Oooo, those Swedes. They gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Bushies must be mightily pissed.

Mohamed ElBaradei, you might recall, is the same guy who, before the Iraq invasion, did everything but stand on his head and whistle Dixie to warn that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons capability (see old Mahablog post on this here). Beginning the day before Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address–home of the Sixteen Words!–ElBaradei made the rounds of talk shows and said his inspectors were not finding evidence of nuclear weapons of mass desctruction, or even weapons of mass destruction-related program activities. Saddam Hussein’s old nuclear weapons facilities and equipment were still sitting dormant, and sealed, just as the IAEA had left them in 1998.

When it became obvious even to the Bushies that ElBaradei had been right and the Bushies wrong, naturally ElBaradei became a target of Bushie wrath. This past January they tried desperately to replace him as head of the IAEA and failed spectacularly:

The United States has failed to persuade 15 countries to support an effort to replace International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, effectively stalling the plan, the Washington Post reported Saturday (see GSN, Jan. 10).

“It’s on hold right now,” said one U.S. policy-maker who lobbied against ElBaradei. “Everyone turned us down, even the Brits.”

In addition to the United Kingdom, the United States also unsuccessfully approached Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa and South Korea, U.S. officials said.

“We can certainly live with another ElBaradei term,” a British official said.

Slap. But the Bushies still have enough clout to keep ElBaradei out of the sandbox, even if they can’t have him evicted from the playground. They’ve refused to allow the IAEA to have full access to Iraq’s old nuclear sites since the March 2003 invasion. After a highly restricted and tightly supervised inspection in the summer of 2003, the IAEA was kept out of Iraq entirely from August 2003 until July 2004, when “sovereignty” was “transferred” to Iraq. The government of Iraq has permitted limited “safeguard” inspection, but the IAEA site adds this disclaimer: “The safeguards inspections are separate from weapons inspections mandated by the UN Security Council that ceased in mid-March 2003.”

Somebody walked off with a lot of old but usable stuff, like milling machines and electron beam welders. I don’t believe the White House has commented on this at all. The only available clue about who is taking this stuff is that the U.S. Department of Energy admitted to taking 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium plus “roughly 1000 highly radioactive sources” in July 2004.

(Note that the uranium was still secured by IAEA seals when IAEA inspectors checked it prior to the invasion, meaning Saddam Hussein hadn’t done anything with the stuff for many years. It was just there. I mention this because righties tend to get all worked up whenever they learn about the uranium. But it was not only sealed, it was years away from being weapons-ready as it was.)

Fred Barbash and Dafna Linzer report in today’s Washington Post that “ElBaradei was virtually unknown when the United States engineered his candidacy eight years ago to run the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency.” In other words, the Clinton Administration supported him. Another black mark. Further,

In an interview with The Washington Post last fall, ElBaradei said the day the United States invaded Iraq “was the saddest in my life.” It was not because he was a fan of Hussein, but because he was so sure Washington’s assertions about weapons stockpiles and a secret program would be proved wrong.

Washington responded to ElBaradei’s findings on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction by trying to prevent him from taking a third term, despite requests from other board members that he stay on. “I am staying because I was asked, because so many board members made me feel guilty about leaving at such a crucial time,” he said in an interview earlier this year.

The Bush administration launched a vigorous but solitary campaign — including a complete halt of intelligence sharing, recruitment of potential replacements for ElBaradei and eavesdropping on him in search of ammunition against him. But as his popularity diminished in Washington, it soared elsewhere.

Heh.

See also Meteor Blades.