"Schröder is playing into Saddam's Hands"
..op-ed..Pro-American.
"Welt am Sonntag" (Germany):
March 9, 2003 | "Welt am Sonntag" / Ernst Cramer
freerepublic.com
Chancellor Schröder is playing into Saddam’s hands
For Berlin lingers a sobering lesson: An amateurish peace policy almost always leads to war.
By Ernst Cramer
The signs point to war. It’s becoming more and more inconceivable that the dictator in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, will voluntarily scrap all his weapons of mass destruction. That he and his clan go into the exile of their own accord is also hardly conceivable.
Whose fault is the war, which, according to all foresight, will soon break out, will devour gigantic sums of money, will bring death to innumerable civilians in Iraq and elsewhere in the region and to many soldiers on both sides and will threaten the cohesion of the Iraq, perhaps even the stability in the whole Near East?
The megalomaniacal and brutal Saddam Hussein undoubtedly carries the most of the blame himself. Almost everyone in the world agrees with that, including the Arabs.
Besides that, broad public opinion primarily holds the American president, George W. Bush, responsible for the war. There is drivel, mostly by so-called intellectuals, of “Washington’s battle cry”, of “lust for war”, of “the howls of a defiant little boy”, of “cowboy mentality”, of a “political lightweight ", of “hegemoniacal aspirations”, and, of course of, of “oil “.
That the American president, after the experiences of September 11th, 2001, could be acting out of concern for the safety of his fellow countrymen and, furthermore, for freedom loving people all over the world is laughed at for the most part.
A careful analysis of the facts and the developments points in a completely different direction, however. When everything is peeled away, one can finally seek the main blame for the now almost inevitable war against the Iraqi tyrant in, appearing as the prince of peace, Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, himself. More than anything, his absolute and uncompromising “No” to a military disarming of Iraq, even if the Security Council of the United Nations would vote for it, has, unintentionally, of course, strengthened the resolve of Saddam Hussein in an, for our country, inconceivable measure.
Everything started in late summer of last year with Schröder’s suddenly discovered “peace policy”. At that time, his Anti-war slogans saved his re-election as Chancellor, which had been given up for lost.
Furthermore, they awoke in Germany fears dating from World War II, believed to have been overcome long ago. The nights of bombing, even if people didn't experience it themselves, the experiences in Stalingrad or in a war prison camp still lay below the surface in the memory of many.
In addition, several critical remarks and even more disparaging and offending comments about President Bush from the immediate milieu of the Chancellor washed an anti-Americanism, often interwoven with anti-Semitism, onto the surface which had been dormant in the sub-consciousness of many in the country.
Before one understood the entire import of this in the USA, Saddam Hussein had recognized that the unity of the West had started to crumble, that there were adversaries of the United States in its own camp. The pressure on the dictator in Baghdad, which the Anglo-Saxon countries wanted to increase in order to finally force him to make actual concessions after he had led the United Nations around by the nose for twelve years, eased noticeably.
The peace policy of the Federal Chancellor and the support for it, which soon manifested itself worldwide, even in the United States, in demonstrations against the war, did something further. Since some leaders of other nations, and not always for noble reasons, soon joined up with the Anti-war front, there arose a new, even until recently unimaginable, heterogeneous, and one can safely say, unholy alliance aimed at America. These tectonic alliance shifts have plunged the most important of the current international organizations, the United Nations, NATO and the European Union into deep crises and have thereby heightened uncertainty everywhere else in the world.
Saddam Hussein, who, through pressure sustained worldwide, even by Arab countries, probably would have given way and would have fulfilled the provisions of the UN, believed more and more he could get a handle on things. He repeated his old game of stringing the UN inspectors along.
When the weapons’ searching UN officials nevertheless found things, like rockets with too long a range or traces of poisonous substances, Saddam acted surprised, he never knew anything. One thing is clear, in a dictatorship fixated upon a single person, the autocrat naturally knows exactly if there are forbidden weapons and where they are hidden.
So it may well come to war now and to the violent removal from power of the Iraqi dictator. This could presumably have been avoided more easily without the counterproductive German politics.
For Berlin, however, the sobering and, historically, not new lesson lingers: An amateurish peace policy almost always leads to war.
Artikel erschienen am 9. Mär 2003
Kanzler Schröder spielte Saddam in die Hände
Translated by longjack |
