ElBaradei Refuses To Aid Rush To War

Mohamed ElBaradei is refusing to be rushed by the Bush administration and it's European allies and has ruled out hurrying a detailled report on Iran's nuclear program so as to make it ready for the early February emergency meeting they have called.

ElBaradei said in written responses to the U.S. and EU requests that he had given Iran until the March meeting to answer questions in IAEA inquiries into its nuclear project, which it concealed from U.N. inspectors for almost two decades.

"Due process, therefore, must take its course before (we are) able to submit a detailed report," he said in a letter to the U.S., British, French and Australian ambassadors to the IAEA, distributed to all board members and seen by Reuters.

Diplomats close to the IAEA say ElBaradei disagrees with the Western thrust for referral now, believing further direct talks with Iran and IAEA investigations could still rein in Tehran. A fresh team of investigators is due in Iran this week, at Iran's invite, to monitor the research they will be making after taking the IAEA seals off equipment recently - equipment which was originally sealed by Iran voluntarily and in excess of requirements made by non-proliferation treaties.

Meanwhile, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that "You can't have negotiations going on while the regime is ignoring its agreements with the international community," - seemingly unaware of the irony of his words. If you listed all the agreements with the international community that the Bush administration has unilaterally reneged on, starting with the Geneva Convention, it would be longer than this webpage.

Scotty's attack-dog rhetoric seems to give the lie to recent reports that Bush, Rice and others had agreed on a policy of containment and peaceful regime-change for Iran. If they are just lying to present a case of plausible deniability behind which a rush for war continues then that would be utterly reprehensible. The very real possibility of changing by careful diplomacy the current regime in Iran for a more moderate one, without a revolution and without involving covert action and lunatic opposition resistance groups like the MEK, is the only one that offers a lasting resolution between Iran and the West which doesn't make matters worse.

Maybe it's just that, as my friend Mr M. at Comments From Left Field says, the Bushies are simply terrible at diplomacy. M blames the cronyism that is endemic to Bush's appointees:

The problem with cronyism is that it is an exact antithesis of diplomacy. This is simply because cronyism requires you to rub elbows with people who are similar to you, and easy for you to get along with, whereas diplomacy requires you to put aside personal differences and dislikes to work with people you don't like.

I think he is spot on about that, but I'm still of a mind that, like the Iraq invasion and the subsequent occupation, the administration's story may be one of lies and misdirection as well as incompetence.

Take for example the recent New York Times by David Sanger entitled "Why Not a Strike on Iran?" by David Sanger. Sanger is a consummate Washington insider, a member of the influential Council on Foreign Relations and of Joseph Nye and Brent Scowcroft's Aspen Strategy Group. Every single one of his reports has the appearance of being composed mainly by administration officials and sources commenting anonomously. Thus we can look at his latest story as being the second stage spin for the rush to war - it basically says that military strikes are possible, that the consequences would be terrible...and then, sotto voce, that even so, those strikes should take place because to do less would be cowardly appeasement. Nowhere is this attitude more prevalent than in the current highly rightwing Israeli government. Like Rove, they know that nothing wins votes for the incumbents like a handy war or the threat of one.

But the cracks are already showing, the lies are already surfacing. Dick Cheney had to admit this week that there is no evidence for close ties between Iran and the boogeyman, Al Qaida. (Unsurprising, really. Iran has already experienced several terror attacks by Al Qaida in recent years which went utterly unreported by the mainstream American media.) People like Dr. Jeffrey Lewis are doing sterling work showing that not only is Iran a decade or more away from having the capability to build a nuke, it's current missiles are utterly inadequate to deliver the heavy nukes it could build in the forseeable future.

Even the rightwing pundits (the honest ones at least - not the sycophant hacks) are being backed into a position where they have to conceed that there is a possibility that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. Their answer to that is to suppose that Iran wants everyone else to think they do - the possibility that American and Israeli hawks, along with nutcase Iranian would-be tyrants, are fabricating the evidence to enable the war they want so much is never considered. Even after admitting that "our intelligence in Iran is quite poor (poorer even than our intelligence was in Saddam’s Iraq and you know how that came out)", the right still wants to attack because, whether Iran is working for nukes or whether the hawks have just convinced themselves it is, "prudence requires us to respond to either alternative identically."

I'm very glad that ElBaradei has refused to be steamrollered. However, I am extremely dubious as to whether his sanity will be enough to reign in the rush to war. It is becoming ever more likely that, after refusing to be a part of negotiations in the first place, pressuring for the breakdown of negotiations and then refusing to entertain others beginning negotiations again, the war-wishers in America, Europe and Israel will announce there is no point to diplomacy any more and reach for their own bombs.