As in any revolution, people were called upon to make a serious choice one way or another: revolt or support Qaddafi? If your side did not emerge victorious, you were sure to be in serious trouble. That was most gravely true for Libyan residents, but other parties had a similar dilemma, especially once the tide started to turn against the rebels starting around March and the prospect of civilian massacres started to arise. Much of NATO – including, crucially, the Obama administration, although the lead was taken by France and the UK – then chose to intervene, and managed to get passed UN Security Council Resolution 1973 to justify (somewhat) that intervention. Others held back – and the most prominent of these was Germany, which made no contribution to that NATO military effort and in fact abstained in the Security Council vote on Resolution 1973.

Well, now Qaddafi is dead and gone, and the winners and losers are clear. Germany is a loser (although not as badly as the regime supporters). In that light, @swissbusiness has come up with a fascinating interview in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

«Die Nato ist keine Weltpolizei» http://t.co/Vz5Qoswd

November 15, 2011 11:42 am via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@swissbusiness

swissbusiness

The interviewee is Elke Hoff, Defense Spokeswomen for the FDP, junior party in Angela Merkel’s current governing coalition and the ideological home of German Foreign Minister Guide Westerwelle, while the interviewer is one Andreas Jahn, presumably a journalist or editor at that paper – but in any event, probably Swiss and so with no particularly need to mince words . . .

His very first “question”: “You guys were wrong!” Frau Hoff is gracious enough to admit that that was indeed the case, but quickly gets rather defensive when Jahn follows-up with “So was this Germany’s biggest foreign policy mistake since the founding of the Federal Republic?” Wait a second, she says, there you’re quoting Joschka Fischer (German Foreign Minister 1998-2005)! Not only are out-of-office Foreign Ministers not supposed to criticize the policies of their successors, but Fischer has enough mistakes on his own plate to apologize for – like admitting Greece to the euro! (Oooh, touché!)

It doesn’t take long, though, before this sort of apportioning of blame loses its usefulness and appeal. Luckily, the interview goes on to look forward, namely to possible future humanitarian interventions that Germany might well be interested in supporting – especially now that the possibility for something like that in Syria seems to be growing. So what is Germany’s position? From what one can make out from Frau Hoff, it’s one that may not be entirely coherent:

• Yes, participating in a NATO intervention in Syria would be justified, she makes clear . . .
  
• Except that the sine qua non for that would be an authorizing UN Security Council resolution. Hoff doesn’t think that is likely – Russia and China will never go for it – precisely because of displeasure of what happened with Resolution 1973, which those governments feel was distorted way beyond the “protect the civilians” purpose it initially allowed (and they may well be correct). What if a regional organization asks for intervention instead? – the Arab League is obviously headed towards something like that. No dice, says Frau Hoff: the German Constitution accepts only a UN Security Council resolution. (And let us recall here how strange the very idea of Germany sending any military forces outside of its own country was until a very short time ago.)
  
• So what about the emerging international doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect,” which potentially authorizes the violation of a nation’s sovereignty if it starts mistreating its own citizens too severely? Frau Hoff cannot endorse this. There can be no general rule as to interventions; “NATO cannot be the world’s policeman.” Plus, NATO should not intervene – no matter how shocking a government’s abuses – if it can’t be sure that it has the military staying-power to see the intervention through to victory. Frau Hoff strongly insinuates here that that has only been shown to be possible when the Americans are on-board; so no NATO intervention, no matter what, without the USA.

                          

In fact, things have gone even further than that. Algeria has closed (or at least declared closed – with the obvious exceptions) its 1,000km-long desert border with Libya, has cut diplomatic relations, and of course shows no inclination to formally recognize the new regime there. It is hardly the only country to have bet the wrong way on the ultimate outcome of Qaddafi’s struggle with domestic rebels, but it might be the only one further doubling-down on that failed wager. Why? Several answers are offered in an excellent – though anonymous – analysis in Die Zeit (Algeria’s problem with the new Libya).

The best clue might lie in the little-reported bombing attack last Friday on Algeria’s military academy at Cherchell, a coastal town, which killed 18 cadets. Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (Maghreb=North Africa; that terrorist organization is conventionally abbreviated as AQIM) claimed responsibility, you see. The Algerian government hates AQIM, understandably, but also suspects that there have been elements involved in Qaddafi’s overthrow. While the entire rebel movement was hardly another Al-Qaeda project, as Qaddafi repeatedly tried to make the world believe, it is nevertheless by no means unlikely that the more-limited Algerian suspicions about some involvement are true. And it’s indisputable that this terrorist group was able to use the general chaos prevailing in Libya to pick up all sorts of new weapons and munitions.

While it may share its anti-AQIM stance with most of the rest of the world, Algerian diplomacy also has a strong anti-NATO stance, particularly when that organization is intervening on the African continent. This also sets it against the new Libyan regime, which of course relied heavily on NATO air and logistical support. Then again, the Zeit article also very intelligently describes the tacit “Stability Pact” which the Algerian regime has long held with the US and Western Europe: you leave us alone, we’ll not only sell you oil and gas but also work to prevent radical Islamists from taking over anywhere in the Maghreb, just like we were able to thwart them in our own country.

Now that mutual understanding looks a bit dated, that recent AQIM attack aside. What’s more, the Algerian government itself is a bit paralyzed when it comes to policy-making due to an internal power-struggle currently taking place. Meanwhile, though, the country is riding its losing Libyan bet to increasing diplomatic isolation.

                          

Le Monde provides a perspective, in an unsigned article (Libya, a political objective now uncertain for L’Elysée). Put simply, it’s something akin to buyer’s remorse. France was looking forward to a glorious “big brother” role with the assistance it provided the rebels, one that would go far towards erasing – so officials hoped – her rather ugly colonial history in the area. Most of all, though, this was supposed to be short and sweet, something – in the words of Juppé back in March – that was to “be calculated in days or weeks – certainly not in months.”

Well, now it is months later, and the fighting is still going on. The rebels do seem to be making some sort of progress, yet it still seems doubtful that they can take full control before the onset of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan on 1 August complicates their efforts considerably.

According to the article, Sarkozy had a somewhat earlier date in mind for a rebel victory: 14 July, or Bastille Day, just two days away, when the usual parade of military hardware down the Champs Elysées could be spiffed up considerably on the wave of a cut-and-dried successful military campaign. But that certainly will not happen, and meanwhile Le Monde reports how the French president recently changed his mind from a trip across the Mediterranean to go visit the rebels’ self-styled Libyan Republic and opted to visit actual French troops in Afghanistan instead.

