Muslim who works for the UN wins PEACE PRIZE

this is great news, and well deserved, because, as we know, no countries acquired nuclear weapons on el baradei's watch.

 

Sarcasm?

 

in other news:

Man Wins Award for Creating Fake Dog Testicles

 

nvm....

 

As usual, basso's post illustrates his logic, or should I say lack of logic?

 

Absolutely. Even more deserved since It has been well documented that el baradei has dettered US from stockpiling nuclear weapons. This is of greater importance since we are the only nation in the history to have used it on another.

Oh the hypocrisy....

 

So by that logic, the war on terror hasn't been all that succesful, right?

 

I thought the nobel prize for medicine went to the guy who showed ulcers are bacterial not stress related.

 

This is "lg Nobel `" award. It recognizes wierd and strange works. They also have similar awards in Physics, chemistry, peace, literature etc.

I found the one in literature the best. It was awarded to Nigerians for their creations of names in the junk emails. The ones who need just a tad bit of money to unlock loads of riches. So who goes up to take the award? The president of Nigeria?

 

look up basso!

WHOOOOSH!

 

Basso, is just upset because El Baradel was correct that Iraq did not have wmd.

Basso sadly had his trust abused by the Bush Administration , but it hurts too much to realize this. Being conned can be emotionally devastating for the victim. It can make you pissed at those who were not similarly conned.

 

OK, dude, you obviously have never studied international security. The reason other countries haven't used such weapons is BECAUSE we have a lot of them and they know we'll retaliate. It's called second strike capability. The absence of a second strike capability increases the likelihood of a first strike. So preventing the US from stockpiling weapons has no effect because we have so many and if it has any effect at all, it increases the likelihood for a country to strike first.

EDIT: For more on the subject, read some Mearsheimer (I recommend The Tragedy of Great Power Politics)

 

That award was from Harvard. The Ig Nobels spoof the Nobel Prizes by pointing out the lighter side of science.

 

Mearsheimer also argues that our nuclear umbrella was the only thing keeping Russia out of Western Europe. I'm not sure why we still have so many TNWs deployed there now though...

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1816612,00.html

Gong for dubious level of achievement
By Bronwen Maddox
Foreign Editor's Briefing

GIVING the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei is a slap in the face for the US. That was perhaps the motivation; it is hard to see any other solid reason for giving the award to him, shared with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
In the past eight years the agency and its director-general have failed to detect covert nuclear programmes in at least three countries — and failed to get diplomatic purchase on the problems when others have brought them to light. That does not amount to a contribution to world peace.

The single judgment that Dr ElBaradei has got right in his eight years at the IAEA is the one most provocative to the US: that Iraq, in 2003, had no significant nuclear programme.

But before the war, the US didn’t rate the Iraqi nuclear programme as a big threat, compared with that from chemical and biological weapons. It thought that the real nuclear threat lay in the future, in Saddam Hussein’s known interest in acquiring the capability.

The IAEA’s “success” in not exaggerating the threat of Iraq in 2003 is compromised by the number of times it has missed a threat entirely:

Before the 1991 Gulf War (before Dr ElBaradei’s appointment), the IAEA failed to detect Saddam’s nuclear programme. After the war, it was startled by the scale of his work to make fissile material.

Under Dr ElBaradei, the IAEA missed the Libyan nuclear programme, which Libya chose to reveal after the 2003 Iraq war.

It missed Iran’s 20-year covert nuclear research programme, exposed by Iranian dissidents three years ago.

It failed to detect the “nuclear supermarket” run by A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold plans and components to Libya, North Korea and Iran.

It was slow to sound the alarm about North Korea’s conversion of its civil nuclear power into a weapons programme. The US accused North Korea of weapons ambitions in 2002.

Nor, when those cases of proliferation have come to light, has Dr ElBaradei or the agency played a significant part in trying to get the regimes to desist. The stand-off between India and Pakistan after nuclear tests in 1998 was left to the US and Europe to tackle. In North Korea the IAEA has been sidelined as the US, China and Japan have taken the lead.
But it is Iran where the IAEA and Dr ElBaradei most need to justify their actions — or lack of them. In the past three years IAEA inspectors have repeatedly visited Iran to study the extent of its nuclear research. Dr ElBaradei’s quarterly reports to the IAEA board of directors have shown that Iran’s co-operation has been grudging, slow and sometimes incomplete. Inspectors have not found clear evidence of a weapons programme.

America’s quarrel with Dr ElBaradei is that these reports have been written in so measured a tone that they have not put much pressure on Iran.

British officials, who have been working with French and German counterparts, say that Dr ElBaradei has been less helpful than they wanted in trying to threaten Iran with referral to the UN Security Council. US officials have suggested that this is because he is Egyptian, Muslim and sympathetic to Islamic countries. European officials more often see his reserve as stemming from a distress at the failure of diplomacy that a referral would imply.

But certainly, in his public comments, Dr ElBaradei has sounded sympathetic to the aspirations of developing countries. He has attacked what he sees as double standards at the heart of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, by which acknowledged nuclear weapons powers seek to stop others getting them.

He has extensively promoted his own solution to the Iranian problem: to put uranium enrichment plants under shared, international ownership, so that everyone could rest assured that they were not used to make weapons-grade material.

It is a neat theoretical idea that has found no foothold in diplomatic reality. Dr ElBaradei’s defenders say that his critics wrongly blame him for problems that stem from the IAEA’s mixed mandate or their own muddled diplomacy. The twin roles of the IAEA have always given it an uncomfortable juggling act: to promote civil nuclear power but to deter the spread of weapons. Dr ElBaradei has argued that the agency must follow its remit in asking to inspect known sites. It cannot ask for impromtu inspections based on rumours. Even so, under his lead, the agency has widened the “additional protocol”, giving it the right to make more intrusive inspections of more countries. He has also been caustic about the weakness of some European diplomacy. He was critical of one “deal” with Iran that ducked the key question of how to define the suspension of controversial work, handing this to the IAEA.

That defence is fair, as far as it goes. But it still seems a tepid answer to the challenge thrown up by the record of the past eight years, in which the IAEA failed to detect many cases of proliferation and then struggled to find itself a role.