ElBaradei: Iran not an immediate nuclear threat

This is the guy on the spot, the guy who knows the score better than anyone else. Want to be he gets ignored?

Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the world shouldn't "jump the gun" with erroneous information as he said the U.S.-led coalition did in Iraq in 2003, nor should it push the country into retaliation as international sanctions did in North Korea.

"Our assessment is that there is no immediate threat," the winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize told a forum organized by the Monterey Institute of International Studies south of San Francisco. "We still have lots of time to investigate."

"You look around in the Middle East right now and it's a total mess," he said. "You can not add oil to that fire."

The recent violent history in Iraq bears an important lesson for diplomacy with neighboring Iran, the diplomat said. "We should not jump the gun. We should be very careful about assessing the information available to us," he said.

The Bush administration led a coalition into Iraq in 2003 saying President Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were found.

"I ask myself every day if that's the way we want to go in getting rid of every single dictator," ElBaradei said.

While it was unclear whether Iran ultimately intended to redirect its development of nuclear power into a weapons system, it was clear there was no danger of that right now, he said.

And perhaps most worrying of all is that Democrat hawks are more than happy to jump on the "Iran is eeevvvuuuulllll and wants to nuke everybody!!!" bandwagon so that they don't appear "squishy" alongside the bloodthirsty sociopaths that have hijacked the Republican party. Their thinking can only be compared to going out and murdering someone because you don't want to be seen as a wimp next to Hannibal Lecter.