Joe Conason, TruthDig: The Right Smears ElBaradei

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_right_smears_elbaradei_20110202/

Posted on Feb 2, 2011

By Joe Conason

To his fellow Egyptians and to most observers across the world, Mohamed ElBaradei looks like a hero—an international diplomat who might well have lived out his days in the comforts of Geneva and New York but instead returned home to provide leadership despite serious personal peril. But to leading figures on the American right, ElBaradei is a figure to be mocked, scorned and dismissed as a stooge of darker forces in Egyptian politics and the Mideast.

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his years of stewardship of the International Atomic Energy Agency, he is suddenly the target of insults and attacks from Republicans who deem themselves expert on the politics of the Middle East. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton calls ElBaradei a “dilettante,” and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer goes further, calling him “a bad guy.”

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To everyone else, it is obvious that Hosni Mubarak cannot abide much longer as president of Egypt, despite the billions in aid that we have lavished on him these past three decades. And to everyone else, it is also obvious that whenever he goes, the most promising alternative is ElBaradei, a secular liberal with strong ties to the West.

But to the neoconservatives, the possibility that ElBaradei might help preserve his country’s 80 million souls from bloody chaos matters much less than the fact that he disagreed with them about the invasion of Iraq and that he still disagrees with them about a pre-emptive strike against Iran. He committed the unforgivable sin of being right when they were wrong about Iraq’s mythical nuclear weapons program, and he has insisted on pursuing a peaceful resolution of Iran’s atomic ambitions as well.

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