“In light of all this, the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address resonates hauntingly today. “What is the joy about?” he challenged. He admonished us that, “…the most striking feature in the West today is the decline in courage. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party and of course in the United Nations. Political and intellectual functionaries proudly exhibit self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable and even morally justifiable it is to base policies on weakness and cowardice…”

The truth of the matter is that he was frighteningly right. The United Nations, the Nobel Foundation and all the other keystones of civilization are failing as testing agents of human decency. The crucibles in which enduring human values must be generationally re-forged are growing cold. The flames flicker out. The anvils on which we hammered out justice, are slowly being cast aside.

In their absence swords cannot be turned into plowshares. Our best hopes for civility and civilization are dragged down to the lowest points of discredit by debasement and evil run rampant. And the sublime prophecy which graces the entrance to the United Nations that “…nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore…” rings out as hollow as lost hope.”

~ The Temper of Our Time

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When British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, Virginia on Oct. 19, 1781 ending the Revolutionary War, he ordered his military band to play an old English tune called “A World Turned Upside Down” as his army passed in salute in front of George Washington’s forces. The name of that old English song is an apt description of the temper of the times we live in today.

Not much should surprise us anymore as we have become so immersed in the smug, self-satisfied double standards that allow us to wrap ourselves in comfortable cloaks of political correctness while ignoring the stark reality of the moral bankruptcy that surrounds us. Yet there are still events that should shock us out of our reveries and make us realize that if we accept the current human condition without protest or contest then each of us will be judged complicit in the degeneration to a world citizenry without character, existing in societies that dare not care, ruled by leaders who can no longer tell right from wrong.

One such event took place last week. The Nobel Committee awarded the 2005 Peace Prize to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency and its director-general Mohammed El-Baradei. To paraphrase Churchill, rarely has so much been given to so few for so little.

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The IAEA was set up in 1956 to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The Nobel Foundation praised the IAEA and Dr. El-Baradei “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes.” The Nobel citation went on to add that the selection committee had become preoccupied by "the struggle to diminish the significance of nuclear arms in international politics," a goal toward which it admits, "the world has achieved little." The sheer hypocrisy of this addition to the international community’s bodyguard of lies about the United Nations leaves one breathless.

As a department of a world body two-thirds controlled by despotic regimes, the IAEA is perhaps singularly responsible for the spread of weapons of mass destruction and “dirty” bombs into the hands of rogue and failed states under the legitimization of the UN itself.

On Iran, the IAEA did nothing when its inspectors were barred from weapons-development sites even in the face of Iranian admissions that it had weapons-grade plutonium. In violation of international agreements, Iran possesses hundreds of uranium-enriching centrifuges that can only be used in the manufacture of offensive armaments. The IAEA’s reaction has been an agreement to submit this issue to the Security Council at “some future date”.

On Iraq, the IAEA did nothing from the time Saddam first announced he would be building a nuclear power plant in 1974. Even after Israel took out the Osirak reactor, Iraq continued to operate a nuclear weapons program that continued until the American invasion. Both El-Baradei and his predecessor Hans Blix, who visited the nuclear sites and called them “research facilities”, had the temerity to praise Iraq’s co-operation in the 1990’s as “exemplary” even though several nuclear sites were found and destroyed by coalition forces in the Gulf War. After the War, the IAEA declared Iraq’s nuclear program “totally dormant”. Again these lies were disproved when an Iraqi general in charge of the program defected to the West in 1995 and he confessed to having led a "crash program," post-war, to restore Iraq's nuclear weapons capability. Not surprising that former chief UN weapons inspector Sir Richard Butler, who resigned in disgust with the world body, once intimated that Blix was Saddam’s favourite UN representative.

On Libya, the IAEA did less than nothing when Khaddafi revealed in 2003, years after El-Baradei’s ascension as director-general, that he had been running a nuclear weapons program for some 20 years. The IAEA was caught completely with its pants down since it had not once even looked into that outlaw nation nor mentioned the butcher of Lockerbie in its reports.

