I am on the Left Coast this week at the Cisco Summit with limited blogging capacity but this piece by Richard Bernstein in the New York Times of the moral ambiguity of the BND affair bothered me. Bernstein seems to be saying that there is no reason for people to be upset by the revelations that Germany provided intelligence support to US-led invasion of Iraq:
Is it really so shocking, that argument goes, that a German government would have quietly done what it could to help its American ally, while at the same time holding together the Atlantic alliance and even providing some militarily useful information that might have saved some American lives? Surely, even if the government did the wrong thing, there were some good reasons for what it did.
But the intensity of feeling produced by the affair seems to reflect that the German public so identifies the Iraqi war as a moral abomination that these counterarguments seem to be making little headway.
The anger over this affair is not the result of some "moral rigidity" on the part of Germans, but legitimate anger that they were very likely deceived by the Red-Green coalition that tapped into sincere anti-war sentiment to secure votes. Here, Germans were not alone: 99% of the planet was against the US-led invasion of Iraq, including the overwhelming majority of Britons that disagreed with the actions of their elected government. Isn’t a democracy on some level supposed to represent the will of the people? Germans are completely justified to feel they were betrayed; the investigation into the actions or the BND needs to take place – and fast.
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It seems to me that the Bernstein piece is really more about a level of hypocrosity than it is about there not being reasons for the German public to be upset with the inconsistent actions of its own government. What does it say about the German electorate that so many of it seemed to vote for Schroeder on one issue: Standing up to the US? The German public should be upset; with itself for not seeing that they were being whipped up as a way of brushing over the most important issues that have direct effect on their own society. Clearly, the domestic issues (unemployment, Hartz 4, etc) should have resulted in a much more sound defeat for the former government. But somehow, the voters in Germany seemed to only focus on just part of the picture.
There hasn’t been any betrayal except for those who wanted to be betrayed. Schröder’s government said it loud and clear: No German contributions for the Iraq War – as far as our duties as a NATO ally are not concerned.
So Germany granted open skies for the transit of US-bombers, accepted the integration of its navy units in Task Force 180 into the US Order of Battle, and more…
German Defense Minister Struck, by the way, has demoted a certain Major Pfaff because of his refusal to write logistic software for the US war against Iraq. The German Federal Administrative Court has abolished major Pfaff’s degradation: It was his duty to not obey the orders he got, because otherwise he would have supported an illegal war of aggression!
Major Pfaff is now LtCol.
Of course there hasn’t been any investigation on this subject, so why should we be surprised our new government won’t allow questions concerning even more secret activities?
PS: More than 10% in the BND have a military rank. You can bet the two residents in question operating in Iraq have been officers of Bundeswehr reconaissance, specialists in observing a theatre of war.
If that is true, what I think it is, Schröder has lied in deed that he won’t send soldiers to Iraq. So not only has Germany sent soldiers to Iraq, it has also received, relatively, more honors than any other country: 50% of them have been highly decorated with a US-Medal! Har!
Wie in Frankreich dürfen sich in Deutschland die Geheimdienste um Innenpolitik kümmern.
So geht es nicht weiter.
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