At least Sarkozy has just confronted the issue of submitting his military operations to approval of the legislature rather better than Barack Obama has done, and indeed has gained renewed votes of support for Libya actions from the Assemblée and the Senate, when there were fears that this was not certain. But the fighting goes on, and perhaps it should not be so surprising that the French should start lowering their standards for how they think it should end, as long as it does so quickly.

                          

As vacation season here on the European continent starts to shift into high gear, it’s difficult for any mere man-made initiative like this (as opposed to, say, a natural catastrophe) to create much of a sensation, but the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza at least considered this news so important that it issued two slightly-different articles about it (here and here) from its Washington correspondent, Marcin Bosacki, who notes that there’s never been any sort of letter like this sent since 1989. Also, that newspaper also published on-line the complete letter in its English translation, including a table at the bottom explaining who all those 22 signatories are.

As I say, the letter’s general message is alarm over what these signatories consider to be an on-going decay in America’s relation with NATO and with those CEE countries. One can speculate that these worthies’ concern was first raised when they realized that the only actual visit by Obama to any of their countries in a long while was going to be that one trip he took to Prague at the beginning of April to attend the EU-US summit. But that occurred only because the Czech Republic happened to be holding the EU presidency at the time, and Obama anyway ignored the officials of the host Czech government highly effectively. (Recall that that was because half of them were but figureheads, the government having fallen two weeks previously, while the other half were fierce Euro-sceptics.) NATO is now weaker than back when we all joined it, these CEE politicians complain; at the same time, it’s clear that official Washington no longer thinks it needs to pay much attention to the region and instead is content just to “check the box” (Polish: odfajkować – perhaps best expressed in the American idiom as “punch the ticket”). That’s short-sighted, they claim, because continued friendliness towards the US on the part of CEE populations can by no means be assumed, not after the experience of having been dragooned to contribute forces to Iraq, or once a new generation of political leaders comes to power that has no personal memories of the revolutions of 1989. At the same time, Russia is emerging as a geopolitical threat once more, as a “revisionist” power that clearly does not accept the incorporation of these countries into the EU and NATO, one “pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods,” which include “overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation.”

In all, you could call this only a bold-ish sort of gesture, mainly because I think everyone realizes that President Obama is hardly adverse to receiving and considering carefully even implied criticism of this sort (and from a bunch of foreigners!), in stark contrast to his predecessor. Although it’s on the long side, the letter itself makes for interesting reading, and one has to approach with respect any message with the endorsement of Václav Havel. (Not necessarily Lech Wałęsa, though; sure, he is a brave and determined son-of-a-gun and a great historical figure, and he holds the Nobel Prize, but he’s hardly known as contemplative or analytical. On the other hand, another of the signatories, former Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga, was indeed particularly respected both for her thinking and political performance, at least by CEE cognoscenti, during her time in office.)

That said, I do have a number of arguments with this letter:

• The writers make a serious mis-step early on: “Twenty years after the end of the Cold War,” they write, ” . . . we see that Central and Eastern European countries are no longer at the heart of American foreign policy.” Hey, I got some real bad news for you guys: It can accurately be asserted that CEE countries have never been “at the heart of American foreign policy.” Americans really didn’t care much about any foreign countries (with the possible exception of Latin America – cf. the Monroe Doctrine) until after World War II, and the concessions to the Soviets at Yalta ensured that CEE would continue to be quite uninteresting to American authorities. (Yes yes, there was all the talk about “rollback” from John Foster Dulles during the Eisenhower administration – until the failure by NATO to do anything in the face of the Soviet suppression of the 1956 revolution in Hungary gave the lie to all that. By the way, in this letter the signatories do make sure to get a brief dig in at what the US did to their countries at Yalta.) Even during the series of revolutions in 1989-90 that freed them from Soviet domination they were hardly “at the heart of American foreign policy,” with one exception: East Germany. To be sure, all of those self-liberating events – in Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. – were happy news, but remember that the serious diplomacy and American effort of that time was devoted to the problem of how to allow Germany (and Berlin) to reunite without sparking off World War III. Afterwards, i.e. in the 1990s and in this decade, the CEE countries have continued to miss out being “at the heart of American foreign policy” if only because the Persian Gulf (and also perhaps China) has claimed that position.
  
  

  These CEE worthies hereby get their message off on the wrong foot, foolhardily maintaining that their part of the world was ever “at the heart of American foreign policy,” and so implicitly asserting both the importance of what they have to say and the obligation of the Americans to react in some substantial way. I daresay that they are fated to be quite disappointed here; President Obama surely will input their views in some way into his foreign policy apparatus, but I seriously doubt that this will prompt any sort of response or actual adjustment to American practice.
  

• As indicated above, there’s quite a bit of complaining about Russia here, and in general it is completely justified. However, the letter goes a bit too far when discussing the brief Russo-Georgian war of last August: Russia is said to have violate Georgia’s territorial integrity “all in the name of defending a sphere of influence on its borders.”
  
  

  It’s time for a bit of recollection here – all this happened not even a year ago. It was the Georgians who actually struck first and so started this war, remember? It’s true that the Russians ruthlessly exploited the opportunity they thereby gained to drive Georgian forces back across the border and beyond, and that those Russians were very slow to leave Georgian soil once the cease-fire had been agreed upon (for all I know, there could very well still be there). But it was Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili (not a signatory here, by the way) who unleashed all of this.
  

• Towards its final part, the letter makes quite a curious argument as part of a complaint over the US visa regime, which still requires a visa for entrance into the US from a few (but not all) of the countries that these ex-politicians represent: “It is incomprehensible that a critic [of the US] like the French anti-globalisation activist Jose Bove does not require a visa for the United States but former Solidarity activisit and Nobel Peace prizewinner Lech Walesa does.”
  
  

  What do they mean here? Of course things should be that way! Are they saying that the US is supposed to evaluate foreigners for being allowed or denied entry into the country based on their personal attitude vis-à-vis the US? No way! Ideally that is just the opposite of how things should be (not that that hasn’t been true in cases in the past). It’s in fact much better to base the visa-requirement, or the waiver of same, on an individual’s country of citizenship, according to things such as whether that country itself allows visa-less entry to Americans, American immigration policy towards that country’s citizens, etc. I do admit that Lech Wałęsa constitutes an outrageous outlier who of course should be free to travel to the US without needing a visa; surely exceptions can be made for special cases like that.
  
