Mohamed El Baradei, head of the UN’s IAEA, says if there’s a military strike on Iran, he’ll resign.

On the road to a safer world, what a two-fer!

According to this Reuters dispatch, “U.N. atom watchdog chief says to quit if Iran attacked,” El Baradei in an interview with Al-Arabiya TV on Friday said that a strike on Iran would “make me unable to continue my work.” What work? While Iran’s rulers have been prancing across the world stage, bragging up their nuclear program, brandishing their uranium enrichment projects, praising mushroom clouds and whipping up chants of “Death to Israel! Death to America,” El Baradei has busied himself pondering and dithering over Iran as if it were a matter of deepest metaphysical mystery what the mullahs might possibly want out of the nuclear cycle. Only after Washington obliged with that absurdly misleading National Intelligence Estimate last year, which seemed to have written any military action against Iran right out of the script, did El Baradei work around to a more explicit warning this spring.

What else has this “watch-dog” accomplished? Remember that episode in 2004, just before the U.S. presidential election? That’s when El Baradei’s IAEA apparently leaked highly critical material on the U.S. in Iraq — sparking speculation that in violation of the UN charter he was trying to meddle with the American vote. In 2005, at a UN rife with chummy connections to the Nobel Prize committee, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Why he won is an interesting question, and it’s hard to connect it with any success at the IAEA, since on El Baradei’s watch nuclear proliferation has been going gangbusters in North Korea and Iran (and, as we now know, Syria) — but the prize was exquisitely timed to provide some distraction from the sleaze still oozing out of the UN Oil-for-Food program, as Kofi Annan set about scripting a legacy for himself during his final year at the UN.

As for El Baradei today, in the Reuters article linked above he is quoted as saying (highlighting is mine): “If you do a military strike, it will mean that Iran, if it is not already making nuclear weapons, will launch a crash course to build nuclear weapons with the blessing of all Iranians, even those in the West.”

Come again? Who is El Baradei actually speaking for?

How does it happen that El Baradei, an Egyptian who works for the UN in Vienna, now fancies himself a spokesman for “all Iranians” –? How does it happen that El Baradei — whose job is not to run the world, but to inspect, monitor and report to the decision-makers — believes himself entitled to dictate policy to U.N. member states? And what about the obviously high probability that with or without the blessing of all Iranians, Tehran’s terror-addicted regime is already precisely in the process of making nuclear weapons? — What else is one to make of Iran’s threats, illicitly whirling centrifuges and web of connections to nuclear proliferators, past or present, in North Korea, Pakistan, Syria and China, as well as its nuclear partnership over the years with Russia?

It’s high time for a house-cleaning at the IAEA. If a military strike on Iran would bring the end of the reign of El Baradei, what are we waiting for?