Frau Merkel wants to be George W.'s friend, and she has scolded the chancellor for damaging relations with Washington. The chancellor's injection of Iran into the election campaign is not without severe risks. Wolfgang Schauble, the foreign policy chief of Frau Merkel's party, calls him callously irresponsible. "He's acting as though the problem were in Washington, rather than in Tehran, even though he knows that isn't the case," he said. "The chancellor is creating the fatal impression in Tehran that the international community is not resolute."
A foreign-policy spokesman for another dissenting party agrees: "The subject is too serious for it to be introduced into the German election campaign, in any form." At the moment, the leader of Germany, along with those of France and even Britain, is trying to wipe away the traces of Iranian egg. Only two years ago the foreign ministers of the three countries returned home, having persuaded Iran to suspend temporarily its uranium conversion and enrichment program, sounding a lot like Neville Chamberlain after Munich, declaring that their "soft diplomacy" worked. Now they're all decrying betrayal.
The mullahs in Tehran insist that Iran will produce uranium fuel only for civilian nuclear-power plants, never for the production of nuclear weapons. But you'd have to believe in the Easter bunny to believe that, and the Easter bunny doesn't make deliveries in Islamic countries.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), meant to monitor Iran's nuclear conversions, is a cocker spaniel of a watchdog. When the mullahs resumed enriching uranium, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the monitors, told the mullahs that he hoped "this is a hiccup in the process and not a permanent rupture." Bow, wow.
Well, there's still a little left of summer, and I'm off to the beach with my visiting Berliner twin granddaughters (and their parents) for a belated celebration of their first birthdays, to take the sun and put my feet in the sand. But the sand is no place for wise heads elsewhere, as Angela Merkel is trying to warn her countrymen.