Footnote to the preceding

Dodging what would very likely have been a humiliating defeat, the US has dropped its opposition to a third term for Mohamed ElBaradei as the chief of the IAEA, Reuters reported on Sunday. The Shrub team had mounted a serious lobbying effort to get other nations to agree to his ouster on what were widely considered the spurious grounds that no one should serve more than two terms. US opposition never gained any traction and now Washington has flip-flopped to endorsing him.

It's very likely that the real reason, as suspected by most diplomats, for the original opposition was that the White House wanted to punish ElBaradei for what they perceived as his "softness" on Iran and before that on Iraq. The fact that his insistence that there was no evidence Iraq was running a nuclear program proved to be right was, of course, irrelevant.

In fact, there may have even been a more pointed reason: It was the IAEA that effortlessly proved the White House-brandished memo supposedly "proving" that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake from Niger was a clumsy forgery. That kind of embarrassing smackdown is not something the folks making up the White House cabal easily or quickly forget.