El Baradei - An Unwanted Obstacle To War

By Cernig

The Bush administration are mounting another major attempt, behind the scenes, to oust Mohammed El Baradei. Bush and his supporters have had the knives out for the IAEA's director ever since he said prior to the invasion that Iraq had no WMD's and was proven right.

Now, they are annoyed that he has done what the UNSC told him to do - work to clear up outstanding issues regarding Iran's nuclear program. With a whiff of dirty tricks just to add some sleaze to stupidity. Thus proving that they never really cared about solving disputes over Iran's nuclear program or making the world a safer place - they just wanted the IAEA - and thus the UNSC - to rubberstamp their push for war.

In similiar vein, watch how the public will be told that Iran cannot be trusted when it says it doesn't have a weapons program:

Speaking to an audience of Revolutionary Guards, the elite military unit that answers directly to him, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a rare direct statement that Iran is not interested in nuclear weapons.

"While the Iranian nation has no atomic bomb and has no plans to create this deadly weapon, it is still a respected nation" for its spiritual and revolutionary values, he told the Guards whose leader he had just replaced.

Despite the rhetoric of Iran's bombastic president, the IAEA has found only slow growth in Iran's enrichment program and no evidence of a weapons program. Nor have any of the dozens of lurid claims passed to the IAEA by US intelligence about secret and hidden weapons-related sites and programs panned out as true. The facts on the ground support Khamenei's statement.

It is the Bush administration which cannot be trusted. While it bangs the wardrums ever harder it has also, by withdrawing from critical nuclear arms treaties and by making deals with nuclear weapon holding states outwith the NPT, badly undermined world confidence in non-proliferation and in America's integrity.

American and world opinion (as well as Congress and the UNSC) should tell the Bush administration, loudly, to butt out, stop trying to fix the intelligence around their policy, and let the IAEA's experts do their job.