Allies, After All?
Caldwell, Christopher
Allies, After All? Except in Germany, European support for the president grows. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL IN HIS ADDRESS to the United Nations General Assembly last Thursday, President Bush,...
...Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi described military action as the "logical consequence" of Saddam's deeds...
...French, British, and Americans will refrain from mentioning that much of the evidence concerning Saddam's production of chemical and biological weapons over the years has come from German sources...
...But France has moved from sniping skepticism to heartfelt (if ad hoc) support...
...Schroder's Iraq demarche coincided with devastating floods on eastern Germany's rivers, which washed away tens of billions of dollars in newly redeveloped property, most of which had been underwritten by the German taxpayer...
...Only of Spain, the United Kingdom, France, and so on...
...resolutions passed during the Gulf War was sufficient casus belli, and that no new resolution was necessary...
...Interior minister of Brandenburg Jorg Schonbohm, a Stoiber ally, attacked Schroder by invoking the past in a way that is almost unheard of in German politics: "If the United States had behaved towards Hitler the way this government wants to behave towards Iraq, the Germans would never have been liberated from National Socialism...
...But at an election rally in Regensburg, Schroder did not mention it...
...Stoiber, meanwhile, went on the offensive...
...The French snickered privately at the suivisme ("follower-ism") of Tony Blair, and insisted that Washington produce a link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda before they would support an invasion...
...Germany had too few troops to send to Iraq anyway, he said, so who cares what we think...
...Stampa to write, without irony: "The Washington-London-Rome triangle is functioning marvelously...
...By the time Friday morning's papers came out, it appeared the mood of the country was shifting Stoiber-wards...
...If we're to take the chancellor at his word, while the world community fights to avert a 'grave and gathering danger,' Germany will be the only country that sits it out...
...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL IN HIS ADDRESS to the United Nations General Assembly last Thursday, President Bush, perhaps without meaning to, used a word that always jolts Europeans like a burst of electroshock...
...He mocked Stoiber, saying he was unfit to be chancellor...
...Security Council vote against an American invasion, "Nothing is ruled out...
...Causing Milan's pro-Berlusconi newspaper La Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...incursion into Iraq by 67 percent to 24 percent, but also that French voters ranked the United States and Israel as two of the top five "threats to world peace...
...The problem is that he has stated his position with such inebriated vehemence that it will now be difficult to climb down from it...
...Schroder's Green party foreign minister Joschka Fischer had said Bush's speech "reinforced [his] profound worries" that a war against Iraq would link fundamentalists and Arab nationalists in a coalition against the West...
...The problem is, his electoral libido got the better of him...
...One after another, the countries fell into line...
...The word— which came up towards the end of his case against Saddam Hussein's weapons buildup—is "irrelevance...
...Spanish prime minister Jose Mana Aznar went further, saying, "Spain does not want the U.N...
...Schroder was omnipresent, consoling the washed-out locals with Clintonesque assurance...
...Within hours after Bush's U.N...
...Predictably, the Frankfurter All-gemeine sneered: "The leaders in London and Paris are working to win back America for the United Nations and to win back the United Nations for America...
...By contrast, the president's speech has thrown Germany into a foreign policy crisis...
...Perhaps they will suffice to bring Schroder on board...
...The decisions will be made by others, and the only countries consulted will be those ready for dialogue...
...And the Chirac government may even reap a political benefit, for the same polls that show an impatience with the United States also show a steadily growing panic in France over Islamic extremism...
...Schröder's is now the only important dissent from the American ultimatum on Iraq...
...In the Bundestag on Friday, during the last parliamentary debate before the elections, Schroder said he stood by the anti-terror coalition...
...Given that he fought a pitched battle for weeks last winter to get his own party to commit troops to Afghanistan, it is the consensus of German political observers that he wishes to retreat from his position should he be reelected on September 22...
...to become an obstacle to military intervention if that is decided on...
...France also gets an economically crucial say in how any post-Saddam regime would be run...
...A survey taken for Le Monde in early September showed not only that the French opposed a U.S...
...Germany may find it has isolated itself—from Europe and from the world...
...What France gets out of this shift is relevance...
...The next day, Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told an interviewer on Europe 1 television that, even should the U.N...
...It was tough to tell if his Nein on Iraq deserved the credit...
...Following much-publicized consultations between Bush and Chirac, the speech allowed Chirac to take credit for rescuing Bush for multilateralism...
...In other words, "Europe" and "European opinion" and "the European leadership" suddenly looked like fictional terms for airy entities...
...Two months ago, lagging badly in the polls, Socialist chancellor Gerhard Schroder began to attack the United States for war-mongering...
...Stoiber accused the pair of them of "campaigning for anti-American votes...
...France had appeared for weeks to be the toughest diplomatic nut to crack...
...Having been more forward than any Western leader after the September 11 attacks in declaring his "unconditional solidarity" (uneingeschrankte Solidaritat) with the United States, he now threw at the United States what the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called an uneingeschranktes Nein...
...He reacted to Schroder's Iraq challenge by trying to duck it...
...That afternoon, at a European "constitutional convention" in Brussels, the Spanish eurodeputy Inigo Mendez de Vigo lamented: "The president of the United states never speaks of the European Union...
...Stoiber, like Bill Clinton in 1992 or George W. Bush in 2000, is short on foreign policy experience...
...If only I had known!, he will say...
...That may explain the timing of Tony Blair's September 24 presentation to Parliament, where he will release his "proofs" of Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction capacity...
...On Thursday, the Ministry of Defense announced that its own evaluation of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons capabilities was "very convergent" with those of Washington and London...
...A recent poll by ZDF television showed 50 percent of Germans opposed to an American invasion of Iraq and 49 percent in favor...
...Stoiber praised the speech as a strengthening of the U.N...
...Anders Fogh Ras-mussen, the prime minister of Denmark (which holds the rotating E.U...
...appearance, this entire dynamic had shifted...
...But his uneinge-schranktes Nein was suddenly nowhere to be heard...
...What's more, polls indicated growing antipathy to the United States...
...Meanwhile, the political landscape of the real Europe—the Europe of countries—has been transformed by the president's speech...
...But the center-left Suddeutsche Zeitung took the same tone: "With his thoughtless remarks, chancellor Gerhard Schroder has mired the Federal Republic even deeper in geopolitical irrelevance...
...presidency), had already expressed his (and Bush's) view that Iraq's violation of the U.N...
...Norwegian prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik called the speech "multilateral," which is Norwegian for "Count us in...
...The leaders in Berlin are working to stay in office...
...Like Bill Clinton, Schroder is most alive when he's on the campaign trail, and his rhetoric quickly spun out of control...
...Schröder spoke of Iraq at every appearance, and his team insisted it was his statesmanship, not his hugging prowess, that had boosted him...
...Stoiber's people behaved as if they believed it, too...
...Schröder quickly made up a 10-point deficit in the polls, pulling ahead of his conservative Bavarian rival Edmund Stoiber...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 2
