Thanks Gerhard Schroeder

As Germany moves towards key elections in three weeks, Kenneth Timmerman at the National Review online reminds us of the perfidy and idiocy of Social Democratic Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder. Three years ago Schroeder played the anti-US card to narrowly defeat his CDU opponent Edmund Stoiber. Then he and Chirac led the obstructionists against the US making the Iraq effort much more difficult. Schroeder is going to the well once again.

Here's what a senior Iranian said about the 'negotiations' that Schroeder championed:

In December 2004, Iran's IAEA delegate, Hossein Mousavian, told reporters in Vienna that such violations were Iran's right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. "It is natural that the Islamic Republic continues all its nuclear activities. Iran has only suspended the fuel cycle voluntarily, in the framework of its policy to build trust, without any legal obligations," he said.

On the eve of an emergency session of the IAEA's board of governors in Vienna earlier this month, Mousavian revealed to an Iranian television interviewer that Tehran had used the Europeans to "buy time" to complete their nuclear facilities. This is exactly what the Bush administration had been warning about for more than a year.

The IAEA had initially given Iran a 50-day ultimatum to cease all nuclear-fuel activities, including work on centrifuges and construction at the uranium-conversion facility (UCF) in Isfahan. "But thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year, in which we completed the [UCF] in Isfahan," he said.
...
"We suspended the UCF in Isfahan in October 2004, although we were required to do so in October 2003," he said. "If we had suspended it then, [the UCF] in Isfahan would have never been completed. Today we are in a position of power: [The UCF] in Isfahan is complete and UF4 and UF6 gases are being produced. We have a stockpile of products, and during this period we have managed to convert 36 tons of yellowcake into gas and store it. In Natanz, much of the work has been completed. Thanks to our dealings with Europe, even when we got a 50-day ultimatum, we managed to continue the work for two years."