More incompetent than Hans Blix? Meet Mohamad ElBaradei.

The incompetence with which Hans Blix is generally regarded as having carried out his duties as head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency was expected to take some topping.

Unfortunately, his successor Mohamad ElBaradei has given a whole new definition to the term 'incompetence' and in the same way that Middle East journalist Robert Fisk's name has become a verb - to 'fisk' - it would be appropriate if the same happened with ElBaradei to describe situations in which people or authorities, duly tasked with being in charge of a process or outcome, fail singularly in that task due to gross professional incompetence.

For example:

"Why hasn't the United Nations resolved the issues in Darfur?"

"Oh, they're too busy ElBaradeing."

(Note that Google returns zero results for 'elbaradeing'...it's unusual to make up any term and not find it already thought of previously).

From Pakistan to North Korea to India and to Iraq the IAEA has been shown to be profoundly ineffective as those countries went about developing nuclear weapons capabilities, some successfully and some not, right under the noses of the watchdog.

The IAEA is the agency that is meant to be aware of the development of nuclear technologies around the world.

In spite of all of the evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons (read Kenneth Timmerman's book - Countdown To Crisis, amongst others) including the fact that the centrifuges they've installed are only used for the production of weapons grade material, ElBaradei defends Iran, says they're not trying to build nuclear weapons and berates the United States for overstating the case.

CHIEF UN atomic watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei said overnight he had no evidence Iran was building nuclear weapons and accused US leaders of adding "fuel to the fire" with recent bellicose rhetoric.

"I have not received any information that there is a concrete active nuclear weapons program going on right now," the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told CNN.

Last month the IAEA was caught with its pants down by Israel's destruction of a nuclear development facility in Syria. The Syrian's were so outraged (at getting caught) that they said almost nothing, expressing very minor outrage at what was an act of war by Israel. Whatever was bombed was clearly so secret that the Syrians wasted no time covering it up, as the before and after pictures below show:



What was ElBaradei's response? He's from the UN so, of course, it's blame Israel time.

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog criticized Israel on Sunday for attacking a suspicious Syrian site last month, saying the "bomb first and then ask questions later" undermined global atomic monitoring work.

In his first public comment on Israel's mysterious bombing run on what some analysts suggested was a nascent Syrian nuclear reactor, Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, called on the Israelis and other countries to share information with IAEA.

Israel has spent nearly 60 years sharing information with UN agencies and finding it used against them so it's understandable that they'd take things into their own hands in this circumstance.

But Israel's attack is not the main issue. The elephant in the IAEA's padded cell is that it was completely unaware of Syria's nuclear facility up until Israel's action.

One of the under-reported benefits of toppling Saddam Hussein is that Libya voluntarily ceased its own nuclear program. Did the IAEA know about Tripoli's dabbling in the odd bit of atom splitting? Of course not.

The IAEA didn't even know about Iran's program until it was well under way. Given that both China and Russia had been helping build the thing and they're members of the UN's Security Council it shows not only how clueless the IAEA is but also what a joke the Security Council has become given its charter of maintaining international peace and security. Letting a regime that thinks the twelfth Imam's return is just around the corner, and the decisive conflict with the Jewish state is nigh, have nuclear weapons seems to be at least a tad at odds with the charter and just a little bit unwise.

What other rogue states are there in the process of quietly developing nuclear weapons? Is the nutjob that runs Venezuela heading down that path? Who knows? If anyone does then ElBaradei and his cronies will be the last to, that's for sure.

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