THE NOT-SO-GREAT-MAN LEAVES - AT 10:35 A.M. ET:  The Wall Street Journal marks the departure of the failed head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose failures got him the Nobel Peace Prize.  Sound familiar?

Mohamed ElBaradei caps his contentious and ultimately failed 12-year stint as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency today, having spent many years enabling Iran's nuclear bids only to condemn them in his final days in office. Mr. ElBaradei combined his rebuke of Iran with his familiar calls for more negotiation, but we'll take his belated realism about Iran as his tacit admission that Dick Cheney and John Bolton have been right all along. Let's hope the education of the Obama Administration doesn't take as long.

Yes, it's time to agree that Cheney and Bolton, both despised by the American left and its disciples in the press, have been right all along.  However, I don't think you'll see that concession in the press.  My experience has been that the media will happily correct a minor mistake, to prove its "responsibility," but will rarely correct a major one.  The reporting of the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, in which Americans were told that a decisive military victory was actually a defeat, has never been corrected by any mainstream publication or broadcast outlet.

"Time is running out for Iran to address the international community's growing concerns about its nuclear program," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday, but the West has said this many times before. Earlier this year, Mr. Obama said Iran had a deadline of September.

The Iranian regime is laughing all the way to the reactor building.

"A few years ago [the West] said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last month. "Now look where we are today."

And the great facilitator has been Mohamed ElBaradei, who always urged more negotiations in the face of overwhelming evidence that negotiations with Iran accomplished nothing.  Of course, our deeply experienced and sophisticated president bought the negotiations line entirely.

Those are the words of a man who believes he has Mr. Obama's number. And until the President, his advisers and the Europeans realize that only punitive sanctions or military strikes will force it to reconsider its nuclear ambitions, an emboldened Islamic Republic will continue to march confidently toward a bomb over the wreckage of Mohamed ElBaradei's—and Barack Obama's—best intentions.

Well said.  Iran, even more than Afghanistan, will be a test for Obama - a test of whether he lives in the real world, and whether his party will allow him to function in that world.  Hang onto your seatbelts.  It's going to be a bumpy year.

November 30, 2009