The NY Times has a story about an odd bit of information from pre-invasion Iraq: apparently German spies in Baghdad provided pretty important information about the Iraqi defenses to the US-led invasion forces.

Two German intelligence agents in Baghdad obtained a copy of Saddam Hussein’s plan to defend the Iraqi capital, which a German official passed on to American commanders a month before the invasion, according to a classified study by the United States military.

In providing the Iraqi document, German intelligence officials offered more significant assistance to the United States than their government has publicly acknowledged. The plan gave the American military an extraordinary window into Iraq’s top-level deliberations, including where and how Mr. Hussein planned to deploy his most loyal troops.
German Intelligence Gave U.S. Iraqi Defense Plan, Report Says, by Michael Gordon, NY Times, Feb. 26, 2006.

Although Germany’s then-chancellor Schröder vigorously argued against the invasion, German troops did perform duties that directly, and controversially, supported the war: they manned AWACS planes and checked for possible effects of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Kuwait. Germany was, and is, a major logistics hub for the US military, and German troops provide security at those facilities. So Germany was hardly neutral in this conflict, despite all the political rhetoric. Of course, now we know that Chancellor Schröder was angling for his Gazprom job, so he may have already been working for his new boss Putin.

Morally, the invasion was wrong, I think. For Germany it would have been better to stay neutral. But that would have created a major confrontation with the US, and no one in the German government then had the stomach for that. So now we’re all so “schockiert” that German spooks supplied plans to the US? I mean, once these guys had the plans for the defense of Baghdad, what were they going to do with them? Return them to Saddam’s guys? “Hey look what I found in my fax machine! I think this belongs to you guys ….” Sure, they went to General Tommy with that. Big deal. At that point, the invasion was going to happen anyway. So making it easier for the Americans to oust Saddam was not an unreasonable moral choice.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Germany, Ja sowas!, useless info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.