Irwin Stelzer traveled to Berlin to meet with some unnamed German journalists and didn’t like what he heard:
My interlocutors–who on other subjects had wide-ranging views–all
emphatically agreed on one thing: Bush should stop talking about
"freedom." Several people had counted the times our president had used
the F-word. They noted that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had avoided
using it at all. The Germans prefer "stability" to disturbing the
status quo by trying to spread "freedom."They also agreed that nothing would induce Schröder to provide any help
to America in Iraq, although he will continue to give marginal
assistance in training Iraqi police and soldiers elsewhere. Most felt
that Germany had done enough by sending troops to Afghanistan. None
expected Schröder to abandon his election-winning anti-American
rhetoric.An underlying theme was that America has overreacted to September 11,
which most of those I spoke with saw as an incident rather than part of
a "war." Said one, "We know war, and we don′t like it."
But before heaping scorn on his German colleagues for not jumping on George W. Bush’s "Freedom Express" he might have tried to understand the widespread skepticism in Europe for US -style freedom. He might have asked the citizens of Fallujah about their newly-won freedom. He might have tried to interview the detainees in Guantanomo, or others that have been tortured through extraordinary rendition (too late to interview these). Or he might want to ask why the free press in the US has been transformed into a Bush spin machine, In any event, the debate over the true meaning of the F-word in Germany rages on.
