When protests erupted last month, ElBaradei returned to his native Egypt, and under the caption “opposition leader” has been all over the news, offering himself as a “broker,” a “vessel,” a “bridge” an “agent of change,” from Mubarak’s rule to “democracy.” On Friday he welcomed Mubarak’s ouster as “the greatest day of my life.”
Yet ElBaradei has linked arms with, among others, Egypt’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood – the jihad-preaching movement that aspires to an Islamic caliphate, and spawned the terrorists of Hamas and al Qaeda. What kind of brokering and bridge-building might that portend? Look at his record.
Where was ElBaradei’s interest in democracy during the years in which he acquired the multilateral mystique and Nobel prize that made him one of the most famous names in Egypt? As director-general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, from 1997-2009, ElBaradei’s hallmark was contempt for the world’s democracies, notably the U.S. and Israel; and an affinity for some of the world’s worst tyrannies, notably Iran, Syria and North Korea.
This cannot simply be chalked up to the constraints of serving as a technocrat within the UN, where respect for sovereign states trumps such fine distinctions as despotism versus democracy. ElBaradei has long prided himself on speaking outside the box. As head of the IAEA he used his erstwhile neutral platform in 2009 to try to bully the BBC into airing a fundraiser for Hamas-controlled Gaza. Throughout his 12-year tenure he trespassed on the diplomatic turf of UN member states, publicly urging that despots seeking to fortify themselves with nuclear weapons be treated with deference and dialogue.
When North Korea’s totalitarian regime conducted its first nuclear test, in 2006, ElBaradei did not call for North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Il to step down, complete with his nuclear obsessions, and make way for democracy. He urged appeasement, calling Kim Jong Il’s nuclear detonation “A cry for help.”
In Iran, ElBaradei was one of the UN’s big gifts to the mullahs, running interference for years against referral of Iran’s nuclear program from the IAEA to the UN Security Council. According to former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, ElBaradei “frequently altered the reports of IAEA inspectors,” editing their findings in such a way that he “gave Iran every benefit of the doubt.”
In the fall of 2009, when news emerged that Iran had secretly built a uranium enrichment plant on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps base near Qom, ElBaradei went to Iran, and on Oct. 4 made a statement there that could hardly have been more deferential toward the UN sanctioned and nonproliferation-treaty-violating Iranian regime. The IAEA inspectors had come, he said, “To assure ourselves that it is a facility built for peaceful purposes.” Ignoring the thrust of three UN Security Council sanctions resolutions aimed at stopping Iran’s drive toward nuclear weapons ElBaradei added, “As I have said many times, and I continue to say today, the Agency has no concrete proof that there is an ongoing weapons program in Iran.” He further assured Iran’s rulers that the IAEA had no interest in Iran’s missile program, which he apparently viewed as in no way “nuclear-related.”
ElBaradei threw in some personal comments, but they had nothing to do with the bloody suppression just four months earlier of the Iranian uprising against a regime far more brutal than the despotism he is now reviling in Egypt. Thanking his Iranian government hosts for their kind welcome, he stressed that this final visit in his official IAEA capacity would be “definitely not my last.” He said that as a private citizen, “I would be very happy to come here as many times as I can.”
Three months after ElBaradei’s Nov., 2009 retirement, the IAEA suddenly became much better at connecting the dots. On February 18, 2010, the new head of the IAEA, Japan’s Yukiya Amano, produced a hard-hitting report, based on information stretching well back into ElBaradei’s tenure, discussing reasons for concern that Iran might be working on “the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
When Israel in 2007 destroyed a clandestine and nearly completed reactor that Syria, with the help of North Korea, had been building for years on the Euphrates River, ElBaradei appeared less upset with the Syrians for building and concealing the illicit reactor than with the Israelis for destroying it. He chided Syria’s tyrannical, terrorist-sponsoring regime for not being more transparent. He publicly accused Israel’s democratic government of breaking international law.
In the case of Saddam Hussein’s mass-murdering totalitarian regime in Iraq, ElBaradei’s current interest in democracy for the Arab world was nowhere on display. He opposed the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam, whose legitimacy he did not question. He reserved for President George W. Bush a brand of insult he never lavished on the worst tyrants of the Middle East.
In 2004, ElBaradei went out of his way to insert the IAEA into the U.S. presidential race between Bush and John Kerry. The week before the vote, The New York Times ran a story, based on half-baked information leaked from the IAEA, alleging that U.S. authorities had failed to secure large quantities of high explosives that had apparently disappeared from an Iraqi weapons facility at Al Qaqaa, near Baghdad. The same day the story broke, ElBaradei rushed to confirm it, sending the leaked document to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan with a letter saying that “because the matter has been given media coverage” ElBaradei wanted the underlying document distributed to the Security Council. It later turned out the Al Qaqaa story had been overblown. But in the runup to the polls, it looked like the IAEA-generated scandal might sway the election. The Washington Post — no fan of Bush — editorialized that ElBaradei had gone out of his way to fuel the story, and “The fact that he was providing easy fodder for Mr. Kerry’s campaign just eight days before the presidential election evidently did not deter this U.N. civil servant.”
The following year, 2005, the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee — also no fan of Bush — awarded ElBaradei and the IAEA the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel citation was necessarily generic praise “for their efforts”; nuclear proliferation was on the move, and there were no stellar deeds to cite.
Having returned to Egypt after his long and richly decorated sojourn at the IAEA, ElBaradei has said he is not seeking the presidency, but if the people insist, he would “not disappoint.” Meanwhile, by his own account “reaching out” to the Muslim Brotherhood, he is there to broker change. He’s got a record as a broker all right, but is this the resume of a man who prizes democracy?
