NATO security training in Iraq

GOD BLESS GERMANY!!! Finally coming to its senses!!!

In another positive sign showing improved German-American relations…

At a NATO conference in Bucharest, Romania, Germany’s defense minister said his country could not rule out getting involved in Iraq years from now. Germany, which opposed the war and troop engagements, is now involved in security training for Iraqi forces.

Let’s see how long years last, especially now that both Bush and America have the upper hand in Iraq!

edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast … index.html

how does this fit with the ‘kerry don’t have a hope of getting any german help in iraq, so when he talks about getting more allies he’s talking pish…’ line of attack?

It does not, but it does show that Germany is quieting down in its anti-Americanism. The Defense Minister has always been very concerned about Schroeder and Fischer’s gratuitous attacks on Bush and America. He is one of the old school who truly knows where Germany’s security interests are.

BUT what does Germany have to send regardless? 3,000 maybe 5,000. Highly unlikely. These resources would go to Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan first. There will be no German troops in Iraq at least not in any useful numbers.

BUT it does show a political realignment in Germany that I find most heartening. It shows that the unreconstructed Marxist Fischer may be running out of room to maneuver. The grownups are increasingly in charge and that is the context that I would put Stork’s remarks in. That context bodes well for improved German-American relations and that will be good for both Europe and America.

last night or so the picture of the last hostage in Iraq, murdered brutally, was repeating one time too often in my mind and I changed my opinion on Iraq. Not backwards, because those days the attack on Iraq was highly irrational in my view. But now as it has happened (and this has advantages too, like not seeing this Saddam bastard grinning on TV anymore) and Iraq is unstable, I thought… well thought we should offer the millitary help we could provide, even if it would be not much regarding our … millitary. Because if Iraq is not stabilized, it is the benefit of nobody. To my surprise, the German defense minister Struck was giving this statement just at the same time.

Well, Schroeder called him back, and we will still not go there…

So we can tell the world 100 more times we were right and saw the chaos coming… but blabla does not help the next victim.

:frowning:

All wars involve chaos. Afghanistan and Iraq are experiencing chaos but are things getting better? are they better than before? I would say yes emphatically for both counts.

Bob Honest:

I regret to disagree with you regarding Germany’s “principled” opposition to the invasion of Iraq. If the German government wanted to tell us so blah, blah, blah, it did so and we were aware of the German positiion but to actively seek to block the effort in connivance with France was what caused relations with America to deteriorate. Let us have our folly and stay out of it we told the German government but do not actively oppose. What did Germany gain out of cooperating with the French to actively oppose America? No one has been able to tell me this. If Germany had wanted to stay out, I would have accepted that. Active opposition in cooperation with the French, however, was something very different. We will put it down to a momentary lapse in Germany’s good sense. Time to forgive and forget, but France… Chirac… they have made many “eternal” enemies in America because deep down we know betrayal and active malice when we see it. I will never NEVER trust the French government again.

One should bloody well hope you had the good sense never to trust them before either!

Hmmmm perhaps you are right BB, but I for one cannot think of an example where France previously so blatantly sold out American interests and then brazenly attempted to turn the world against us. If you can supply an example, I would be happy to look at it, but for all France’s triangulating with the Soviets during the Cold War, I cannot recall anything on this caliber where they sold weapons to a direct enemy of a major ally.

Argentina’s weapons from France were sold to them before the British were even involved. They cannot be blamed for that. Much weaponry was sold to Middle Eastern regimes before they started invading countries or to fight Iran during the Iran-Iraq war so okay but this corruption and cooption at the highest levels in the UN security council and now the efforts to sell weapons to China has me utterly bewildered. Did the French ever try to sell weapons to the Soviets during the Cold War? My impression was that they did not. So, I am left scratching my head and forced to come to the conclusion that France’s actions clearly are an act of war and that they have clearly targeted us as their main enemy to be “contained.” We will fight back until they learn their lesson. A major shock from a civilized Western nation. Schroeder and Fischer I can put down to Carteresque “adherence” to failed and misplaced ideals. Fortunately, history and post history will be equally unkind to the two German nitwits as to Carter despite his pathetic and despearte efforts to give his life some meaning by lobbying and squandering cash on public relations to deliver the message that “he meant well” and that he is our “best ex-president.” Yeah, right.

He will always have the milliions of victims in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Central America and other places such as Iran and Afghanistan and really the whole turmoil in the Middle East today can largely be attributed to his failed policies. I don’t know how the man sleeps at night. What a wasted life. What a disastrous mess to have on his conscience.

I think that this is very interesting and unfortunately very prevalent (attitudes in Europe at least) which is why sensible, grown-up leaders are required to deal with the fickle, easily riled masses.

[quote]But when you talk to young men and women in Berlin, so acutely sensitive to what Hitler did, they seem utterly unable to comprehend the implications of doing nothing about a man like Saddam Hussein, whose Hitler-like atrocities are documented in the mass graves of the tortured and the damned. Germans simply refuse to see the analogies to Hitler that are so obvious to everyone else, and that modern technology renders an evil tyrant with ambition and means far more dangerous than der Fuehrer ever was. Hitler never had an A-bomb. Young men and women in their 30s and 40s, hanging out in the coffee shops and cyber cafes, don’t want to think about Hitler. Going on endlessly about George Bush as the enemy of the people is much more fun. Contemporary German cultural attitudes suggest clues as to why this is.

From February to September, more than 1.2 million persons looked at an exhibition of paintings and sculpture lent by New York’s Museum of Modern Art at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The renowned collection showed some of America’s most famous artists along with Europeans, including contemporary Germans. Men and women camped out with sleeping bags and bottles of water to have a place in line when the doors opened each day. The buzz was electric. [b]German critics saw the show as reflective only of American imperialism and mammon