees is their revulsion for the United States. The list includes North Vietnam’s Communist leader Le Duc Tho (’73), Amnesty International (’77), Desmond Tutu (’84), Mikhail Gorbachev (’90), author and Marxist fraud Rigoberta Menchu Tum, (’92), and the late terrorist leader Yasser Arafat (’94).
Then there’s the most glaring instance of the Nobel committee’s political commentary: its 2002 decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to former president Jimmy Carter, whose sole qualification for the prize seemed to be his zeal for denouncing the imminent military liberation of Iraq. Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Berge fortified that impression, stating, “It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.”
Similar remarks greeted El-Baradei’s selection last week. Hans Blix, himself an outspoken critic of the U.S., chose to see it as nod to the IAEA’s opposition to American policy, or, as he phrased it, an “endorsement of the professional and independent role of the IAEA and of international verification in the field of nuclear power and non-proliferation.” Undoubtedly El-Baradei himself saw it that way, opining, “The award sends a very strong message: ‘Keep doing what you are doing, be impartial, act with integrity,’ and that is what we intend to do.”
Given El-Baradei and the IAEA’s fecklessness, we can only fear he will, in fact, maintain the status quo.
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