The Germany That Didn't Bark

My friend Leo Bauer writes from Germany:

The hot potato in the Iran nuke crisis is uranium enrichment, a technology for which a distinction between civilian an military application is no longer possible. As soon as the Atomic Energy Agency looks the other way, all you need to do is turn a switch and the enrichment centrifuges will produce bomb-grade material instead of reactor fuel. Therefore, the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty requires permanent inspections. But the mullahs expect the Atomic Energy Agency to finish the inspections with a clearance as soon as the construction of their facilities is completed. Even after five IAEA resolutions, they still deny the ratification of the Additional Protocol, which would anchor the inspections in international law. Now Khomeini-successor Ayatollah Khamenei has made uranium enrichment his dealbreaker of choice to cut the negotiations.

When last week, just in time for the first round of negotiations, Iran tested a Shebab-3 missile which can reach Kosovo (beeline 2000km), Ex-President Rafsanjani told staff at the Aerospace Research Institute in Tehran: "Experts know that a country that possesses this can obtain all subsequent stages." Not just Tel Aviv, Athens and Bucharest are now in the reach of Iranian missiles of North Korean design, but soon also Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. And at the button for nuclear blackmail there are the same terrorists who have already demonstrated, by their 1989 death fatwa against Salman Rushdie in London, that they reclaim Europe as a part of their realm. With their oil revenues, the mullahs also pay for the world's largest state-sponsored terror network after the Taleban, whose branches like the Pasdaran, the Hezbollah or the Kosovo Liberation Army fail to get a mention on the European Union's blacklist.

"What more could Tehran want [than] the recognition of Iran as a respectable regional power?", the bearer of the European prize for science jornalism, Gero von Randow, asked last week, representative for the German intellectuals, who up to recently seem to have mistaken the mullah regime for a Karl May festival. "As for the nuclear issue, I believe that Europe and America are not as concerned as they profess to be", Ayatollah Khamenei explained on Iranian state TV just in time to the second round of talks. "We had an Islamic revolution, following which we established an Islamic regime. The next step is to establish an Islamic government and the following step is to establish an Islamic state, and the step after this is to establish an Islamic civilization - The Islamic International Civilization. We are currently in the stage of the Islamic state and government. We must create the Islamic rule." Reverend Jim Jones must have sounded just that way.

The refrence to the Rev. Jones starts at the beginning of the article. Go read it all.