w o r d s

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.

Old Europe is in a tizzy over finding out more and more details of how the CIA used European airspace and airports to shuttle abducted terrorism suspects to and fro for “innovative interrogation” in what some call a “gulag-like” system of “black sites” - secret prisons. Well, the GULAG it ain’t, but a scandal it sure is.

Now it looks like the CIA had an interesting collaborator in Germany: former Minister of the Interior Otto Schily, as the Washington Post reports:

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country’s interior minister. (…)

[Ambassador Daniel R.] Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.
Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake - Washington Post, December 4, 2005; Page A01

Otto Schily is an interesting figure in German politics. As a co-founder of the Green Party, he is a key figure of the German left. He later “defected” to the Social Democrats, and built a reputation as the one-man law-and-order wing of the German left.

The issue of the CIA planes transporting abducted suspects, many of whom were innocent, could be a huge problem for Germany and other European countries, because they may violate the European Convention on Human Rights. If the German government was aware of these flights and human rights violations were perpetrated on these planes in German airspace or on the ground, than Germany is also implicated in these violations. and unlike the U.S. government, the German government does not assume it can violate human rights with impunity by waving the “9-11 wand.”

Kanzlerin Pestbeule is ready to lead Germany … in circles probably. On the surface a national consensus government may seem like a good idea to accomplish needed but painful social reforms in the next four years. That would be the case if this was 1) a government with a mandate, and 2) a government with real leadership.

1) despite fact that this “coalition” occupies 448 of 614 seats in parliament, it does not represent the will of 70 percent of the population. In fact, a poll last week shows that 75 percent of German voters see the arrangement as a “Notlösung” - a solution of last resort. Better than - uh - no government. A the same time, 54 percent are optimistic about the coalition. That’s not much of a mandate for such an arrangement.

2) Both SPD and CDU have serious leadership problems. The CSU (the Bavarian flavor and Siamese twin of the CDU) has no leadership problems. They have no leadeship. The Social Democrats have just dealt with their leadership problems and put a new generation of leadership in charge. We’ll see how that plays out.

This weird coalition represents quite well the state of mind of the German electorate. They want things to change - but not really. The fact is that Germany has been governed by a hidden “grand coalition” for a while. None of the reforms and changes Schröder’s government did, would have been possible without help from the opposition. These deals were hammered out in bi-and tri-partisan committees. If the Merkel gang had any complaint, it was that the entitlement reforms did not go far enough. The German electorate became frustrated with increasing cost of health care and disappearing entitlements, and voted for a conservative government - but not really.

Germany is entering an interesting transition phase. Several things can happen:

• Nothing much
• New leadership emerges and takes charge
• This “coalition” becomes gridlocked and no one is in charge - which will likely lead to
• New elections

Or any combination of the above.

I doubt that any of this will bring about the much-needed smart reforms of the social network and the entitlement programs.

Kanzlerin Pestbeule?! Jetzt will ich aber nichts mehr hören, von wegen “wie konnten die Amis nur diesen Bush wählen!”

Angela Merkel will be Germany’s new Chancellor.

O’zapft is! at the mother of all beer orgies, the oohmpah fest to end all oohmpah fests. With two mighty strokes the mayor of Munich drove the tap into the barrel of beer and handed the first beer to the Ministerpräsident (Governor) of the Free State of Bavaria. The natives went wild! Especially the Japanese, American and Australians in lederhosen, rearing to go native in pools of beer and piles of greasy haxen.

The Munich Wiesn - aka Oktoberfest - is open for business, and business they mean. Last year 5.9 million visitors drank 5.5 million liters (1.45 million gallons) of beer and ate 89 oxen. The beer price is up, again, at over 7 Euro ($ 8.50) per liter! The Wiesn supports 8000 full-time employees and another 4000 temps.

Now, allow me to get this straight: The Cincinnati Oktoberfest is not anywhere near the second-largest Oktoberfest in the world. At roughly 500.000 visitors they get an honorable mention. And I seriously doubt that Uncle Al’s and Capt. Windy’s hokey pokey is the World’s most annoying performance either …

Which of Germany’s largest Volksfest events is the largest is a matter of great contention and serious dispute. The rivals Munich Wiesn and Cannstadter Wasen have been going head-to-head for as long as I can remember (not that I ever really cared). Years ago, when I lived in Stuttgart, neighbouring Cannstadt proudly claimed to beat Munich by a couple hundred thousand visitors, but both events only relied on estimates. When the Cannstadt organizers did an actual tally, they came out way below their estimates, and never published the figures. Currently, they claim 5 million visitors annually, independent estimates for last year were 3 million visitor in Cannstadt.

Early in the morning on August 13, 1961, workers began tearing up the cobblestone and asphalt along the sector boundaries across Berlin. They began erecting concrete pillars and barbed-wire barricades, while units of the the Volkspolizei - the People’s Police - kept the angry people in the eastern sector in check with machine guns.

The residents of West Berlin watched these events with shocked disbelief. The mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, ordered an emergency session of the West Berlin City Senate and issued an appeal to the international community to stop the division of their city and country by the Stalinists. The government of West Germany in Bonn, under then-chancellor Adenauer, appealed to the West-Germans to stay calm and not to provoke any incidents.

For the East German Stalinist government under Walter Ulbricht, sealing off West Berlin was the final effort to stop the exodus of farmers and workers from the “Farmer’s and Worker’s State.” In the preceding months they had fortified the border between the two German states. As they began surrounding West Berlin with barbed wire, they were plugging the last hole through which thousands of people fled to the West every day. The 24 hours preceding the start of the construction of the Berlin Wall, 2,400 people had registered in the refugee camp in Berlin -Marienfelde alone. Up to that day, almost 2.5 million people had fled the Stalinist regime in East Germany.

The fortified border between East and West Germany, including the Wall surrounding Berlin, cost the lives of hundreds of people in the next 28 years. On November 9, 1989, the East German government started opening the border and allowing some travel of East Germans to the West. In the next two days, thousands of East Germans rushed to the border, and in West Berlin some started applying sledgehammers to the concrete barriers. On November 11, the first concrete segment of the Wall fell, and the border posts were overrun by East Germans. This was the end of the Wall, and the beginning of the end of the divided Germany.

[Source: Chronik der Mauer (in Geman)]

It’s about time. Germany is finally ready to dedicate a major memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe today joins Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Museum and many other places of remembrance. In plain view of the Reichstag building, where the German parliament deliberates in the heart of Berlin, this memorial contributes to the important task of keeping alive the memory of those dark years and the shameful, horrific persecution and butchery of millions of innocent people, perpetrated supposedly “in the name of the German people.”

We will not forget.

We must fight hatred and terror today, and we must stop the violence perpetrated on the innocent today. We must speak out for the rights of every human to live in peace and dignity. To be able to do that we must be able to face the horror of the past.