NOBEL NONSENSE

New York Post:

October 8, 2005

The Nobel Committee, true to form, made a political selection yesterday in naming the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its head, Mohammed el-Baradei, the winners of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

It was widely expected that this year's peace laureate would have something to do with nuclear power — this being the 60th anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought World War II to a close.

And what more appropriate choice for the world's most prestigious award, the committee must have felt, than someone who had so publicly clashed with the Bush administration over claims that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction.

Indeed, el-Baradei won a third term as IAEA chief earlier this year despite heated opposition from Washington.

The committee said it was awarding the prize to send a message "at a time when disarmament efforts appear deadlocked [and] when there is a danger that nuclear arms will spread both to states and to terrorist groups."

But if the Peace Prize was meant to recognize those who have stood in the way of nuclear proliferation, then it's being given to the wrong people.

After all, the IAEA has done nothing to halt ongoing — and active — efforts by both North Korea and Iran to obtain nuclear weapons capability. And el-Baradei has been outspoken in opposing efforts to bring the issue of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons before the U.N. Security Council.

By contrast, it was President Bush (and Britain's Tony Blair) who persuaded one of the most dangerous men on Earth — Libya's Moammar Khadafy — to abandon his support for terrorism and his own stockpile of WMDs and begin to rejoin the community of nations.

Of course, the committee presented its Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter in 2002 in what one member boasted was meant as "a kick in the legs" to President Bush: This bunch isn't about to consider the political realities of halting nuclear proliferation.