With the embers from the Danish cartoon dispute still burning, one Berlin newspaper appears to be on a suicide mission. On Friday, the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel ran a cartoon by Klaus Stuttmann portraying the Iranian national team at the World Cup wearing suicide bomber belts  and the German national team dressed in Bundeswehr army uniforms. You know, free speech and all that. The cartoon reads: "Why the Bundeswehr absolutely has to be deployed at the World Cup."

The Iranian embassy in Berlin has demanded an apology for the cartoon and is considering taking legal action over the matter. But in a navel-gazing interview with the same newspaper that commissioned the sketch, the cartoonist says his aim with the drawing was simply to criticize the debate in Germany about whether the army should be deployed domestically to provide additional security during the World Cup soccer tournament in Germany.

Of course, in times when Danish embassies are being torched in the Middle East, its products being boycotted and a Tehran newspaper calling for a Holocaust cartoon contest, this type of humor is especially sensitive these days. The paper asks Stuttmann if maybe one should be more cautious as a caricaturist in the wake of the uproar over the Muhammad cartoons. "Of course I was cautious," he responds. "Besides, I never would have drawn caricatures like those my Danish colleagues drew. I thought the drawings in Jyllands-Posten were a gratuitous provocation." After all, who would seriously find anything offensive about portraying Iranian soccer players as suicide bombers?

The paper's editors are clueless as to why portraying athletes as terrorists might have outraged Iranians. "The absurdity of the situation is obvious," editor Gerd Appenzeller writes in an opinion piece. No one, he argues, would ever believe that the Iranian team would show up armed -- nor would the Bundeswehr be present on the soccer pitch. "The illustrator makes that clear," he explains. "The Iranians' faces, just like those of the Germans, are those of peaceful everyday people -- the boys next door" -- not rabid terrorists. The paper said it "regretted the Iranian reactions to the caricature" and that it would be hard to explain the domestic political debate over deploying the Bundeswehr during the World Cup to the Iranians.

In its Sunday edition, the Iranian sports newspaper 90 decried the cartoons as "shameless." "It is now clear that the Germans are influenced by the Zionists and that they have degraded themselves to the point of being (Israel's) straw man."

Cartoonist Stuttmann says he has received hundreds of threatening e-mails from around the world, including death threats. He has even taken the precaution of moving out of his apartment. The paper asks Stuttmann if those threatening violence have won. His response? "I wouldn't say that, but next time I will probably think thrice about whether someone with a religious background could give a different interpretation." Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20.

-- Daryl Lindsey
11:40 a.m. CET

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Ahmadinejadistan

On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- who has called the Holocaust a "fairy tale" and urged that Israel be "wiped off the map" -- further provoked the international community.  The radical leader said negotiations with Russia over a compromise plan in its civil nuclear program would be indefinitely postponed and that Tehran would begin enriching uranium at another Iranian research site. Most in the West believe Iran's nuclear ambition -- though labeled as a "civilian" project -- is really a clandestine program to create a nuclear bomb that could be used against Israel and throw off the balance of power in the Middle East. In Germany, most papers see Monday's move as the escalation of an already tense situation.

"This hard course is hardly surprising," writes the business daily Financial Times Deutschland. "What is striking is how diffuse the signals from Tehran are right now." Last week, President Ahmadinejad said his country might abandon the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it was followed this weekend by a denial from the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Optimists, the paper suggests, could read this as a sign that Tehran is far from united on what to do about its nuclear program. But the main point of strife between the international community and Iran is that other countries want to make sure Iran doesn't obtain the bomb. "On this issue, after long delay, the international community is finally in lock-step." That, the paper believes, is something Tehran wasn't expecting. Now Ahmadinejad and his followers appear to be staging (in the theatrical sense) a massive confrontation with the West. But it could be that cooler heads in the mullah regime will use a cost-benefit analysis and ultimately show themselves willing to find a compromise solution. "Ahmadinejad's aggressive tones have helped to unite the world together against him," the paper concludes, "but this brutish course could also lead to resistance within his own camp -- and that's one of the hopes in this conflict."

Until now, Russia has attempted to move Tehran to an acceptable compromise, writes the conservative daily Die Welt. Moscow has offered to enrich uranium on behalf of Tehran for used in Iran's nuclear power plants. But the Iranian government doesn't appear terribly interested in the plan. "Apparently, Ahmadinejad doesn't see any need to negotiate with Moscow on the issue," the paper writes. "But if he remains obstinate, he will dupe President (Vladimir) Putin and push him into the camp of those supporting sanctions." The paper speculates that Ahmadinejad, who is apparently unhappy with the way Iran has developed since the revolution, would like to re-spark the revolutionary spirit of the early Khomeini years. "But the price for doing so would be high," the paper warns, "because President Ahmadinejad would force the international community to impose sanctions on Iran."

The leftist Die Tageszeitung notes that Iran hasn't officially put the kibosh on negotiations with Russia -- it has only delayed them. This, the editorialist believes, is a sign that not all important questions in the theocracy can be answered by the president alone. (Don't forget the mullahs!) "There are powerful forces in the background who see their political interests being endangered by Ahmadinejad and want to avoid a confrontation with the West. Whether or not these forces can succeed in putting the reigns on radical fundamentalist Ahmadinejad will also depend on the West's behavior," the paper writes. Some politicians in Washington and Brussels may have the opinion that threats of sanctions or even military measures will strengthen this internal power struggle in Iran and weaken Ahmadinejad's position, it warns. But the latest developments have shown the opposite to be true. Since the EU has shifted towards Washington's hard line, populist Ahmadinejad has expanded his base. "Threats," the paper writes, "are the wrong path. The goal of smart diplomacy has to be to isolate radicals like Ahmadinejad and not the entire Iranian population."

"Who will stop Ahmadinejad?" asks the business daily Handelsblatt. He denies the Holocaust and he's fanning the flames of hate against the West over the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Worse than all that, however, is the fact that Tehran is well on its way to being able to produce weapons-grade uranium. "Iran is still a few years away from being able to build a bomb," it adds hopefully, "but the rest of the world is having to look on powerlessly as the country pursues that path, step by step." And even though the EU, US and Russia appear united on the issue, China has remained conspicuously silent. "The bitter truth is that -- just as in the cases of Serbian despot Slobodan Milosevic and Iraqi dictator Saddam Husseim -- it will not be easy to force Ahmadinejad to adhere to international law." Especially if Tehran isn't formally violating any. Thus, the paper concludes, "anyone who wants to hinder the mullah's from building a nuclear weapon and threatening Israel with it, must also be prepared to take political, economic and, ultimately, military action."