On Sunday, American investigative journalist Sy Hersh reported  in the New Yorker magazine that United States commando units have been on clandestine missions inside Iran hoping to identify hidden nuclear and chemical sites for possible preventative strikes in the future. The Pentagon, which is still reeling over Hersh's expose of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in Iraq last year, dismissed his article as "so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed." But Hersh has defended his work and says he is "confident" the Bush administration is preparing to go into Iran. The story also goes into detail about European efforts to secure a deal with Iran to stop its efforts to produce enriched uranium that could be used to produce nuclear weapons.

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung steps up in defense of Hersh, an established journalist of high repute. "The magazine has a clear political position, but it isn't sensationalist," writes the paper. Nor has the author done the Bush administration any favors, "but he's not the kind of reporter who would invent 'facts' to create a good story -- that's well known." The editorial then theorizes that the story could have been leaked "to signal to the Iranian leaders and their European negotiating partners that Washington will not accept (Iran) developing a nuclear military capacity." The threat, it writes, "would be addressed to both Iran and Europeans, distrust of whom has become a bad American habit." Even skeptics, it adds, "will have to admit that at the moment the European initiative on Iran is the only one there is." The editorial concludes that US agents are likely in Iran collecting information but adds that it is implausible that they are actually thinking about going to war. "Then one would at most need to speculate about the scope of the disaster," and that's just "not believable," it writes.

The FAZ isn't alone in its skepticism. The editors of the Financial Times Deutschland also view a war scenario as unlikely. Does this sound plausible, the paper asks? "Hardly." See, the American intelligence services haven't exactly enjoyed a solid track record during the past few years. "There is no reason to entrust such a complex task to the US intelligence services," it writes. "Bin Laden is still at large, the information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was wrong and it took ages to find Saddam." The paper adds that the story is "unfounded" because "above all one side benefits: the government in Washington."

But Hersh isn't without his believers in Germany. The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung points its finger at US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Whilst some in the US military are seriously thinking about an exit strategy for Iraq, their boss Rumsfeld has secretly ordered commando troops to prepare for a war against Iran," it writes. The logic? "If we can't solve our problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, let's just lash out around us even more." The editors see the scenario as eerily reminiscent of Iraq. "But the result will be worse than in Iraq," if the US goes to war, the paper concludes. "The region would be facing a political and military tsunami. Iran can hope for two things -- that the chaos in Iraq goes on forever and that the Americans don't once again convince themselves of the feasibility of a pre-emptive strike."

A second major issue covered on the editorial pages on Tuesday is German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's call for a loosening of the European Union's Stability and Growth Pact. Germany has violated the pact -- which ensures the stability of Europe's common currency, the euro, by putting a ceiling of 3 percent on deficit spending -- for three years running. Schroeder is calling for radical changes to the pact that would give countries leeway for additional deficit spending if they are burdened with stagnant economic growth or costly structural reforms that are ultimately aimed at improving the situation. The EU's other big deficit sinner, France, is supporting the call and European Commission Currency Commissioner Joaquin Almunia says it mostly jibes with suggestions made by the Commission. But Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, fears the proposals would ultimately weaken the pact.

But it may be better to weaken the pact than to keep lying about it. "Gerhard Schroeder has finally given some straight talk and, by doing so, broken the sham existence of the alleged 'stability pact' that's been in place until now," the Financial Times Deutschland writes. "The cries from an opposition that wants to keep everything as it is are unconvincing," it adds. The paper then goes on to argue that, for the sake of its own political credibility, Europe needs a more pragmatic application of the pact. The paper says the deficit limit has caused Germany, in its efforts to trim the budget, to drastically cut public investments. "Whoever wants to really evaluate the role the budget plays in stability and growth must look just as closely at the economic state as well as the types of expenditures and reforms that first take effect in the long-term," it concludes.