May 20, 2009 | Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), discusses the record of his term in office, his bitter struggle with the Bush administration and the dangers that new nuclear powers pose.
Mr. ElBaradei, you have been the director general of the IAEA for more than 11 years, and you plan to retire in November, at the end of your third term.There can be no question of retirement. The nuclear threat is too great for me to be able to put this issue to rest. I will continue to play an active role.
When you took office, you wanted to make the world a safer place; but now the threat seems greater than ever. Nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of the Taliban in Pakistan. North Korea has announced plans to test another nuclear weapon. And, in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasts about being able to close the nuclear cycle. Have you failed?No, I don't think so. We did what we could. We at the IAEA are merely a tool as strong as our member states allow us to be. We cannot make political decisions; nor are we in a position to implement them. We cannot simply march into any country without its consent. It was others who failed.
Whom do you mean?The international community. The world has ignored our warnings. Take the case of Iraq, for example. Even though we had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, they were used as justification for the war -- the most dangerous moment of my tenure. Or take Pyongyang. Efforts to engage North Korea in ongoing disarmament talks have failed. And the dialogue with Tehran was tied to preconditions that were unacceptable to the Iranians.
It was because of assessments like these that you were accused of being naive, especially by the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush.
That's unfair. In the case of North Korea, for example, we pointed out in 1992 that the country was in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). And we have consistently pressed the Iranians to respond to unanswered questions about their nuclear program. The world has the IAEA to thank for almost everything it knows about Iran's nuclear progress.
Information coming from the exiled opposition led to the discovery of the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz.
Unlike some nations, we do not have our own satellites for aerial photographs. Sometime they give us something because it suits their geopolitical goals, and sometimes they withhold things.
The Bush administration was so suspicious of you that U.S. intelligence agencies tapped your phones.
That didn't bother me so much because I never had anything to hide. On the contrary, it gave me a shot in the arm because I knew that I was doing the right thing. But my daughter was deeply disturbed that people were listening in on her private conversations.
Would you have thought the Bush administration was capable of that sort of a wiretapping campaign?
It didn't really surprise me. What can you expect from an administration that -- in a mixture of ignorance and arrogance -- passed over countless diplomatic opportunities to conduct a dialogue with Tehran? The entire Middle East was turned into a complete mess.
The new American administration has announced a change of course.more at link
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link to www.salon.com]
Last Edited by SPUD on 09/30/2011 12:21 PM"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."
- George Orwell, 1984
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link to thesecrettempleofit.blogspot.com]
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