  

• There’s also mention here – as indeed there needs to be – of the US effort to place a set of anti-missile rockets in the area, with radar in the Czech Republic and the rockets themselves in Poland, the whole system ostensibly guarding against nuclear-armed ballistic missiles emanating from Iran. The signatories to this letter make it clear that, from a political point-of-view, this effort has now passed the point of no-return and must be taken all the way to full deployment “[r]egardless of the military merits.” (And also regardless of “what Washington eventually decides to do” with regard to it!) That’s pretty amazing language, if you stop to ponder it: “Stop making sense, I don’t want to hear any more facts or arguments about whether it will all actually work or not – just deploy!”
  

Now it’s clear that the Obama administration – far from itself regarding this missile-defense deployment as a done deal – is having serious second thoughts, as the above considerations suggest that it well might. There’s absolutely no doubt that the subject came up during President Obama’s recent visit to Moscow, on the way to the G8 summit in Italy (with of course no visit to any CEE country included in the itinerary), even though no decisions on this subject were reached or agreements arrived at. But it seems reasonable for these CEE signatories – and the governments in which most of them formerly served – to start to worry that eventually some US-Russia deal will be reached about this deployment over their heads. Insofar as this letter can function to try to prevent that, to remind the Obama administration that CEE nations (and of course the Czech Republic and Poland in particular) need to be directly involved in decisions about how (or whether) to carry the deployment forward, then it does carry a valuable message. But of course its remit clearly goes way beyond that, in ways that you have to wonder whether they are in fact very useful, especially when brought forward in this very direct and public manner.

UPDATE: The Economist is now featuring an article on this CEE letter under the “Europe.view” rubric on its website (meaning that I doubt that it’s to be found in the print edition). The author – unnamed, as is usual for The Economist – also takes a rather dim view of it, writing that it “risks sounding plaintive and naive” and that “[s]adly, other stuff matters more.” He also includes a rather biting observation from a “savvy American official”: “They are asking us, in principle, to risk world war three in their defence. If their country stands for organised crime and economic collapse, that’s a hard sell.”

                          

As befitting its status as one of Denmark’s best-regarded daily newspapers, Berlingske Tidende has some good coverage of this affair (NATO’s declaration-of-confidence in Denmark), written by Ole Bang Nielsen. First off, Nielsen makes it clear just what this appointment means to the Danes themselves, namely a recognition that Denmark is no longer just a “footnote-nation and hesitant member of NATO,” as well as a personal vote of support to Rasmussen himself. To get there past the Turkish opposition, though, truly took a tremendous diplomatic full-court press – “the large European NATO lands finally threw in all their political ballast against Turkey,” as Nielsen writes. Breaking up that NATO meeting without having Rasmussen in place as the Secretary-General would have been a humiliation – especially for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who basically had announced the day before that Rasmussen would be named – so those European countries did indeed throw in everything, including Turkey’s prospective EU membership. Yes, EU matters generally do not belong being linked to NATO issues (the memberships of the two organizations don’t match very exactly, anyway), but Nielsen writes that certain threats were made nonetheless against Turkey’s EU membership process should it continue to hold out against the Dane. It seems even that the EU enlargement commissioner (Olli Rehn, a Finn) was on-hand personally to utter authoritative remarks toward the Turks such as “This does not look good from a European perspective, if Turkey does not give way.” There you have it: ordinarily Rehn did not even belong there at the NATO meeting at all, since he is an EU official, and because Finland is not a member of NATO anyway.

Does the Emperor Have No Muslim Clothes?

So the issue was finally resolved, and Rasmussen is the man. (Der Spiegel’s Matthias Gebauer even credits Barack Obama with resolving the impasse – that piece is in Der Spiegel’s on-line English edition.) But there still may be an “Emperor-has-no-clothes” element here: when everyone agrees that one of the new Secretary-General’s main tasks will be building better relations for NATO with the Muslim world, how indeed could the Danish prime minister, who handled that “Danish cartoons crisis” in an unyielding manner that resulted in anti-Denmark riots across the Muslim world, be a good choice to undertake that? Make no mistake: I applauded at the time Rasmussen’s principled refusal not to be intimidated into yielding on the fundamental principle of freedom of expression, and I still do (and indeed, had I been keeping up EuroSavant at that particular time, you would have been able to read about this opinion even as I kept you up-to-date on Danish and other foreign coverage). But one can still wonder whether, in light of this, he’s the right man for this particular job.

(There was another minor but interesting aspect of Rasmussen’s statement as he accepted the position. Let me give you here Berlingske Tidende’s quote of what he said: “I consider NATO’s tasks as some of the most important in modern times. As NATO’s coming Secretary-General, Fogh Rasmussen will build up trans-Atlantic relations and improve cooperation between the EU and NATO when it comes to international tasks like Afghanistan.” That’s right; I was back-tracking to check to see where the quotation-marks began and where they ended, but if this quote is accurate then it seems that Rasmussen likes to refer to himself in the third person!)

Interestingly, there are further interesting perspectives on Rasmussen’s naming to the Secretary-General post to be found in the Dutch quality-newspaper, NRC Handelsblad (Naming of Rasmussen a “blessing for Denmark”). This is mainly because NRC journalist Joop Meijnen has managed to swing some telephone interviews with two Danish political experts, namely Prof. Peter Viggo Jakobsen from the University of Copenhagen and Hans Mouritzen, director of the Danish Institute for International Studies. Both these gentlemen have great sympathy, in fact, for the Turkish resistance to Rasmussen’s appointment because of what in their eyes was his faulty handling of the cartoons affair. Mouritzen:

He gravely underestimated the sensitivity in the Islamic lands, operated in a much-too-passive manner, and refused to receive ambassadors from those lands. That is a disturbing handicap when you become chief of an organization which finds its crucial task in an Islamic land, Afghanistan. We don’t know how that will turn out.

In fact, Mouritzen goes on to say that Rasmussen would not have gained the post if there had been any other serious candidates on offer at the just-concluded NATO summit. But there simply were not. As for Jakobsen, he maintains that Rasmussen had been trying to line up some international job for himself for some time, to finally get out of Danish politics, but that his first choice was that of the one-man European Council president in office for two-and-a-half years established by the Lisbon Treaty (as opposed to the six-month national rotating EU presidencies we have now). Of course, the Lisbon Treaty is not yet ratified, and in fact there are growing doubts that it ever will be, so Rasmussen settled instead for another, more securely-established role on the international stage.

