LETTER FROM EUROPE: Merket Time
Gedmin, Jeffrey
"LETTER FROM EUROPE" JEFFREY GEDMIN Merkel Time WAS IN LONDON THIS SUMMER after the terrorist attacks that killed 57 people. July 7 had changed things, and you could feel it. I...
...As a Munich friend puts it, the burning question on the minds of Germans is: When will it be safe again to go to Egypt or Turkey for holidays...
...It turned out that the cul- prit, whoever he was, had just made a bomb threat...
...No kidding...
...God knows, the country needs a wake-up call...
...She grew up in East Germany, and I do not think she has a naive bone in her body...
...J E F F R E Y G E D M I N Every day...
...Merkel agrees...
...It is hard to grasp just how feminine Germany has become...
...I spent an hour and a half recently with Angela Merkel in her office near the Brandenburg Gate, sharing a cup of her peppermint tea from the big thermos she always keeps nearby...
...She finished off Helmut Kohl in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Germany's mighty chancellor of 16 years...
...She has slit the throat of nearly every challenger that has come her way since...
...Londoners seemed steady but understandably sensitive to their surroundings...
...I like Merkel...
...SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61...
...People keep saying Merkel is no Maggie Thatcher...
...We all broke into a sprint...
...At this point, though, let's just have the Schroder regime put out of its misery...
...six died in the Bali nightclub bombing that same year...
...Directed by Wlady www.spectator.org See what daily insight from George Neumayr gets quoted by the who's who in Washington and talk radio...
...We ought to at least see what this lady's got...
...The London taxi driver who took me to Heathrow told me that his friend Harry, another cabbie, lost his wife in the bus bombing...
...London was rocked the very next day by another round of explosions—the two-week anniversary of the first bombings—but this did not make headline news in Germany...
...She sounded like the scientist that she is—she was trained as a chemist—collecting as much empirical data as possible from which she might draw her conclusions...
...I had coffee with a German graduate student, who is writing her master's thesis in Washington on counterterrorism, and she told me that her German friends would laugh when they heard about her topic...
...In percentage of GDP, the country spends about what Luxembourg does on its armed forces...
...Then, no one is Margaret Thatcher...
...For 45 minutes Merkel pressed him with questions about Israeli security...
...Berliners were blase...
...Still, I guess there is something abstract about it all until terrorists actually strike big on your own soil...
...Terrorists had blown up two embassies in Africa, attacked the USS Cole in a harbor in Yemen, and tried to destroy the World Trade Center a first time in 1993...
...According to some estimates, at least three major attacks inside Germany have been thwarted since September 11...
...Instead the front-page story was the German president's formal decision to announce new federal elections, a deci60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 sion that came as a surprise to absolutely no one...
...Germany has double-digit unemployment, slow growth, an aging population, and declining birth rates...
...A few years ago I took former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in to see her...
...A few minutes later three businessmen did much the same, at which time the attentive doorman offered to hold my papers till my conversation was finished...
...Officers en-circled a man, guns drawn, on the sidewalk about 50 feet from me (I think I remember a time when London cops did not carry guns...
...Everyone here was thinking the same thing—the Brits were being punished for helping George W. Bush in Iraq...
...Germans are naive in the extreme to think that by staying out of Iraq they are safe...
...First, a young woman walking by stopped, took a long look, and then glanced disapprovingly at me and the seemingly unattended item on the street...
...To be fair, we Americans were asleep before September 11, off on our own "national beach party," as former CIA director James Woolsey once put it...
...That afternoon I had been walking to my hotel at Portman Square near Oxford Street, when a half dozen police cars raced onto the scene...
...London was feeling a little like Tel Aviv...
...Fourteen German tourists were killed by terrorists in Tunisia three years ago...
...But in truth we Americans did not feel threatened...
...She did not bat an eye when Netanyahu explained what it took to get after Palestinian terrorists...
...Seconds later, another group of policemen appeared and ran toward bystanders, shouting for us to clear the area...
...LETTER F R O M E U R O P E J E F F R E Y G E D M I N Merkel Time WAS IN LONDON THIS SUMMER after the terrorist attacks that killed 57 people...
...I was standing one evening in front of Annabel's, one of the elegant clubs owned by the stepson of the late, eccentric billionaire Jimmy Goldsmith...
...Otto Schily, Germany's exceptional interior minister, knows this and fights a lonely battle here...
...No one in Germany talks about defense...
...I suppose I was wandering a bit as I talked...
...I had just come from a dinner, wanted to talk on my cell phone before getting into a cab, and had made the mistake of setting a package by my feet...
...She is tenacious...
...She had been brainwashed, they'd say, by edgy, overreacting Americans...
...Find out what the Washington Prowler has uncovered...
...Big cities start feeling pretty small when this stuff happens...
...With a gentle and charming smile she told me it bothered her that people call her the man-killer, adding that she would have killed women, too, had any women been around...
...Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin...
...After the attacks at the Egyptian Red Sea resort Sharm el-Sheik that killed 88 in July, I heard a German radio interview with an expert who called for radical Islamists to be released from Egyptian jails...
...They have families, this fellow explained, and letting them rejoin their communities would help to defuse the tension...
...Regular appearances by Jed Babbin Lawrence Henry Marina Malenic Enemy Central John Tabin David Hogberg Shawn Macomber and of course, RET...
...A spokesman for Berlin's public transportation announced after the second round of UK bombings that no additional security measures were needed on the city's buses or in the U-Bahn...
...A day later, back in Berlin, things could not have been more different...
...AVING SAID ALL THIS, I have some hope that Angela Merkel, Chancellor Schroder's challenger in the September 18 elections, can begin to awaken Germany from its slumber...
Vol. 38 • September 2005 • No. 7
