SO LONG SUCKER!

New York Daily News

As of today, Mohamed ElBaradei is retired as head of the United Nations' chief nuclear watchdog agency after 12 years of service. He gets a gold watch, a special model that ticks louder and louder as Iran gets closer and closer to getting hold of the world's most dangerous weapons. And this watch is made of fool's gold. For that is what ElBaradei has been: a dangerous, delusional fool, a man who swallowed lie after lie from Tehran and excoriated the U.S. for failing to share his gullibility. This is the man who, in October 2003, told the BBC he was "assured that [Iran's leaders] have made a decision to come with [a] full and complete story of all the nuclear activities in the past, and that they are absolutely ready now to cooperate fully with us and to demonstrate full transparency, for us to be able to get all the clarification required." This is the man who, in February 2008, said on Iranian TV that he expected "the issue would be solved this year." And who later that month described Iran's explanations of its suspicious nuclear activities as largely "consistent with [the IAEA's] findings [or at least] not inconsistent." This is the man who this February boasted, "We have been able to understand the scope of the most sensitive part of the Iranian program, which is the enrichment program, which is now under complete agency inspection."

This is the man who in July said, "In many ways, I think the [Iran] threat has been hyped." This is the man who, according to France, suppressed evidence of Iran's covert weaponization facility from a report on Tehran's nuke program. This is the man who last month said, "Israel is the No. 1 threat to the Middle East," adding, "Iran could be a very positive element in the stable Middle East. Iran could be absolutely essential to stability in Afghanistan, in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestinian territories." And now, as he leaves office with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nakedly vowing to build 10 more uranium facilities like the recently revealed one at Qom, ElBaradei has declared: "It is now well over a year since the agency was last able to engage Iran in discussions about these outstanding issues. We have effectively reached a dead end, unless Iran engages fully with us." And his IAEA has suddenly wised up with a demand that Iran immediately freeze operations at Qom, amid "serious concern" about possible military uses of its nuke program. The record is clear. ElBaradei styled himself a peacemaker of eternal dimension, got played like a fiddle by the power-mad mullahs and wound up pushing the planet toward disaster.