Turkish Hit Men

Finally we have the murky subject to take up of just what was promised to the Turkish prime minister and/or Turkish president (both of whom were present there at the NATO summit) to make them finally cease their resistance to Rasmussen’s appointment. One thing we know for sure was that a Turkish official would be named as Vice-General-Secretary. But there was other talk – coming mainly from the Turkish press – that Rasmussen had pledged to apologize for the Danish cartoons affair and to shut down the offending Roj TV. But, as we can all see in this English-language article from the website of another great Danish daily, Politiken, it looks like that is not going to happen. In fact, from the Danish opinion newspaper Information we already have word from an article entitled “Fogh in a difficult religious balancing-act” that, even as he flew from the NATO summit straight to Istanbul – what an amazing coincidence! – to attend a UN conference there on “Alliance Between Civilizations”, Rasmussen still publicly insisted on such principles as “freedom of expression as decisive for [the] open dialogue” that is needed between different religions and cultures – all of this couched, though, in the appropriate toned-down, moderate language that you’d expect Rasmussen to have to adopt whenever he happens to find himself in Istanbul – if he ever desires to get out of there alive, that is.

Speaking of his being able to keep body and soul together . . . maybe the photo that Information has at the top of that article gives us a clue why Rasmussen now wants to take pains to be conciliatory: as he smiles towards the turbaned fellow opposite him on the conference stage, he’s standing there with his right arm in a sling, having dislocated it (according to the caption) by falling down the stairs of his Istanbul hotel! What an amazing coincidence! Please, not that old “fell down the stairs” excuse which has served from time immemorial to cover up violence, whether domestic or otherwise, which people would prefer to keep hidden! I mean, in Scandinavia the public officials are famous for thinking nothing of just going walking in the city streets with their fellow citizens, so you’d have to assume that Rasmussen’s Danish security detail cannot be too intimidating; it looks like the Turks were ultimately at least able to send in their hit men to work out some of their frustrations over his appointment.

(Whoops: one final comment, back to Denmark, which now that Anders Fogh Rasmussen has gone off to NATO has a new prime minister. Yes, it seems Danish politics is a strange thing. You can be a free-market conservative, you can be a Marxist, or you can even come upon the scene at the head of the free-love-and-free-beer party, but to make it to prime minister there is but one requirement: you need to have three names, the last of which is “Rasmussen.” Let me introduce you here to one Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, who was Danish prime minister until Anders Fogh succeeded him in 2001 . . .)

                          

Chisinau? You might recall that as the capital of the Republic of Moldova. It may not share any border with Russia, but in fact it is one country that has more to worry about in the face of the new Russian assertiveness than most, as André Tibold of the Nederlands Dagblad reminds us today (Moldova is also worried about provocations).

That is mainly because the situation there and the situation in Georgia are so similar. It’s almost eerie:

• Former territory of the Soviet Union, now aspiring to membership in European institutions? Check. (Moldova has made it clear that it wants to join both NATO and the EU; according to Tibold, in Romania it even has an advocate to push for its membership within both of these.)
• Break-away region within that state supported by Moscow? Check. (In Moldova it’s Transnistria, a strip of land along the Dniester River on Moldova’s eastern edge, that seems to go big-time for things like the hammer-and-sickle and statues of Lenin.)
• Russian “peacekeeping” troops stationed within said break-away region? Check. (There are formally 1,200 of these “peacekeepers,” but in addition the 14th Russian Army is stationed in Transnistria as a solid expression of Russian support. Those troops were supposed to withdraw under terms of the Istanbul Accord that Russia signed with the OSCE in 1999, but . . .)
• Russian troops staying on in an area from which they had previously signed an agreement to depart? Check. (That 14th Russian Army is still solidly in Transnistria to this day.)

Yes, you can be sure that events of earlier this month in Georgia and South Ossetia were followed very closely by officials both in Chisinau and in Tiraspol (Transnistria’s capital) – to the point that both Russia and Transnistria were also very keen to see what the official reaction to those events would be from the Moldovan government, as that could be interpreted as its statement on their own political impasse. At first the Moldovan authorities simply echoed the official EU position, calling for a cease-fire and withdrawal of Russian troops. That was not good enough for Transnistria, since it did not include a condemnation of Georgia’s initial attack on South Ossetia, so Transnistrian President Igor Smirnov broke off all official contacts with Moldova, until later the Moldovan government gave in and also condemned the Georgians.

But the Moldovans remain under considerable pressure. In the past Russia has blocked importation of any of that country’s agricultural goods – which hurts, because that is basically all that it sells to the outside world – to make its displeasure known over the Moldovans’ aspirations towards the EU and (particularly) toward NATO, only to relent and lift them. Last May, Moscow proposed a deal: it would intervene to finally solve the Moldova-Transnistria dispute, and at the same time withdraw 1,500 of its troops, if Moldova would basically give up its Western aspirations – i.e. forget about the EU and NATO, and also withdraw from the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, a regional organization meant as a counter-weight to Russia made up of GUAM: Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova.

As of yet, there’s been no decision from Moldovans about how to respond. But the newly-threatening Russian face after Georgia probably doesn’t make that any easier for them.

UPDATE: Ah, mainstream attention (of a sort) now for Moldova’s travails! Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog now has an entry mentioning how the Russian pressure is now increasing on that country, and on Azerbaijan. But he concludes that this is just something that we – the West – will have to live with, since we need Russia’s cooperation in more important matters, like Iran.

                          

In the meantime, the countries of the NATO alliance struggle to come to terms with the new ruthless military face Russia has shown in this crisis. Germany now stands central in that military alliance, in the same way it has stood central for some time now within the European Union, again because of its sheer weight of population and economic power (and, who knows, maybe also its reputation for military ability in the past), which makes German commentary on these recent developments particularly interesting.

A very good contribution comes from Jochen Bittner, who writes a weblog, called Planet in Progress, that is carried off the Die Zeit webserver. For his essay entitled Good bye [sic], Putin, he takes as his starting-point that old saw about NATO’s purpose (attributed to the Alliance’s first Secretary-General, the 1st Baron Ismay, that it is “to keep the Americans in, the Soviets out and the Germans down.” But things have changed since back in those days, especially since the break-up of the Soviet Eastern European empire in 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union itself two years after that. For one thing, there has been no further need to keep the Germans “down” – the EU has itself done quite a sufficient job of anchoring German interests within those of Europe generally – and indeed the impulse in recent years has rather been the opposite, i.e. to motivate greater German involvement and influence within NATO – in the interest of gaining the additional German troops and money such greater involvement would necessarily bring with it, you understand.

Russians Still Out?

