Two weeks ago, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on CNN that an attack on Iran would “lead absolutely to disaster.” He added that there is no evidence of a “concrete, active nuclear weapon program” going on inside Iran.
Today on CNN’s Late Edition, neconservative warhawk John Bolton responded by smearing ElBaradei as “an apologist for Iran” and said the United States is “paying the price” for not opposing him more vociferously.
When host Wolf Blitzer reminded Bolton that ElBaradei correctly warned prior the Iraq war that there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program, Bolton derisively dismissed his warnings by claiming “even a stopped clock is right twice a day”:
BLITZER: But, you know, in fairness to Mohamed ElBaradei, 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, he was saying there was absolutely no such evidence. He was poo-pooing it, saying the Bush administration was overly alarming and there was no nuclear weapons program that Hussein had revived. He was right on that one.
BOLTON: Even a stopclock is right twice a day. Bolton insisted that “there was never any real disagreement” between the IAEA and the Bush administration on Saddam’s “physical capacity for a nuclear weapon.”
In fact, in February 2002, ElBaradei insisted that there was “no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear related activities in Iraq.” Meanwhile, Bush asserted that Saddam was meeting with his “nuclear mujahedeen” and that the United States could not wait “for the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Admiral William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, said a strike against Iran is “not in the offing.” Fallon added that the rhetoric of right-wing war hawks is unhelpful:
“None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go,” he said. “Getting Iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.”
Do you remember when someone said that Bolton chased one of his people to a worker’s hotel room and he wanted her to unlock her door so he could confront her so he used his shoe to bang on her door. She had said something true at a meeting and he was embarassed that she brought it up in front of other people because it was something that he didn’t want exposed to anyone. Well when David Brooks of the NYTimes op-ed talked about that incident on the Newshour on PBS and he said it was ridculous and of course it never happened. I almost jumped thru the television because I had heard a live interview on radio where the person he did it to described in detail how nasty and crazy he could get. I think they both worked for the state dept at the time. She told the story because he was up for a confirmation hearing for the UN ambassador and she thought his desposition was not right for the post. She was ridiculed by the right for coming forward.
I hope you don’t mind if I go on about Brooks but in todays op-ed Bob Herbert has a terrific piece about Reagan. It seems NYTimes op-ed columnist Paul Krugman said something about Reagan when Reagan launched his presidential campaign in Miss. Brooks basically said it wasn’t true without mentioning his fellow co-workers name. I guess that got Herbert stirred up and the feud is still going on in todays NYTimes. Brooks has moved on but he can’t be happy about todays op-ed page. You know how most of the right, conservatives etc love to talk about St. Reagan