The next thing the Norwegian Nobel committee could do is rename its peace prize the war prize. Past recipients include arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat; a communist thug, Le Duc Tho of Vietnam; a floundering United Nations and its secretary-general, Kofi Annan; and the one American president who has taken to criticizing his own country from foreign soil, President Carter. By choosing Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the midst of a desperate struggle to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the committee is honoring a record of inaction and failure.

Mr. ElBaradei and his agency failed to detect the underground A-bomb network operated by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. They were taken by complete surprise when Libya announced in 2003 that it had a nuclear program. Colonel Gadhafi gave up his program not because of any fear of the IAEA’s inspectors, but because, after watching America and her allies dispose of Saddam, Libya’s tyrant feared the same fate. The IAEA also failed to detect that Iran was lying about its nuclear program for almost two decades; an opposition group alerted the world to that. While the mullahs continue to pursue a nuclear bomb, the IAEA still does nothing.

The IAEA was also in charge of monitoring North Korea’s program to 2002 from 1994. It turned out its inspectors were watching the wrong site, and now the alarm is up that Kim Jong Il has nuclear weapons. The IAEA also failed to detect Saddam’s nuclear program before the 1991 Gulf War. Just months before the war it praised Saddam for his compliance and after the coalition exposed nuclear sites the IAEA expressed its shock at the scale of his program.

Not content with making the world more dangerous by failing to catch rogue states proliferating, Mr. ElBaradei is trying to make the world even more dangerous by pressing democracies that have atomic weapons to give them up. He regularly attacks the “double standards” of those states – read: America – that have nuclear weapons yet want others not to have them. A favorite target of his is Israel. America’s nuclear arsenal deterred Soviet Union expansion after World War II. It continues to deter other would-be aggressors to this day. Israel’s nuclear program – the father of which, Prime Minister Peres, is himself a Nobel laureate in peace – serves as a deterrent to those Arab states that remain openly committed to the annihilation of the Jewish state. The United Nations’ nuclear chief either dissents from the notion that nuclear weapons in the right hands can ensure peace or is opposed to Israel for other reasons.

Meantime President Bush was demonstrating a decidedly different view of all this. Speaking to the National Endowment for Democracy last week, the president put Iran on notice that its days as a sponsor of terror and proliferators of atomic weapons are limited. The president told the gathering that “State sponsors like Syria and Iran have a long history of collaboration with terrorists, and they deserve no patience from the victims of terror. The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them, because they’re equally as guilty of murder.”

The contrast between the messages being sent from Washington and Oslo reminds us of a line from President Reagan’s famous speech, “A Time for Choosing,” in which, in 1964, he endorsed Senator Goldwater for president: “There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.” Reagan may have failed to gain recognition from the Norwegians, but he did defeat the Soviet menace, win the Cold War, and bring peace to the region. Mr. Bush is in good company.