So no more “Germans down.” That’s fine, but an even more remarkable turn-around in Baron Ismay’s aphoristic formulation involved “Russians out”: no more were they to be kept out, they were rather to be invited in! Yes, NATO policy towards Russia during the Yeltsin years (especially as espoused by the Americans, as Bittner point out) was actually one of the “Open Door.” This did not extend so far as actually offering NATO membership (although I can remember how that option was certainly discussed, as incredible as that may seem today), but did still mean considerable cooperation and co-involvement – as long as Russia started behaving itself in politically-acceptable ways, of course. At the bare minimum this meant peaceful conflict-resolution in accordance with the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 (together with various subsequent accords which reinforced the same point).

Now, with their actions in Georgia, the Russians have grossly violated that expected standard of behavior. And quite naturally the existing mechanisms of NATO-Russian cooperation were put on hold yesterday as a result at the Ministerial session of NATO’s North Atlantic Council, as the NATO collective statement made clear to Russia that “we cannot continue with business as usual.” Have things turned around so complely that it is time to return to the old days of having NATO focus on keeping “Russians out”?

To that Bittner says “yes,” but with good reason, namely the justification Moscow has used for its Georgia intervention: protecting Russian passport-holders outside of Russia’s own boundaries. This is revealed in an editorial the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dimitri Rogosin, wrote for the International Herald Tribune (Washington’s hypocrisy, in English), writing “As for the defense of our citizens outside the country, the use of force to defend one’s compatriots is traditionally regarded as a form of self-defense. Countries such as the United States, Britain, France and Israel have at numerous times resorted to the use of armed force to defend their citizens outside national borders,” going on to cite incidents such as the intervention of Belgian paratroopers in Zaire in 1965 and the US attack on Grenada in 1983.

Protecting One’s Own – Outside

But there is a problem here with Ambassador Rogosin’s reasoning, Bittner says: the intervetions he cites have involved the evacuation of a country’s citizens outside national borders, not the conquest of the territory in question. Yet it is that latter “right” that the Russians now claim – and, if you think about it, it’s quite a frightening “right” indeed, employable at their discretion to invade the Ukraine, the Baltics, and any number of the other states in Russia’s “near abroad” which in the past where subject to the authority of the USSR, and which Russia presumably would like to have back.

It’s this “right” that the world has seen before, namely in the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 to “protect” the ethnic Germans there, made possible by the capitulation of the Munich Agreement with Britain and France and which of course proved to be just the next step in the Nazi plan for the conquest of its neighbors in Central Europe. (This is an argument which we have seen before here when discussing the reactions to Georgia from the Czech press.) It’s simply ethno-imperialism, and it’s ramifications are just as frightening in 2008 as they turned out to be back then.

One country that has not been intimidated so far is Poland, and in fact it seems that the signing of the agreement with the US to set up the missile defense base there was speeded up in response to the Georgia crisis. That action is regarded approvingly by Nils Kreimeier of the Financial Times Deutschland, who writes in his commentary article A Shield at the Right Time about the curious contradiction lying behind the US-Polish arrangement. Ostensibly, that missile base (as well as the supporting radar installations in the Czech Republic) have nothing to do with Russia, since it’s ridiculous to think that it could have any effect on any nuclear attack Russia might want to launch against the US or any other enemy. But on the other hand, it’s quite apparent that they must indeed have something to do with Poland’s neighbor to the East, as the Poles have found itself on the receiving end of military and even nuclear threats from the Russian military of a sort that have not been brandished on this continent since the bad old days of the Cold War. More to the point, those basing agreements that the Polish and Czech governments have recently signed with the US mean valuable security reassurances for both countries in these times of increased uncertainty and threats. That can be seen in that aspect of the agreement with Poland that will have US anti-aircraft and anti-missile Patriot missiles, manned at first by US troops, stationed on Polish soil – a clear violation, by the way, of assurances made to the Russian government in connection with the admission of Eastern European states to NATO that there would never actually be US or Western European troops stationed in those countries. Nonetheless, that Poland and the Czech Republic have in this way contracted directly with Washington, rather than being satisfied that their NATO or EU memberships already protected them sufficiently, is also a very interesting aspect to this development.

Finally, Andreas Schwarzkopf in the Frankfurther Rundschau (Together Against Moscow) has a look at the galvanizing effect on NATO Alliance unity that the developments in Georgia has had. Going into yesterday’s North Atlantic Council meeting there had been worries expressed over the division in opinion among NATO members about how react, with the US together with Eastern European states wanting to take a hard line while the others, particularly France and Germany, seeking a softer diplomatic line. What finally emerged – in the form of the statement quoted in part above – he judges to be a decent-enough compromise, although there must be follow-up. In particular, an end must come to the disunity within European ranks that has greeted each attempt up to now by Vladimir Putin’s government to intimidate its neighbors, from the cyber-war unleashed against Estonia in the spring of last year to natural gas cut-offs to Lithuania and the Ukraine. In order to let Russia know without any doubt that violence or economic threats will no longer be tolerated behavior, the West itself must change, too. The Eastern European states must be put on a shorter leash, made to understand, as Schwarzkopf puts it, that “revenge is a poor counselor.” And the US must change its policies back to be willing to work with its allies in a multilateral framework.

                          

But are the two military undertakings, separated by four decades, really comparable? You could ask the Czechs themselves about that. Petr Šimůnek of the leading Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny devotes precisely 99 words to that question in a piece entitled, of course, 99 Words. (The allusion here is to the Two Thousand Words, a manifesto by a leading reformer of the 1968 “Prague Spring” that laid out the objectives of the Czech reformers.) He doesnt’ have much space to work with, then, but his point is that, yes, they are the same in principle: “A small land under the influence of Russia, which shows everyone by force just who is boss. Scenes of tanks, ploughing down the highways of the attacked state. A world that chastises the Bear, but doesn’t do anything. A violated land, that needs years to recuperate.” Naturally, Šimůnek urges assistance to Georgia: diplomatic, economic, humanitarian. “And next Thursday [i.e. the anniversary of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion] we will also remember Tbilisi, quaff Georgian brandy and boycott vodka. And we won’t forget.”

