January 13, 2006, Triskaidekaphobia
On this Friday 13th, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with the President in Washington, and the two joined in... tough talk to Iran. At least from the Times report just cited, little mention was made of much vaunted German opposition to the continued operation of the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, nor any mention at all of German resident and Gitmo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, with whom you are all familiar by now.
It's unclear what's going to happen with respect to Iran. Unlike Iraq's Osirak facility which Israel attacked and destroyed some 25 years ago, Iran's nuclear development facilities are, presumably, hardened and spread out. A simple air strike won't do it.
And the American military is kind of tied up now, next door, so a serious military response seems most unlikely. And sanctions against Iran will just punish the Iranian people, rather than Iranian leadership (where have we seen all this before?) and hence are not promising as all that effective, without a credible military threat (from... guess who?) And at the end of the day, Iran will likely have managed to acquire nuclear weapons... and Iran, unlike Iraq, has a long and storied history of providing weapons and support to the world's most troublesome terrorist groups.
Just to make sure we're all in the same place on our scorecards: Germany has (1) condemned our operation of detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, (2) refused to lift a finger to help its own resident there because of racist German laws (never saw them before) that deny citizenship to immigrant Turkish people even if born and living in Germany, but (3) Germany had no compunction whatsoever about interrogating said German resident at Guantamo for its own intelligence purposes. The United States has (1) suspended habeas corpus (for those of you who haven't figured that out, that's pretty big), (2) spied on its own people to a degree we'll probably never know, though we're reasonably sure its at least thousands of people, contrary to applicable constitutional and legal prohibitions on said spying, (3) invaded a country that posed no threat to us and had not attacked us because.... we are afraid of nasty weapons, such as and especially nuclear weapons... falling into the hands of terrorists.
I picked another bad week to give up sniffing glue.