On North Korea, the IAEA sent back glowing reports from 1994 to 2002 until it was revealed that the agency’s inspectors were looking at the wrong sites. The UN finally appointed a special envoy for nuclear talks with the Stalinist regime some twenty months ago. That envoy, Canada’s Maurice Strong, was forced to resign earlier this year when his ties to Saddam Hussein in Cordex Petroleum and his dealings with South Korean businessman and some-time international arms dealer Tongsun Park came to light.

On Pakistan, the IAEA has said not a word on the  “nuclear supermarket” run by A. Q. Khan, the “merchant of menace” as TIME magazine called him in a cover story, who sells plans and components to Libya, North Korea and Iran.

The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control once declared that the IAEA "had an unsurpassed record of failure" on nuclear arms control. That is the most eloquent epitaph for that body.

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But Mohammed El-Baradei has some interesting baggage of his own. He has for years played a critical role in undermining any censure of Iran saying that as long as Israel has nuclear capabilities, it would be “hypocritical to condemn” others. He has actually been quoted as saying that “the jury is still out on whether the Mullahs want the bomb.” This was at the same time that Mohammed Ghannadi, second in charge of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told the Tehran Times in October of last year that the Isfahan uranium conversion facility “… is 70 percent operational right now.”

In March of 2004 El-Baradei told the Security Council that documents that demonstrated Iraq tried to procure uranium from Niger were crude forgeries. Well it turned out, as reported in London’s Daily Telegraph, that Iraq had a longstanding procurement arrangement for yellow-cake from Niger and El-Baradei was either purposely lying or simply did not want to know.

And after the American invasion of Iraq, in the midst of the WMD debate, El-Baradei admitted that up to the time of the invasion, and despite all the words of praise by the IAEA for Iraq’s “co-operation”, Iraq had failed to account for 6,500 bombs which could carry up to 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent, or for 8,500 litres of biological warfare agent and a large amount of growth media which could be used to produce about 5,000 litres of concentrated anthrax. But for some reason all this testimony never made the front page of The New York Times.

El-Baradei is a classic apologist for those who not only subscribe to the bankrupt notions of moral relativism and political equivalency, but who also defend to all our deaths the right of rogue states to be wrong as they stagger drunkenly in their fruitless attempts at “nation-building”. Writing in the New York Times he stated "We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction, yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security - and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use."

Presumably we must take from this that until the big powers lay down their arms, we should just be lenient with any lunatic fringe regime that wants the same toys. And in another commentary  of his, we could reasonably conclude that this would include the theocratic tyrannies who seek to impose their will on the great “satans” of the world.

Writing in the Cairo Times El-Baradei had the gall to place the blame for the failure to curtail nuclear proliferation on every Middle Eastern tinpot dictator’s favorite whipping boy…Israel. He stated that, “I think we need to continue working hard on developing a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. That zone must include Israel. At its root, non-proliferation in the Middle East is inextricably linked to peace between Israel and Palestine.”

What sophomoric sophistry to link the offensive aggressive ambitions of states like Iran, Iraq and Libya to the defensive security concerns of the only free nation in the Muslim Middle Rim of this small planet. And this man shares a Nobel Prize for Peace.

But what can we really expect from someone who started his career serving Nasser’s regime in 1964. Fought in the Egyptian army against Israel in both the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. And just last year leaked the fake “October Surprise” letter meant to blame Bush’s policies for “missing” Iraqi weapons in an attempt to bolster support for John Kerry in the U.S. Presidential elections.

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In light of all this, the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address resonates hauntingly today. “What is the joy about?” he challenged. He admonished us that, “…the most striking feature in the West today is the decline in courage. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party and of course in the United Nations. Political and intellectual functionaries proudly exhibit self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable and even morally justifiable it is to base policies on weakness and cowardice…”

The truth of the matter is that he was frighteningly right. The United Nations, the Nobel Foundation and all the other keystones of civilization are failing as testing agents of human decency. The crucibles in which enduring human values must be generationally re-forged are growing cold. The flames flicker out. The anvils on which we hammered out justice, are slowly being cast aside.

In their absence swords cannot be turned into plowshares. Our best hopes for civility and civilization are dragged down to the lowest points of discredit by debasement and evil run rampant. And the sublime prophecy which graces the entrance to the United Nations that “…nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore…”

rings out as hollow as lost hope.

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