Bad Timing

Intrepid Time magazine reporters have discovered some sizzling Pentagon PowerPoints:

The Pentagon, which is calling for the largest defense budget since the cold war, has been floating scary threats lately. TIME has obtained a copy of a PowerPoint presentation that senior officers have been showing to groups around the U.S. warning that failure to stop Osama bin Laden and his ilk would have the same "consequences" as Europe's appeasement of the Nazis before World War II. Bullet points describe possible U.S. economic depression and Washington being forced into an "accommodation" with terrorists. Skeptics question the timing of such predictions.

In other news, the Times of London reports that Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, is also silly:

Frau Merkel, in a blunt and pugnacious speech, attacked the Iranian Government for pressing ahead with its nuclear programme in defiance of international opinion.

Using a rhetorical device often employed by Americans to justify pre-emptive action, she said that Adolf Hitler could have been stopped in the 1930s if the world had taken stronger action against him sooner. And she denounced the recent inflammatory remarks made about Israel by President Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Mr Rumsfeld, by contrast, was a model of diplomatic behaviour. He praised the alliance’s historic achievements and said that the United States favoured a negotiated solution to the Iranian crisis. “We must continue to seek a diplomatic solution to stopping the development of its uranium enrichment programme,” he said.

Elsewhere in the London Times, Richard Beeston, the paper's "diplomatic editor", writes:

IT IS the option of last resort with consequences too hideous to contemplate. And yet, with diplomacy nearly exhausted, the use of military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme is being actively considered by those grappling with one of the world’s most pressing security problems.

For five years the West has used every diplomatic device at its disposal to entice Iran into complying with strict conditions that would prevent its nuclear programme being diverted to produce an atomic bomb.

Those efforts, however, are now faltering. US leaders are openly discussing the looming conflict. A recent poll showed that 57 per cent of Americans favoured military intervention to stop Iran building a bomb.

Tehran scoffs at threats by the West, has pledged to press on with its nuclear progamme and defend itself if attacked.

The military option may be the only means of halting a regime that has threatened to annihilate Israel from developing a bomb and triggering a regional nuclear arms race.

Elsewhere:

FOUR people were killed in a northern Afghan city overnight in an exchange of fire between police and rioters protesting about cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, officials said.