Obliged to Do Something

The rhetoric from Germany regarding Iran gets stronger by the day. The latest from Merkel is:

Merkel likens Iran threat to Nazi era

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel likened Iran’s nuclear plans on Saturday to the threat posed by the Nazis in their early days, as top U.S. officials urged a tough line to stop Tehran from making an atomic bomb.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the Islamic republic of being the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, a charge his Iranian counterpart rejected as “ridiculous” and “outrageous”.

Addressing the annual Munich security conference, Merkel said countries around the world had underestimated the Nazi threat as Adolf Hitler rose to power.

“Looking back to German history in the early 1930s when National Socialism (Nazism) was on the rise, there were many outside Germany who said ‘It’s only rhetoric—don’t get excited’,” she told the assembled world defense policy makers.

“There were times when people could have reacted differently and, in my view, Germany is obliged to do something at the early stages … We want to, we must prevent Iran from developing its nuclear program.”

As she was speaking a few hundred metres (yards) from the Munich pub where Hitler launched his “Beer Hall Putsch” in 1923, the board of governors of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency voted in Vienna to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council over concerns it is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Wow. Tomorrow the second installment of The Magical Merkel Tour will be posted. I postponed it so I could add recent events to the summary.