1. IAEA safeguarding nuclear power plants. Great track record going back to the 1950s.
2. IAEA safeguarding enrichment facilities, mixed since the 1970s and better since the Additional Protocol in the 1990s.

They are not idiots, just hampered by technology, intelligence and lack power to really inspect everything related to a potential weapons program. The IAEA has limited technology and means and they cannot fully 100% safeguard everything, but they catch the major stuff now a days. But, what the IAEA has done has forced states to take their programs underground, thereby it takes much longer.

In regards to Iran. I'm not so sure they would kick the inspectors out. They've seen that game, in Iraq and North Korea, and it doesn't work. Iraq's leader is gone, and North Korea is very isolated. I don't think Iran would cross that line, unless provoked somehow. I think they will instead, keep up their program, keeping the technology around, the pieces separated and delivery systems advancing until one day, faced with a national threat, they will declare their intentions. Not the other way around. Meaning, they will probably try and do what Israel has done, a neither confirm nor deny policy, and Japan might do, which is stockpile the fuel and know how close and if needed are a few months away from a bomb.

majorspark;462944 wrote:The IAEA are useful idiots. They will be played like a fiddle by the Iranians just like the North Koreans played them. The Iranians will let them watch and when they are ready to begin implementing their formally secret program they will give the IAEA the boot, just like the North Koreans did.

They will then play footsie with the west negotiating for years to get the inspectors back in. All the while putting the finishing touches on their nuclear weapons ambitions. I am not advocating the use of force, but absent force the results will be the same.

http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2003/inspectorsrecall20030103.html

Those "useful idiots" did their job..and accurately reported that Saddam Hussein had no bio labs, no chemical weapons, and no nuclear weapons...a full 3 weeks before Bush snubbed his nose and caused the irreparable damage to Iraq...at a US cost of 1 trillion dollars and counting. Not to mention 4500 US military men that are now dead...and another 45000 maimed for life...who will be cared for by the American taxpayer over the next 50 years...or longer For what?

And over the past 3 months, the civil war has reignited to the same level as it was in 03, 04, 05, 06, and 07.

Try telling the families of these dead soldiers what "useful idiots" the IAEA are.

The only country that views the IAEA in negative terms is our country Pretty amazing if you ask me.