Ossetians = Sudeten Germans

Also writing in HN, Luboš Veselý of the Prague-based think-tank Associace pro mezinárodní otázky (Association for International Questions) prefers to find a parallel to the Russian intervention in Georgia in the Sudeten question that led to the abandonment of Czechoslovakia by her Western European allies at Munich in 1938 (Russians in a Georgian Sudetenland). His is a more measured view of the Caucasus conflict (perhaps because he gives himself much more than just 99 words to work with). He blames Georgian President Saakashvili for two mistakes: one, the incursion into South Ossetia by Georgian forces that he ordered – which meant not only firing on civilians but also on Russian troops residing in South Ossetia as “peacekeepers” – provided the Russian government with a perfect pretext to finally take care of this disobedient state on its southern flank, which prefered affiliation with the West (and specifically with NATO) to Russian hegemony; and two, in past years he never pursued seriously the real possibility of a political settlement with the two break-away regions within nominal Georgian territory. Particularly Abkhazia, Veselý claims, would have been open to political rapprochement: that territory is not so much under the shadow of occupying Russian troops and secret police, and assisting it in becoming a more open and prosperous society would have been a better route for attracting it back into the orbit of Tbilisi rather than Moscow.

In any event, it is clear that for the Russians have no more real concern for the affairs of the South Ossetians and Abkhazians than the Nazis did for the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia back in 1938: they are rather handy pawns that it can use to further its real aims, which involve the whole of Georgia, as can be seen in the Russian air attacks against Georgian military and civilian targets far from South Ossetia itself, in the hacker-attacks against the Georgian Internet infrastructure, in the sinking of a Georgian military boat on the Black Sea – and in the bombardment of the port city of Poti, which is where Azeri oil which has crossed through Georgia by pipeline is shipped onward to the EU. That last-named action hints that at least one of the main Russian war-aims is to assert its control over what had been an energy source for the EU outside of its control. For this reason, Veselý calls for a much more vigorous European Union reaction, demanding a pull-back of Russian forces from Georgian territory and even from Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well, and dispatching “a military or police mission.”

                          

In all, it’s an enormous ball of fluff, the groupie-tone of which you can appreciate by just taking a look at the accompanying video: maybe you won’t be able to understand the German, but that doesn’t matter so much, as you can rest assured that what is being expressed is the usual stuff of “He was an amazing man to meet!” and “I still think it was only a dream!” It’s obvious that the Economist’s linguistic and analytical talents would better have been employed addressing reaction to Obama’s Berlin visit and his speech coming from an actual representative of the serious German press – could it be that the Bild story was irresistible because it allowed a follow-on mention (check it out, it’s also right there in the Certain Ideas of Europe piece) of Obama’s picture right there on the Bild’s front cover above the topless-girl-of-the-day? Obama smiling and waving just above the fold; topless Claudia on her knees and looking towards the camera seductively just below the fold; the New Republic’s weblog The Plank thoughtfully reproduces that front page shot here. (To be fair, this is of course hardly the only piece the Bild Zeitung delivers about Obama’s visit. Then again: it’s only the Bild Zeitung, whose very name means “Picture Newspaper,” thereby making clear where its editorial priorities lie.)

Obama groupie-love, topless model: how very . . . remarkable! (*Sniff*) But never mind, beloved EuroSavant audience, let’s go make that ramble through (some of) the serious German press that, for whatever reason, our MSM colleagues at the Economist eschewed.

Stuck in Berlin’s “Front-Line Myth”

At the Siegessäule

At the peak of the serious German press – actually a weekly newspaper with a higher degree of commentary in its pieces than sheer reporting, along the lines of the Economist itself – is Die Zeit, so let’s start with Yes, we can hope! (title in English), by Christoph Seils. “The party is over, the Superstar has left,” he begins. Now it is the time for a level-headed assessment of what this was really all about. Yes, he is an impressive speaker, who calmly delivered a quite capable speech in front of more than 200,000 cheering onlookers. Then again, in that speech he clung to what Seils calls “the front-line myth” that Americans seem to continue to hold about Berlin, but which is not true anymore at all. Berlin is not anymore any focal-point of ideological confrontation and by no means recognizes itself as such; rather, it’s the city of the Love Parade, for Heaven’s sake, which used to wind its crazy, techno-dancing way past the very Siegessäule before which Obama spoke! (Granted, the Love Parade now has started to be held elsewhere, after Berlin started to tire of dealing with the yearly hordes of people and their trash: for 2008 it just occurred last Saturday, 19 July, in the western German city of Dortmund.)

As you would expect, Seils does get past the hype to treat the unavoidable fact that, for all the greater cooperation and listening that an Obama administration will offer Europe, it also will demand more of its European allies and will be, with its wide smile, its seeming reasonableness, and thus its marked contrast to the widely-detested Bush regime, much harder to refuse. From the very structure of and statements eminating from this overseas trip, it is crystal-clear that at the top of that list of demands from our NATO allies will be a greater devotion of men and resources to Afghanistan to match what President Obama will be ready to commit. Seils’ article excels in that it depicts the problem that will cause rather starkly: involvement in Afghanistan – any involvement in all, much less the troops and money that are already going there – is widely unpopular in Germany. The meme of “why are we there in the first place?” is ever-present in public discussion. Still, again, that smiling President Obama will want even more. If only those predominantly youngsters clapping and cheering in front of the Senator’s speaker’s podium yesterday evening could realize that – they might change their tune!

He also reminds them – reminds all his readers – that, for all their rapture, it is not they or any Germans who will decide whether Barack Obama becomes the next US president, but rather American voters. And that race still seems very close.

Not to Gerhard Spörl of Der Spiegel, it seems, whose contribution to the post-Berlin analysis is No. 44 Has Spoken. Yeah, this one is pretty hagiographic – somewhat better than the “I met him in the gym!” Bild Zeitung piece, but not by much. Anyway, you can read it for yourself since Der Spiegel “put it on their English-language website (which, you’ll see there, has it’s own version of the George W. Bush’s-remaining-time-in-office countdown!).

Here, Have Some Bitter Truth

Columnist Thomas Hanke of the business newspaper Handelsblatt seemingly witnessed nothing but hard reality in Obama’s words, as he makes clear in his piece Cold Fervor. The references to the Berlin blockader were not just there to make everyone feel good; the decades-long confrontation in the city with the Soviets was brought up as an analogy to the severe tests which the West again faces today, especially in Afghanistan. In Hanke’s eyes, Obama in his speech was simply serving up the “bitter truth” that hard work and sacrifice lie ahead of America and its allies, and the replacement of Bush in the White House with another president is not going to change any of that. There can be no more illusions; Europeans will have to join the US in stepping up and taking responsibility for addressing the world’s problems as well.

Writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Yes He Can), Reymer Klüver both marvels at and dismisses Obama’s Berlin speech and his conduct on this overseas trip in general. On the one hand, the tour has been tremendously valuable to him in that it has demonstrated that he is definitely presidential material. The increasing influence of policy steps he has long advocated – both diplomatic discussions with Iran and a timetable for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq – has showcased his judgment.

