World Watch: Nuclear inspectors win Nobel
He is a man the Bush administration hoped would walk away from his job. But Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, saw fit earlier this year to stay for a third term as director general–with the United States glaringly isolated in its effort to replace him.
Now ElBaradei, an Egyptian lawyer educated in part at New York University School of Law, and his backers have reason to feel vindicated.
Today, he and his United Nations agency were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 in Oslo for their work to halt nuclear weapons proliferation. The award was intended to bolster the IAEA's troubled efforts to persuade Iran and North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons, come clean on their secret programs, and accept international monitoring. But it was difficult not to also see the award as an implicit rap on those hawks in the Bush administration who grew angry at the IAEA for not toeing its line on Iraq and Iran–and tried to punish ElBaradei for it.
Though it was the IAEA that initially ferreted out Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons drive in 1991, under ElBaradei it refused to endorse Washington's claims before the 2003 Iraq war that Saddam had reconstituted the program–one of President Bush's stated reasons for going to war. The IAEA turned out to be right.
On Iran, ElBaradei's agency issued tough reports detailing past deception and questionable nuclear technologies, but it refused to conclude–as the administration wanted–that Iran was in hot pursuit of the bomb. That was too much for the administration, and hawks led by the State Department's top arms control official at the time, John Bolton, attempted to peel off support for ElBaradei, 63. Tensions grew so high that for a time the administration stopped sharing intelligence with the IAEA and sniffed around for possible successors. ElBaradei reportedly was the target of U.S. spying as well.
But there were no takers in the U.S. campaign, and Washington ultimately joined with the pack in voting to reappoint him. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quickly praised the IAEA for receiving the "well-deserved honor."
For his part, ElBaradei said the award will "strengthen my resolve and that of my colleagues to continue to speak truth to power." That would seem to apply not only to the world's atomic miscreants but also to leading governments that, at times, wish to bend the IAEA to their ends.