Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Matthias Kuntzel discusses Germany's idea of confrontation with Iran:
Are 500,000 Keys to Paradise Enough?: Germany "Confronts" Ahmadinejad
Chew on that for a bit. Imagine the concept of "deterence" as applied to a country with that kind of history -- a country that sends its children off by the thousands to clear mine fields, that routinely brags that, and supports groups which boast that while the West values life, they value death.
And they mean it, and they've shown they're willing to act on it.
How much moire dangerous and unstable an enemy is this than our previous partner in nuclear standoff, the USSR?
Kuntzel:
Since, however, Ahmadinejad provided the world with such a stark reminder of the ideological foundations of the Mullah-dictatorship – Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and the destruction of Israel – Berlin is in a tight spot. On the one hand, Berlin would not like to put in danger Germany’s special relationship with Tehran. On the other hand, it does not look particularly good when the country from which came the Holocaust practitioners now collaborates with the regime of the Holocaust deniers. On 11 December, Germany’s new deputy Chancellor, Franz Müntefering of the SPD, indicated the way out of this dilemma: “Berlin Demands a ‘Reaction’ to Ahmadinejad” ran the headline in the following day’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (12 December 2005). This sounded surprisingly forceful. But whoever read the small type quickly understood the actual meaning of the headline: “ Berlin demands a ‘reaction’ to Ahmadinejad from everyone else”. The deputy Chancellor was cited as follows: “We cannot do it alone. Rather this has to be frankly discussed in the framework of the European Community and it must in the clearest possible terms be discussed in the framework of the United Nations”.
Excuse me? Germany can do nothing on its own? Only the German government can abrogate the 2002 investment agreement between German and Iran...
Worth reading in full.
This should not be a shock. Why would anyone be surprised at Germans aiding a country that wants to kill Jews?
Kuntzel's is of course an all too revealing commentary on Ahmadinejad and Germany's business/economic concupiscence vis-a-vis Iran. Too, in Kuntzel's penultimate graph, the forceful note concerning the Left's complicity is apt. These ideas, reflected in Ahmadinejad's genocidal vision and in Germany's enervated moral bearing, again serves to indicate the importance of the long-term stabilizing initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the more encompassing vision and horizon.
On the other hand, to cast this in ethnic/racialist terms (i.e., German or Persian) will at best serve a poor analysis, reflecting, imo, the worst of Goldhagen's sundry and pronounced excesses. It's a wrong tack within the analysis. The source problems relevant to this storied, Eurabian, economic/political relationship no doubt reflect a variety of germinal issues, not all of which are apparent or readily apprehended. However, the tell-tale business/economic interests, the concomitant moral atrophy, even the affected and hypocritical complicity of the Left are hardly factors which can be isolated to Germans or Persians as a class; better assessments and more true can be made. Goldhagen's (to simply use a prominent example) pronounced conceits, while admixed with better scholarship as well, help forward ethno-religious and racialist categories of guilt assignment; this is off the mark not merely because it risks offending in the simple or obvious sense, but because it helps forward misapprehensions of both historical and contemporary problems which need to be better appraised. Too, such categorical forms of guilt association as Goldhagen essentially resorts to begin to mirror a critical aspect of the very problem which needs to be confronted and remedied in the first place. (As an aside, it also risks, if the caution be accepted, what Hermann Cohen thought of as the propensity of unjustly assigned guilt - Cohen's "myth of guilt" - to become a kind of self-fulfilling imprint.) Those assessements may need to be made, but they don't need to be made along ethno-religious or racialist lines, it's counterproductive to do so.
intresting. At least help is being offered. This is more than Arial sharon, bush and blair are doing to help, they just want to steal and kill!
Cold comfort to be sure, but you will notice that when they proclaim "we love death" they always mean someone elses death and never their own. That said, I don't believe detente or MAD will work with a nuclear Iran to keep the selector on "safe" mode. They lack long term consequential analyses worse than the west does.
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Here's a key for the last poster. I think he should go find a landmine somewhere.
I wonder why they made the 12 year old boys go onto the land mines? Lets see, well, their military was in shambles (2 years after the reveloution) Iraq is comming in like thunder. (Iranian villagers had no idea on whats happening until iraqi tanks rolled in and they got two major citys. Iraq was being given money by saudi Arabia and UAE and basically the whole arab legue. Wepons were being providedby dear old Britain and Soviets and guess what US was giving satellite back up to Iraqis . On the other hand Iran was under sanctions for all millitary equipment. Now try stopping your enemy and clear mine fields when you can't buy mine detectors and the enemy is comming in? What would you do? Its very nice to see both sides of the story right?
The plastic keys story and the claims about children being used to clear minefields are false.
-Jahan
Jahan,
In the west, we do not make unsupported assertions. We provide evidence .
Here is a reliable report www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060424&s=kuntzel042406
where is your evidence of flasehood?
That is incorrect.
This is not evidence - it is a webpage containing false claims.
I served in the Basij myself.
-Jahan
Sure plenty of false claims are made in the west, but we've got some crackpot investigators who are free to scrutinize every claim made by our governments and media outlets, which is why just about anything that is false, from doctored military records from the 70s with modern fonts, to photoshopped AP photos, very little that false does not get uncovered to be so soon after it is introduced to the public.
Now, if there is any evidence these plastic keys did not exist, it should be easily obtainable with a Google search. If Taiwan manufactures 500,000 plastic keys and ships them to Iran, it's going to be impossible to hide that transaction. Perhaps some of the details of how the plastic keys were used are contentious, however. The story I originally heard was that the plastic keys were issued to soldiers in lieu of weapons, and that they were mowed down by Iraqi machine-gun fire as they advanced on the front lines. This is the first I've heard of the keys being given to children to clear minefields.
That is incorrect. The example of the (false) plastic keys story is a case in point.
The public doesn't demand proof - it simply believes.
Instead of asking questions from Iranians or Iraqis about their own war, "google" is the way to go.
How ridiculous.