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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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December 19th,
2008 - ‘Germany Was Against the War, But Also Slightly Involved’ |
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‘Germany Was
Against the War, But Also Slightly Involved’ By Michael Scott Moore Der Spiegel December 19, 2008 German lawmakers have been
probing the schizophrenic role of the Schröder administration in resisting
America's invasion of Iraq. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was in
the hot seat this week, and German commentators don't believe everything he's
said. The grilling received on
Thursday by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister and a
candidate for chancellor in 2009, was intense. He was answering to a
parliamentary committee investigating whether German intelligence provided
meaningful assistance to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. And his
credibility is on the line. In the weeks leading up to
the Iraq invasion, two agents from the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND),
Germany's foreign intelligence service, were stationed in Baghdad. Steinmeier
has long said the agents received pre-mission instructions that
"precluded active support of combat operations." Lately, though, a
number of current and former US military leaders have told SPIEGEL that the
German agents provided valuable information to the US in the run-up to the
March, 2003 operation against Iraq. General Tommy Franks, who
led "Operation Iraqi Freedom" told SPIEGEL that "it would be a
huge mistake to underestimate the value of the information provided by the
Germans. These guys were invaluable." General James Marks, who was
in charge of pre-invasion reconnaissance, told SPIEGEL that the two German
agents were "heroes" who had helped save American lives. "We
trusted the information from the Germans more than we trusted the CIA,"
Marks said. Steinmeier is under the gun
because Berlin was so emphatic about being against the US-led invasion. His
boss at the time, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, ran for re-election in 2002 on
an anti-war platform. Were it proven that German agents had provided valuable
intelligence that helped that invasion, it would cast a shadow on those who
were part of that government, including Steinmeier, who at the time was
Schröder's chief of staff, and Joschka Fischer, who was Schröder's foreign
minister. Such a revelation certainly would do nothing to help Steinmeier's
2009 campaign for the Chancellery as the Social Democratic candidate. Fischer also testified on
Thursday, but the media spotlight was trained firmly on Steinmeier. And he
stuck to his guns, calling the comments from the US military leaders
"outlandish" and "ludicrous." He also said it was naive
to think that German intelligence agents didn't pass on some information to
the CIA - and naive to think that the CIA wouldn't pass that along to the US
military. "We never thought the American intelligence services would
paste reports by our two BND agents into their little scrapbooks," he
said. German commentators on
Friday take a closer look. The Financial Times
Deutschland writes: "Although the Schröder
government wanted nothing, officially, to do with the Iraq war, the
statements of high-ranking US military figures and BND employees about the
services provided by two German agents allows for just one conclusion:
Germany did take part in the war." "To clarify this
question of just how two-faced the Schröder government was … we need to know
more than which orders Steinmeier handed these agents on their way to
Baghdad. Even if it's true that the men were only meant to pass along
coordinates of civilian locations, as Steinmeier repeated on Thursday, the
fact is that the BND agents also reported Iraqi positions. No wonder the
commander of US troops in Iraq has described the German information as
'invaluable.'" The right-leaning daily Die
Welt writes: "The Schröder
government is accused of being two-faced: For the folks at home, they
agitated against the war, but secretly, through two BND agents, they provided
vital information for the war effort … 'Total nonsense,' is what Joschka
Fischer told the committee (on Wednesday, saying) the two men were in Baghdad
so the government could create its 'own picture' of the situation in
Iraq." "It may sound banal,
but the truth must lie somewhere in between. On the one hand, Schröder's
government ... wholeheartedly rejected the war. With this gesture it could
also prove (to the left) that in spite of Berlin's participation in the 1999
bombardment of Kosovo, Germany had not grown 'bellicose.' On the other hand,
the government was realistic enough not to break entirely with the United
States. And of course the government would have been informed enough to know
that information gathered by BND agents would find its way into the
international spy community, and that the Americans might find it useful. In
a networked world, both positions can be true: Germany was against the war,
but also slightly involved." The center-right Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung writes: "It was not as obvious
an assignment as Steinmeier would like to pretend for two BND agents to
travel to Baghdad to 'observe' the Iraq invasion. If it were, the German
parliament's supervisory committee would have heard of the mission. And why
did the German government need precise coordinates of certain buildings, if
they just wanted an independent picture of the war? These questions would be
less embarrassing today if Fischer and Steinmeier had simply fulfilled their
governmental duties, instead of striking heroic (anti-war) poses." The center-left Süddeutsche
Zeitung jumps to Steinmeier's defense: "It is and remains a
fact that Schröder, as opposed to Silvio Berlusconi and Tony Blair, sent no
soldiers to Iraq. It's also true that German cooperation with American
intelligence was not quite so meaningless as Steinmeier and company would
like to suggest. The government tolerated this cooperation to avoid
escalating its resistance to American policy." "There were two sides
to German policy: On the unofficial, not-so-clean side it was taken for
granted that the US would use German soil to fly planes into a war that
violated international law. Schröder had no power to prevent this. So he said
no to the war and made peace with his conscience that it would not be a
flawless 'No.' That's the truth about Schröder, Steinmeier and Fischer. If
only it were the truth about Italy, Poland and Great Britain." External link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,597536,00.html |