STOCKHOLM, 8 October 2005 — By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed El-Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the award committee is wading into treacherous political waters.

The Bush administration has bristled at El-Baradei’s diplomacy with Iran and North Korea, saying his approach is too soft — and it unsuccessfully lobbied to block his appointment to a third term this year.

In customary fashion, the Nobel committee appears to be encouraging a work in progress rather than rewarding a concrete achievement. But the endorsement will come as a huge vindication for the Egyptian diplomat and likely strengthen his mandate for leading efforts to curb nuclear proliferation.

“The committee stuck its finger in a wasp’s nest,” said Stein Toennesson, director of the Peace Research Institute — Oslo. The award was surprising, he said, because the IAEA — a UN agency — is still trying to solve the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program without reporting it to the UN Security Council.

“We have to see the prize as, implicitly, an expression of hope that the Iran question can be solved within the IAEA,” he said.

Many world leaders heaped praise on El-Baradei as a skillful diplomat and said the IAEA was the right vehicle to fight the nuclear threat worldwide.

El-Baradei and the IAEA locked horns with Washington in a very public manner in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, when he challenged US assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder congratulated El-Baradei and praised his “courageous stand for an objective view of the situation in the run-up to the Iraq war.” French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said IAEA “fulfills its mission for the benefit of peace and security.”

“France reiterates its support to multicultural ways of cooperation,” he said during a visit to Prague.

In Sweden, El-Baradei’s predecessor Hans Blix, who led UN weapons inspectors before the Iraq war, said the IAEA will be a vital tool to finding peaceful solutions to nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.

“It is trying to look at this calmly and find diplomatic solutions,” Blix said. “But it must be based on factual and professional observation and verification, and that’s what the IAEA has been able to do.”

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he hoped the award would bring greater appreciation of the work of the IAEA. “I hope that this award wakes us all up,” he told reporters in the Swiss capital of Bern.

In London, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said El-Baradei “showed great courage in basically debunking the case the Bush administration ... was making regarding the Iraqi nuclear program. In that he has earned a great deal of credibility.”

“Now we have a situation with Iran today where the US is making a similar flawed case, void of factual data, and Mohamed El-Baradei has had the courage to stand up (against US claims),” Ritter said.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee often uses the award with a look to the future rather than the past.

Examples in recent years include the 1993 prize that was shared by then South Africans Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk at a time when their drive to end apartheid was in danger of turning into the bloodbath. The 1994 prize was shared between Israel leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for seeking a Middle East peace that remains elusive 11 years later.

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf applauded the committee’s decision this year, despite often tense relations with the IAEA, most recently over revelations of an enormous nuclear black market run by disgraced scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned El-Baradei shortly before 1200GMT to offer her congratulations, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. Details were not immediately available. John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations and a key opponent of El-Baradei serving another term, refused to comment beyond Rice’s statement.

“I join in the secretary’s congratuations,” Bolton told The Associated Press as he entered the UN for meetings. Asked if he saw the prize as a rebuff to the US strategy, he said only: “I’ll stick with the secretary’s statement.”