“Germany is losing out enormously in terms of trust and influence,” the CDU spokesman on foreign policy matters, Friedbert Pflüger, told the Frankfurter Rundschau. “If the Germans voted ‘no’ in the U.N. Security Council, possibly as the only country besides Syria, this would amount to a political catastrophe both for the NATO alliance and the common foreign and security policy of the E.U. (European Union).”
But why do Schröder and Fischer cave in to this pressure, and not to the pressure of the broad anti-war sentiments to which they themselves appealed quite successfully during their election campaign?
If they continued to reject the war, they would not only find support throughout the European population, but would also have a profound effect on American public opinion, which would cause considerable problems for the Bush administration. It would immediately become clear that his war policies were by no means as “popular” as portrayed by the media, a fiction that is made possible by the lack of any opposition from the Democrats. There are, moreover, differences with Bush’s war policy that reach deep into the military establishment itself.
The German government would have “nothing to lose except the affection of George W. Bush,” as Michael Naumann, one of the few German journalists proposing opposition to the Iraq war, put it in an editorial of the weekly publication Zeit. Naumann himself briefly served in Schröder’s cabinet before he became editor of the Zeit.
But why do Schröder and Fischer cave in to this pressure, and not to the pressure of the broad anti-war sentiments to which they themselves appealed quite successfully during their election campaign?
If they continued to reject the war, they would not only find support throughout the European population, but would also have a profound effect on American public opinion, which would cause considerable problems for the Bush administration. It would immediately become clear that his war policies were by no means as “popular” as portrayed by the media, a fiction that is made possible by the lack of any opposition from the Democrats. There are, moreover, differences with Bush’s war policy that reach deep into the military establishment itself.
The German government would have “nothing to lose except the affection of George W. Bush,” as Michael Naumann, one of the few German journalists proposing opposition to the Iraq war, put it in an editorial of the weekly publication Zeit. Naumann himself briefly served in Schröder’s cabinet before he became editor of the Zeit.