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Chapter 2. From Unlimited Solidarity to Reckless Adventurism: Responding to 9-11
- Brookings Institution Press
- Chapter
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The Bush-Schröder relationship got off to a rocky start. On the chancellor ’s first visit to Washington after Bush’s election, on March 29, 2001, the new president embarrassed him and his Green Party coalition partners by having the U.S. national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, announce half an hour before their meeting that the Kyoto Treaty on climate change was dead. That was followed by a series of blunt declarations from the new team in Washington denouncing a series of multilateral initiatives to which Germany was party, including the Chemical and Biological Weapons Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, to name just a few. It was clear that the conservative president and the Third Way chancellor were going to have problems. However, this state of affairs was quickly, though temporarily, to change. On September 11, 2001, Schröder was in his office in the massive new Chancellery in the still-under-construction government quarter in Berlin when one of his assistants burst in and told him to turn on his television.1 He watched the images of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and quickly realized the significance of what was happening.Yet he remained typically cool and analytic, methodically assembling his crisis reaction team. He sensed the longer-term implications of these acts of terrorism and considered calling new elections, given his concerns over the demands his government would now face and the fragility of his coalition. At 5:00 that afternoon he held a press conference during which he declared the “unlimited solidarity” of his government with the United States and its support of the invocation of article 5, the self-defense clause of the NATO treaty, by NATO at the initiative of its secretary general, George Robertson—without 15 2 From Unlimited Solidarity to Reckless Adventurism: Responding to 9-11 *ch02 9/1/04 1:49 PM Page 15 prompting by the United States. He did this out of sympathy for the victims and because he understood that any hesitation on his part would isolate Germany from the United States and provide an opening to the Christian Democrats to accuse his government of being anti-American. He also believed that by providing support, Germany would gain the right to be consulted and thus could exercise a moderating influence on American policy.2 However, Schröder had reservations early on about the direction of U.S. policy. He had made it clear to a number of journalists that he was ready to support military action but that he also would listen to his own public and respect their reservations regarding such action. Because the terrorists, who were members of al Qaeda, had attacked a NATO ally, he could justify participating in retaliatory action against Afghanistan, whose Taliban-controlled government had supported al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, while they prepared the attacks and had refused to turn them over afterward.3 But when German foreign minister Joschka Fischer met with U.S. deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in late September 2001,he was told that after the Taliban was removed, the next goal would be the elimination of Saddam Hussein.4 Wolfowitz further said that the only solution to the terrorist threat in the Middle East, and indeed the world, was to change the political equation in the region. Bush’s secretary of the treasury at that time, Paul O’Neil, and his chief of counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, later confirmed that planning for regime change in Iraq had begun early in the Bush administration’s tenure.5 On learning of this conversation, Schröder was convinced that the U.S. position in Afghanistan would lead to a larger American presence in the Middle East. He could not support creating a tabula rasa in the region upon which the U.S. would write its own design. Schröder himself flew to New York to view the destruction at Ground Zero and then to Washington to meet with President Bush on October 9, 2001. At a joint press conference, the president praised him and his country for their role in the fight against terrorism: “There is no more steadfast friend in this coalition than Germany.”6 Schröder left with the clear impression that “they are more enraged than after Pearl Harbor.”7 The chancellor returned to a very skeptical and cautious German public. Reservations about supporting an American war on terrorism were...