Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei is a slap in the face for the United States.
That was surely the motivation; it is hard to see any other reasons for the award to him, shared with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In the past eight years, they have failed to detect covert nuclear programmes in at least three countries - and failed to get diplomatic purchase on the problems when others have finally brought them to light. That does not amount to a contribution to world peace.
The single judgment which ElBaradei has got right in his eight years as Director-General of the IAEA is the one most provocative to the US: that Iraq, in 2003, had no significant nuclear programme.
But to be fair to the US, it never put much weight on the Iraqi nuclear programme two years ago. It did believe that Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons posed an immediate threat, but thought the nuclear work was probably rudimentary. Any nuclear threat lay in the future, in Saddam Hussein’s known interest in acquiring the capability.
I feel sorry for Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. I hear they were in the running, but were just edged out. Maybe they can co-chair the UN human rights commission.
Perhaps by being inept, the IAEA helped peace. Had nuke programs in some nations been discovered sooner there could have been military action to stop them. Now we can instead have the joyful peace of nuclear proliferation. Peace, of course, isn't the same as freedom and human rights. They can and often do (China, Cuba) exist mutually exclusively. Peace is not a noble goal unless freedom and human rights are included.
You can get the rest
here.
While I'm going, here, how about a little fun from Mark Steyn.
I found myself behind a car in Vermont, in the US, the other day; it had a one-word bumper sticker with the injunction "COEXIST". It's one of those sentiments beloved of Western progressives, one designed principally to flatter their sense of moral superiority. The C was the Islamic crescent, the O was the hippie peace sign, the X was the Star of David and the T was the Christian cross. Very nice, hard to argue with. But the reality is, it's the first of those symbols that has a problem with coexistence. Take the crescent out of the equation and you wouldn't need a bumper sticker at all. Indeed, coexistence is what the Islamists are at war with; or, if you prefer, pluralism, the idea that different groups can rub along together within the same general neighbourhood. There are many trouble spots across the world but, as a general rule, even if one gives no more than a cursory glance at the foreign pages, it's easy to guess at least one of the sides: Muslims v Jews in Palestine, Muslims v Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims v Christians in Nigeria, Muslims v Buddhists in southern Thailand, Muslims v (your team here). Whatever one's views of the merits on a case by case basis, the ubiquitousness of one team is a fact.
I would also add Muslims v Muslims in Iraq.
The rest of that is
here.