Then again, the appearance in Berlin might have come at considerable ultimate cost to Germany – “Obama will be expensive for Germany,” Klüver writes. This is naturally because of the “shared sacrifices” that he made clear in his speech that he will be demanding of America’s allies. Still, one can still doubt how much of this will actually translate into concrete action when/if he becomes president. One must remember that 1) The real audience for the speech was American voters, not those who gathered in the Tiergarten to actually hear it, and 2) Obama has already displayed a capacity for abandoning positions he once held in the past (e.g. opposition to free trade/NAFTA), so that should be kept in mind.

Obama to Shove More Burdens Onto Allies?

Also on the Süddeutsche Zeitung site there is currently an interview, conducted by Thomas Denkler, with an “America-expert” from the German Society for External Politics, one Josef Braml (“Obama will not walk on water”). He makes some good points, such as linking Obama’s call for shared sacrifice with the orientation of his speech to the American electorate: what with the economic troubles in which the US now finds itself, interest has grown (especially among Democratic Party constituents) in cutting back on some of the money the country spends for its overseas engagements, by transferring some of that burden onto the allies, in order to have more financial resources to devote to problems at home. Also, even if he is elected president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama can still not expect easy going because of the ideological divisions that persist even within his own party – over free trade, for example, and questions of Homeland Security.

The Frankfurther Rundschau is also a serious German paper, from the country’s fifth-largest city and financial capital. In his analysis The World Becomes Young), FR columnist Harry Nutt has a curious take on Obama’s Berlin visit. He estimates that half of the 200,000 who gathered to hear the Senator live were under the age of 20. What is more, whether the Obama campaign cottoned on to this or not when they were persuaded to accept the Siegessäule as an alternate venue for the speech they wanted to schedule, that monument and the enormous circular square in which it is located (the Großer Stern) does not really anymore symbolize to Germans anything out of their history, presumably because anything it might have once symbolized was entirely discredited in the wake of the Second World War. Rather, (and as above), if you hit a German with Siegessäule! in a word-association test his response will probably be “Love Parade!”, and/or the “fan-miles” that were set up there on the boulevards between that monument and the Reichstag/Brandenburg Gate for swarms of football fans from all over the world during the World Cup in 2006, which Germany hosted, as well as the recent European Championship.

So the audience and the venue itself was all about young people, young culture; Nutt chides Obama that the numerous references he made to the Berlin Airlift were entirely without effect – that is just something out of some history book the members of the audience have been required to study. Still, quite an impressive mass of them showed up to hear the speech, and they proved loud and enthusiastic during it; what were they doing there, then? Firstly, they were looking for something as unlike as they could get to George W. Bush, something that could make them believe in politics again. But they were therefore also looking for an effective new politics, that can get results: “It is the hope for a Realpolitik, that nonetheless can be paired with Passion,” as Nutt puts it.

Amero-Centric

On the other hand, FR contributor Marcia Pally didn’t know about young-vs.-old, but all that she saw filling the square in front of Obama – presumably being present there herself – was Americans (Ich bin eine Berlinerin – Berlinerin merely meaning “female Berliner”). But that was somehow appropriate, anyway: after all, the speech was really meant for the American electorate back home, one big laundry-list of what Obama’s “change” is supposed to mean: putting in order the Iraq problem, as well as Afghanistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, AIDS, climate change, the spread of nuclear weapons, the gulf between rich and poor, and the democratic deficit.

That’s quite a list. And Obama has also come to Europe to let the Europeans know that, if he is president, they will be listened to again. But why does Europe need the US for that? Most people, if they find that absolutely no one is listening to them, simply hire a psychiatrist. And why can’t Europe develop its own approaches to all those problems Obama is promising to bring “change” to? Those are good points, but especially surprising given their source, for Pally’s article itself had to be translated for publication in the FR, from English, for she is a professor who regularly teaches at NYU and a permanent Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, who has just been recently in Berlin as an academic fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Finally to the Financial Times Deutschland, and to a non-bylined editorial (thus representing the views of the editorial board collectively) that also looks ahead to the cold reality that is sure to come after the smiles, cheers and handshakes are long in the past: Hangover After the Intoxication. For what a President Obama has in mind for the world can be seen by the very itinerary of this overseas trip: first to Afghanistan and the Middle East, to take stock of the problems, and then to Europe, to seek help in their solutions. But it didn’t take this trip to enlighten German politicians about what President Obama would ask of them: it has been clear for some time that he would be after both a greater troop and financial commitment to Afghanistan (including changing their rules of engagement so that they are allowed to venture where things are actually dangerous, namely the South of the country), even as they seem to want to treat the American as some “cuddly stuffed animal,” that “says conciliatory phrases when you shake his hand.” But its the German voters, who don’t find it in their job-description to keep track of such things so closely, who could find themselves disappointed in the end, when “Obama’s new America strives after the old objectives” but turns out to be that much harder to say “no” to, precisely because of his great contrast with George W. Bush.

One interesting point the editors bring up: just as a notional Obama administration will be getting up and running in 2009, so will Germany enter its own campaign ahead of national elections in that year. Especially when Germans are running for re-election, they become very reluctant to being depicted as mere American “poodles,” so to say. (The word belongs to the British, not the Germans: it’s the idea I’m after here.) Those so eager to partake of the Obama-aura yeterday could well find themselves in the end rooting for John McCain – a figure much easier to say “no” to.

                          

It seems some NATO alliance partners are rather unimpressed with the level of contribution offered by certain others, and are ratcheting up the pressure on these laggards to get more with the program. This argument dominated the NATO conference of defense ministers held last week in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. As you can expect, the US is the leading country among that first group, but Canada has been complaining as well. That country currently has 2,500 troops stationed in dangerous southern Afghanistan, by Kandahar, and has even threatened to send those troops home once its current commitment comes to an end if there are no new troop commitments to southern Afghanistan from other NATO allies.

Of course, it’s not too polite to explicitly name the targets from what we could call the “slacker” camp whom you’re trying to pressure to do more. Still, the side-hints were clear that Germany heads that list. For although there are now German troops currently serving in Afganistan, they are stationed in the relatively-peaceful North of the country, and they further operate under rules of engagement which restrict them to firing their weapons only in self-defense. German officials had been asked – prior to the Vilnius conference – to commit more troops, and to permit the new troops and those in the North to be transferred to the South, but so far the German government has refused.

