Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PMG who wrote (193502)	9/24/2002 5:08:23 PM
From: PMG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Analysis: Germany's Iraq stance to stay By Jordan Bonfante From the International Desk Published 9/24/2002 3:23 PM (c)United Press International BERLIN, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- The election may be over, but Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's defiant stand against the U.S. policy on Iraq is not going to blow away like some discarded campaign handbill in the cold autumn wind. It's not some passing fancy. Otherwise why would Schroeder already be winging off to London Wednesday to meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair, and his defeated opponent Edmund Stoiber preparing later this week to journey to Washington? For one thing, Schroeder has never been a hawk. In the 1998 election campaign incumbent chancellor Helmut Kohl chastised then-challenger Schroeder for having opposed the Gulf War in 1991 when he was state premier of Lower Saxony. For another, he has the Greens on his back. That means sharing a governing coalition with a party that is single-mindedly pacifist. Schroeder could not have conducted a joint campaign with the Greens, as he did, nor embrace Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer -- the head of the Green party -- as his running mate, as he did, without striking an anti-war pose in the Iraq controversy. Now, as a result of the vote, the Greens are going to wield even more influence in the coalition than before. Most of all, Schroeder's stand finds an echo in a huge majority of the German population. German involvement in a U.S. war against Iraq is opposed by no less than 80 percent, according to Dieter Roth, who heads the Mannheim-based Wahlen Research Group. "With United Nations authorization, that goes down," explained Roth, "but there are still 50 percent opposed to German involvement in any event; 50-40, with 10 not sure." More than one official and expert, accordingly, is ready to conclude that Schroeder's Iraq stand nudged him into the victory lane on Sunday. The anti-war mood runs through all of the political parties. On election night one Christian Democratic Union leader, Hesse state premier Roland Koch, recounted on a television panel that -- because Stoiber's position was less clear-cut -- worried CDU voters had come up to him and asked, "If I vote for the CDU does that mean I'm voting for war?" "It's fear. Fear of war runs very deep among Germans," one German diplomat, well aware of the poll figures, told United Press International. "After all, they have had two catastrophic wars this century. They do not want to get mixed up in other peoples' confrontations. There are exceptions: in Kosovo people felt they had to help stop a humanitarian tragedy. But they see no comparable justification for intervening in Iraq. None. "Mostly this fear of war is pent-up," the diplomat continued. "People ordinarily feel they should not talk about it. So what Schroeder also did, he released people from their inhibitions: 'hey, it's out in the open -- now we can express ourselves!'" But then, German officials do not feel in any way isolated either. They emphasize that public opinion in France is also skeptical about U.S. policy -- as it so often is. They point to polls showing that 60 percent of the rank and file of the British Labor Party is too, and argue that Blair is going to have his hands full holding the line for President Bush no matter how damning his Saddam Hussein dossier proves to be. Copyright © 2002 United Press International View printer-friendly version