In fact, Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, the Egyptian-born director-general of the IAEA-and no crony of the Bush White House, which once lobbied unsuccessfully for his removal from office-has spent the last three years compiling a running catalog of Tehran's refusals to grant UN inspectors access to key nuclear sites, documents and personnel. In his February 2006 report to the agency's Board of Governors, ElBaradei expressed concern about Iran's tests relating to high explosives and its designs for missiles re-entry vehicles, and concluded that the "administrative interconnections" between these initiatives showed the overall program "could have a military nuclear dimension." In his latest report to the Board, dated August 31, ElBaradei complained that Iran "has not addressed the long outstanding verification issues or provided the necessary transparency to remove uncertainties associated with some of its activities . . . Nor has Iran acted in accordance with the provisions of the Additional Protocol [to the NPT]." Far from stamping its seal of approval on Iran's nuclear program, the IAEA regretted that it "remains unable to make further progress in its efforts to verify the correctness and completeness of Iran's declarations with a view to confirming the peaceful nature" of the program.

None of the reporters who have gotten a shot at Ahmadinejad were well-versed enough in the torturous history of Iran's gaming of UN nuclear inspectors to call him on his misrepresentations about Tehran's "cooperation" with the IAEA or the agency's findings. Even if they had, it's highly likely he would have responded by delving into his rhetorical bag of tricks and sprinkling the air with questions, not unlike the confetti ordinary Iranians will heave when, in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Theater of the Impossible, Tehran finally succeeds-a few years from now, U.S. intelligence officials say publicly, within a year, say the Israelis-at enriching uranium to weapons-grade level: Why are you asking? Do you represent the IAEA? Was it not the Americans who first developed nuclear weapons? Does not Israel have them? And who on the Security Council is truly prepared to stop me from having them?

 

James Rosen is the State Department correspondent for the Fox News Channel.