On to Munich

That dispute was not going to be allowed to die in Vilnius, for – lo and behold – right after the NATO conference all the leading players were scheduled to proceed straight to Munich, to the Conference on Security Policy that takes place there each year at this time in February. Waiting for them was Horst Teltschik, the German politician and international businessman who serves as the Munich Conference’s chief officer, and as his visitors made their way there he had some remarks to make to German radio which were picked up by the home-town newspaper the Süddeutsche Zeitung (“NATO is at the limit of its possibilities”). NATO is trying to do too much, was Teltschik’s verdict; what was needed at the conference was an intensive discussion about just where NATO should be engaged and where it should not be. But shouldn’t such calculations already have been made by this point? Actually, In Teltschik’s view, no, they have not, because of poor communication between America and its European allies: the US marched into Afghanistan in the first place without any consultation, according to Teltschik. (This is a bit glib: the US attacked Afghanistan in October, 2001, in response to the attacks of 11 September, which spurred the NATO allies to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, essentially identifying the September 11 attacks as attacks on all NATO members. And while it is true that the Bush administration showed little need or tolerance for outside input when planning its attack upon Afghanistan, April 2003 did see NATO collectively and voluntarily take over command of forces there, the ISAF. I submit that it was that point – at the latest – which was the occasion for weighing whether NATO belonged in Afghanistan, and that the takeover of ISAF command constituted a clear, if implicit, answer.) Still, Teltschik is willing to countenance sending German soldiers to reinforce NATO efforts in southern Afghanistan, i.e. what the German government is currently refusing, although he also suggests that other NATO countries such as Italy and Spain be reminded of their obligations to the Alliance as well.

Ultimately, though, Horst Teltschik these days is not empowered to speak for that government, no matter how “plugged-in” he is to the highest German political circles. It is still instructive to hear the views of such a German politician, especially when he reveals himself to be somewhat less hard-line on the subject of reinforcing/modifying the German role in Afghanistan than his government. Die Zeit now has an article on-line (Die for Afghanistan?) which takes this further by surveying seven other prominent figures, most involved in some way in the German government, about whether German soldiers should be called upon to – as the title puts it – “die for Afghanistan.”

Still Believers in Afghanistan

Reading through the article, it’s a relief to learn that the vast majority of the interviewees still believe in the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Particularly interesting are the comments recorded from Eckart von Klaeden, who is the foreign affairs spokesman for the co-governing CDU/CSU (i.e. conservative) faction in the Bundestag. The German mission to Afghanistan, he notes, marks the crucial new stage in German foreign policy – whose beginning can be said to have occurred on 11 September – in which his country has shown itself finally to be willing to take up it global responsibilities with global deployments. (In the 1990s all that Germans were willing to countenance in the way of military deployment was the immediate European area, i.e. the Balkans. And before that, since World War II the Germans had been unwilling to consider any deployment of their troops outside of their own country at all.) He identifies what he calls “the danger of islamic fundamentalism” and says that anyone who thinks they can avoid that by avoiding the fight against it is fooling themselves. Now, all of this is the sort of language you would expect from someone who after all is a spokesman for government policy – except that there is nothing in his statement that holds back or qualifies the above statements, which might be rather strange in that, as I have noted, German government decision-makers currently have set their face against any change or supplement to the German mission. There seems to be an inconsistency here, no?

Further encouraging talk issues from Heiner Geissler, of the CDU, who is also a well-respected politician emeritus in the mold of Horst Teltschik. “If NATO is unsuccessful, then the Front [against terrorism] will shift to Hamburg, or to Frankfurt.” Good, hard-core stuff, but Geissler also sees justification for the German mission in Afghanistan in the advancement of human rights and democracy, namely against religious suppression. We’re fighting a world-wide civil war, Geissler avers, one that is dangerous because it is irrational, based as it is upon a religion, and “Islam is even a dangerous religion, because it empowers its believers to go wage war.”

Beer-Buddy

So much for members of the governing coalition – what about, say, the Greens? The Die Zeit article does also contain a brief interview with Angelika Beer, political-security spokesperson for the Greens in the European Parliament, and her attitude is also pretty much as positive as could be expected: “We stand responsible for stabilizing Afghanistan.” However, she is not in favor of sending the German troops to southern Afghanistan – not until conditions in the South become like conditions in the North where the Germans are already located, i.e. where things have calmed down to the point that meaningful reconstruction and other civilian-assistance projects can be undertaken. In other words: We don’t want to send our troops to the South to fight to bring peaceful conditions there until peaceful conditions in fact already prevail there!

There’s also a contribution from one Bernhard Gertz, Chairman of the Bundeswehrverband, which I interpret as being not really a soldiers’ union, but rather a soldiers’ lobbying group much like the Association of the United States Army. Gertz takes a “yes, but” position much like Green politician Beer: We must indeed fight in Afghanistan against al-Qaida, let’s not bury our heads in the sand! – but, then again, sending any more troops than there already are won’t really do any good. Finally, there has got to be at least someone from the “nay” side to give the piece some balance, and for that the Die Zeit editors bring in Feridun Zaimoglu, idenitified as “writer and member of the German Islamic Conference.” The German presence in Afghanistan is complete nonsense, Zaimoglu advises – it’s the “ass of the world” anyway, and sending our troops there only servers to advance American imperialism, etc. etc.

Taken as a whole, then, the tone of most of these interviews displays continuing support among leading German opinion-makers for the German mission in Afghanistan. Again, much of this is in fact hard to reconcile with the government’s current hard-and-fast “no” to requests to send more troops and deploy more of them down where they are needed, namely to help out hard-pressed NATO allied forces in the South of the country. This dissonance suggests to me that that German government “no” won’t stand for long, and at least some sort of compromise is sure to be found.

UPDATE: The evidence continues to pile up that the rest of the German government is hardly as opposed to the idea of sending German troops to the more-dangerous southern regions of Afghanistan as is the very top. This article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung reveals how Ruprecht Polenz (CDU) – no less than the Chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee – has made it clear he sees nothing wrong with sending German troops to the South, in an interview with radio station SWR. And our old friend Eckart von Klaeden (quoted above in the Die Zeit interview-article) reappears here to urge his government to be “more offensive-oriented” in its support to NATO allies in Afghanistan. On the other hand, the Süddeutsche Zeitung also cites Gernot Erler (who, as Staatsminister im Auswärtigen Amt is the equivalent of an American Under-Secretary of State) to the effect that Germany cannot be called a slacker when it comes to contributions to the Afghanistan effort – 3,200 soldiers deployed plus Tornado fighter-bombers, and 26 dead so far – and it is therefore not fair to ask her to do more.