IAEA board to debate Iran report

By Cernig

While American readers are eating Thanksgiving turkey, the board of the UN's nuclear watchdog agency will be debating Iran in the light of the most recent report which said Iran could do more to allay fears but that there was no evidence for a nuclear weapons program and that the current centrifuge cascades couldn't be used for making weapon material without the IAEA knowing.

IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei is expected to defend the Agency's work plan in the face of increased pressure by the Bush administration to get its allies to back more and harsher sanctions. It was OK, it seems, to ask for more time for The Surge to work but not for something that could prevent war by removing underlying fears.

Meanwhile, some of the same people who have always described Ahmadinejad of Iran as a dictator, likened him to Hitler and said he is a monolithic threat to the World are agog today that an Iranian hardline newspaper with close ties to the Grand Ayatollah has rebuked Iran's president for calling opponents of the nuclear program "traitors". If they had bothered to pay attention, they would have found us lefties saying that Ahmin-nutjob had problems for quite some time now. We've been quite looking forward to his political demise, more even than we've been looking forward to Bush's.

But they can't have it both ways - either he's a dictator to be feared or a sorry-ass s.o.b. who may be about to get canned by the real boss of Iran to the applause of everyone else on the planet. Can they at least admit that the dictator talk was simple hyperbolic fearmongering now?