No other journalist in Germany has attacked Barack Obama as relentlessly as Der Spiegel's Gabor Steingart. When candidate Obama began his quest for the presidency, Steingart told his readers in Germany that he had no chance to win, that Obama's entire candidacy was an illusion. After Barack Obama won the presidency in a historic election, Steingart prophesized that he would be a failure. In Rupert Murdoch's Wall Streed Journal, Steingart mocked Obama and Americans in general for wanting to achieve a universal health care system similar to what German (and French, British, and every European) citizens enjoy. When President Obama led efforts to avert another Great Depression with federal stimulus programs and injecting capital in the banking system, Steingart told readers of Der Spiegel that it was all a huge mistake– the markets could correct themselves. More recently, Steingart declared Obama's foreign policy a failure, and quoted his friend Newt Gingrich approvingly that Obama "looks a lot like Jimmy Carter". And now, with respect to President Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Steingart calls the awarding the prize to him a "historic mistake" (The Wrong Prize at the Wrong Time, Falscher Preis zu falschen Zeit ). The Nobel Peace Prize, Steingart writes, should have been awarded to Gerhard Schröder for resisting the call to involve Germany in the 2003 invasion of Iraq:
Schröder stuck to his guns. Never was he more clear (and more lonely)
than in the months leading up to the war. "Under my leadership, Germany
will not participate in a war in Iraq," he said. After six years and
more than 106,000 dead, the reasoning seems prophetic: "I can only warn
people not to talk about a war in Iraq without thinking of the
political consequences and without an overarching vision for the Middle
East. Those who march across borders must know exactly what they want
and how they plan to get out."
Steingart fails to mention that Schröder's actions at the time were not so much motivated by a commitment to world peace, but rather a need to win votes: he was in the middle of an election and George W. Bush's bellicosity was extremely unpopular in Germany. But nowhere is Steingart's cynicism more evident than when he proposes that Schröder should share the Nobel Peace Prize with Vladimir Putin – the Butcher of Chechnya.
0 comment
absolutely. He is one of the greats.
Schröders Versprechen, sich nicht am Irakkrieg zu beteiligen, war bestenfalls die halbe Wahrheit, denn die BND-Agenten, die im Irak eingesetzt und dafür von den USA hoch dekoriert wurden, waren Offiziere der Bundeswehr in Zivil.
Und bereits eine Woche nach seinem Wahlsieg entsandte er seinen Verteidigungsminister (“that person” -O-Ton Rumsfeld) Struck nach Washington, um Deutschlands Beteiligung am Krieg in Afghanistan zu erklären. Die deutsche Elitetruppe KSK wurde aus ISAF herausgelöst und Enduring Freedom unterstellt: Erstmals seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg befanden sich deutsche Soldaten wieder in einem Bodenkrieg. Weder in der deutschen Presse noch im Bundestag wurde hierin eine Kehrtwende deutscher Politik gesehen, geschweige denn diskutiert. Schröder war ein Lügner, ihm den Nobelpreis zu geben, wäre ein schlechter Witz!