Did Germany Learn Her Lesson Too Well?

Yossi Klein Halevi attended a seminar on Iran and found to his surprise realism in Europe about the Iranian threat and sympathy for Israel's situation--with the exception of Germany. The question is why, and Halevi thinks he has an answer:

...Inevitably, Germans and Israelis approach the use of force with very different sensibilities. World War II taught us opposite lessons: for Germans, to suspect power as immoral; for Jews, to regard powerlessness as untenable. Still, I expected greater understanding among Germans of their responsibility in helping to resist the Iranian threat, especially toward Israel. Germany, after all, is Israel's most reliable friend in Western Europe. Since the early 1990s, for example, Germany has on several occasions upgraded Israel's submarine fleet, offering it second-strike nuclear capability to counterbalance threats from Iraq and Iran. When the Iranian government sponsored its notorious conference on Holocaust denial last December, the German government sponsored a simultaneous conference on Holocaust remembrance.

...Perhaps another reason for German blindness on Iran is a misplaced sense of contrition. In insisting on engagement rather than confrontation with Tehran, Germans seem to believe they are keeping faith with the lessons of their history. All problems should be peacefully resolved; no aggressor is irredeemable. That was the message offered last week by German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger, who, even as he insisted that Germany was ready "if necessary" to confront Iran, quickly added that Berlin was prepared to give the Ahmadinejad regime "a chance to recover the international community's lost confidence in its nuclear program. If Iran is ready to do this . . . then I think we can spare ourselves future sanctions debates."

The message Germany is inadvertently sending the Ahmadinejad regime is: Continue to hold out because the West is divided and ultimately will abandon not only the military option but the economic one, too.

Germany's Iran policy undermines its own lofty goals. By weakening the sanctions effort, Germany is sabotaging the only real alternative -- as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has described sanctions -- to war with Iran. By strengthening the Iranian regime, Germany endangers Israel, to whose well-being it is committed. And perhaps most ironic of all, by appeasing evil rather than resisting it, Germany compromises its profound efforts to break with its past.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it--but there is also the question of learning the right lesson.

Read the whole thing.

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