Scary Shit

Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday December 4, 2007 03:59 EST
Our serious foreign policy geniuses strike again
(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)
Over the past year, the rhetoric from our Serious Foreign Policy establishment regarding the supposed threat posed by Iran's active pursuit of nuclear weapons has severely escalated both in terms of shrillness and threats. Opposition to this building hysteria has been led by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who -- exactly as he did prior to the invasion of Iraq -- has been relentlessly warning that there is no real evidence to support these war-fueling allegations.
Because of that, he has been relentlessly attacked and smeared by our Serious Foreign Policy elite -- yet again. And yet again, ElBaradei has been completely vindicated, and our Serious Foriegn Policy Experts exposed as serial fabricators, fear-mongerers and hysterics.
In 2005, the Bush administration vigorously (though unsuccessfully) sought to block ElBaradei's re-election as IAEA head on the ground that he was right about Iraq's non-existent weapons stockpiles:
The U.S. has complained ElBaradei has been too soft with Iraq, and has clashed with him over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ElBaradei balked at U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted WMD.The administration went so far as to tape record ElBaradei's conversations with Iranian officials in order to prove he was in league with them, all "in search of ammunition to oust him as director general." As The Washington Post reported, even back then (2005), administration officials "with access to the intercepts" were accusing ElBaradei of being "way too soft on the Iranians." According to the Post: "Some U.S. officials accused ElBaradei of purposely concealing damning details of Iran's [nuclear] program from the IAEA board."
Less than three months ago, the Very Serious Foreign Policy Expert Fred Hiatt published a scathing Washington Post Editorial attacking ElBaradei for warning of the dangers of an unnecessary war with Iran and pointing out that the evidence is non-existent that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Hiatt's Editorial accused ElBaradei of being a "Rogue Regulator" right in the headline.
ElBaradei's crime in Hiatt's eyes: he was trying to "use his agency to thwart their leading members -- above all the United States." And how, according to Hiatt, was ElBaradei engaging in his dastardly obstruction? By pointing out that the claims from American warmongers regarding Iran's nuclear program were exaggerated or false. Hiatt said that ElBaradei's chief sin was "to excuse the Iranian activity that most justifies the would-be bombers -- uranium enrichment."
Hiatt actually went so far as to warn that ElBaradei's insufficiently hysterical statements might mean that we will run out of time to act before Iran gets The Bomb -- exactly the same way that hysterical warmongers like Charles Krauthammer argued that we could not afford to wait for the U.N. inspections process in Iraq to be complete because, by then, Saddam might have The Bomb and it would be too late to act. Hiatt:
The IAEA issued a report last week playing down the centrifuge operation, saying that "only" 2,600 were operating or being installed and tested in July. But Mr. Ahmadinejad announced over the weekend that 3,000 were in place -- and even the lower number is a 50 percent increase over the number that inspectors counted earlier this year. By the time the IAEA and Iran are done talking about past questions, Iran will almost certainly have enough working centrifuges to produce a bomb within a year. . . .
Moscow and Beijing could join Mr. ElBaradei in arguing that nothing should be done before the end of the year. By then, the options of the Bush administration and other governments that believe Iran's nuclear program must be stopped, and not accommodated, may be greatly attenuated -- thanks to a diplomat who apparently believes he need not represent anyone other than himself.Showing his true allegiances, Hiatt mocked ElBaradei for having "set himself a new task: stopping what he considers to be the 'crazies' in Washington who 'want to say, 'Let us go and bomb Iran.'" Hiatt loyally defended his friends in the the "Bomb Iran" crowd: "we consider its members saner than many of the statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."
Identically, earlier this year, Hiatt's neoconservative comrade John Bolton went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and repeatedly smeared ElBaradei for suggesting that there was no evidence that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon. After Blitzer showed Bolton a clip of ElBaradei on CNN downplaying the threat of Iran's nuclear program, Bolton angrily blurted out: "Mohammed ElBaradei is an apologist for Iran. . . . He needs to learn that he works for the members governments of his agency, not the other way around."
Naturally, Bolton escalated the "Iran apologist" accusation against ElBaradei on Fox News. When Bolton accuses a U.N. weapons expert bearing the name "Mohamed ElBaradei" and an Egyptian accent of being an "Iran apologist" -- and when the Bush administration tapes his conversations with Iranian officials to prove he's in cahoots with them -- the reprehensible meaning could not be clearer.
In Bolton's CNN appearance, after Blitzer pointed out that ElBaradei was re-elected and therefore obviously has the confidence of most member states, Bolton lamented: "I don't think we were effective in our campaign to oppose him, and I don't think we did nearly what we should have done, and I think we are paying the price now and will pay it into the future. Then this exchange:
BLITZER: In fairness to Mohamed ElBaredei, before the war in Iraq, when Condoleezza Rice and the President were speaking about mushroom clouds of Saddam Hussein and a revived nuclear weapons program that he may be undertaking, [ElBaradei] was saying that there was absolutely no such evidence, he was poo-poo-ing it, saying that the Bush Administration was overly-alarming and there was no nuclear weapons program that Saddam Hussein had revived. He was right on that one?
BOLTON: Even a stopped clocked is right twice a day.Even Blitzer pointed out the obvious: "That was an important issue in trying to justify the war -- the mushroom cloud, the fear that the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud -- that's not just a little issue. He was right on a major, major justification for going to war."