Mohamed ElBaradei is acting quite undiplomatic to stop the people who want to bomb Iran.
"I wake every morning and see 100 Iraqis innocent civilians are dying," he said. "I have no brief other than to make sure we don’t go into another war or that we go crazy into killing each other. You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say ‘let’s go and bomb Iran.’"
But for "the crazies" Iran is only small change. The real perceived enemies, the last big holdouts against a global empires are Russia and China.
They are the targets "the crazies" are really yearning for. In a well sourced piece in the Congressional Quarterly Jeff Stein writes:
The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.
[…]
“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”
[…]
The independence issue, agrees China experts Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon, is Beijing’s third rail—touch it and you die.“Even if the odds are fairly low of miscalculation leading to war, and war then bringing in the United States, this scenario is scary,” they recently wrote in The Washington Times.
A Taiwanese declaration of independence, they said, “could result in the first major war between nuclear weapons states in history, with no guarantee it would be successfully concluded prior to a major escalation.”
"The crazies" certainly didn’t talk to Taiwan like this without some coverage from the vice-side of the White House.
Though some names have changed, the "new crazies" are the same as the old ones who started the war on Iraq. At least the top guy didn’t change at all. The big targets may be out of reach right now, but the crazies are still very active on the smaller one:
[S]enior officials at the State Department are expressing fury over reports that members of Vice President Cheney’s staff have told others that Mr. Cheney believes the diplomatic track with Iran is pointless, and is looking for ways to persuade Mr. Bush to confront Iran militarily.
[…]
In interviews, people who have spoken with Mr. Cheney’s staff have confirmed the broad outlines of the report, and said that some of the hawkish statements to outsiders were made by David Wurmser, a former Pentagon official who is now the principal deputy assistant to Mr. Cheney for national security affairs.
These people are reckless enough to get into war with China. They certainly have no qualms to engineer something, maybe anything, to get going on Iran.
No wonder ElBaradei is breaking etiquette to sound the alarm.