War preparations
Isolationism here, Illiberalism there: Schröder and the USA
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For instance it is at the moment deplacé to mention "the oppression of Iraqi people": American plans for the time after Saddam have reached this stage already. The Bush government has let the Europeans know that Europe is supposed to finance the reconstruction of Iraq. If Bushies wanted the war to bring human rights and free markets, democracy and the American values to Iraq, then one has to ask himself, why they would leave the "implementation" of their war goals to Europeans - given the fact they are known in Washington for their inability to organize a booze-up in a brewery.
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The fact that the one is getting a different impression is due to spreading of some political daydreams. "I'm at the end of my patience", said George Bush. And the interpreters of his Suada lift their index fingers; Munich 1938! At that time one failed to contain one dictator on time: never again appeasement. Adolf Hitler however - the Swedish journalist Göran Rosenberg for example pointed this out - has up to 1938 manifested his politics in a sufficiently clear fashion . Saddam, so Rosenberg, can not therefore be compared to Hitler, because since 1991 he could not make himself even close to as guilty, as Hitler has managed before 1938.
Hitler is always good for an argument: today everybody is talking about German pacifism as a knee-jerk reaction to the past of national socialism. But Germans are not pacifists: a majority in the country after all supported the first Golf war in 1991, vehemently welcomed the Kosovo war, saw the war in Afghanistan as meaningful. If most Germans today vote against the Iraq war, then it is because they do not want this war.
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Basically the critics naturally aim at something completely different: at the core the problem is that Schröder's government - first time ever in history of the German Federal Republic - has its own foreign policy. If that turns out to be an error, then it will be an error, that one can repair. Same as the betrayal of civil rights, presently practiced in the USA, can be rolled back. Coming back to Ronald Dworkin, he sees it so: during the discussion after the lecture he said that many American judges are deeply concerned. If democrats succeed to win, then the Supreme Court will be put together somewhat differently soon and the law will not be laid out any longer in the sense of the Bushies. There's reason for hope, said Dworkin, that the right-wing political isolation of the United States is to end.
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