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.
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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.”
