German warnings not borne out by Iraq war
Dire predictions look like anti-U.S. feeding frenzy in hindsight
Eric Geiger, Chronicle Foreign Service Thursday, May 1, 2003
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Munich -- Not so long ago, prominent German politicians were outdoing each other forecasting worst-case scenarios for the Iraq conflict. The predictions ranged from "millions of victims of U.S. rockets" to "millions of Iraqi refugees desperately fleeing the country."
While few are willing yet to eat their words publicly, the media is having a field day with the wildly inaccurate pronouncements.
"They were all wrong with their horror scenarios," snorted the Bildzeitung, Germany's largest nationally distributed newspaper. Under the heading "The embarrassing predictions on the war by our politicians," the paper recently listed some of the most erroneous ones.
On March 21, Social Democratic parliamentary President Wolfgang Thierse, one of the country's most influential leaders, told a Cologne newspaper, "Millions of people in Baghdad will be victims of bombs and rockets."
Environmental Minister Juergen Trittin of the Green Party, the junior partner in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition, grandly declared on Feb. 26, "The German government possesses various studies expecting up to 200,000 victims of military operations in Iraq. And it is feared that another 200,000 persons will die from indirect results of the war."
Greens Co-chair Angelike Beer predicted that "U.S. aggression in Iraq will result in the explosion of the Near and Middle East."
The ZDF TV network, considered one of the prime practitioners of anti- American war coverage, is also playing the postwar blame game.
"All the so-called experts were wide of the mark with their forecasts," noted Theo Koll, moderator of the prime time news feature show "Frontel." Among the footage shown to prove his point was Development Minister Heidemarie Wielczorek-Zeul, a Social Democrat, emotionally predicting on a talk show that "3 million Iraqi refugees will be flooding neighboring countries."
Not only politicians badly miscalculated the war's outcome.
Peter Scholl-Latour, a 79-year-old author, former TV news commentator and household name, who is regarded as Germany's top Mideast expert, was a fixture on nationwide TV programs.
Asserting that "not even 500,000 U.S. soldiers fighting in Vietnam could prevent the debacle there," Scholl-Latour on March 29 predicted that the war would "last for a very long time." He added, "The progress of war so far is an acute embarrassment for the U.S. The Iraqis have tremendous national pride, and they fight in the name of Allah. . . . The Americans will have to bury their dreams of world domination."
Gerhard Haderer, an Austrian cartoonist also popular in Germany, said on March 29, "This war won't be decided on the battlefield, but by the images in the media. . . . A few more pictures of the totally terrified U.S. prisoners of war taken by the Iraqi, and Herr Bush and his oil billionaires can forget about their fantasies of a New World order."
Reporters have largely failed to obtain mea culpas from the rejectionists, though the Green Party's Beer said meekly in a brief statement, "Our assessment was based on information we received from aid organizations."
"Those predicting the worst-case scenarios clearly . . . tried to cash in on the widespread opposition to the war in Germany," concluded Udo Steinbach, chief of the Orient Institute in Hamburg, a think tank on Mideast affairs.
On March 28, a nationwide poll by ZDF indicated that 84 percent blamed the conflict wholly on the United States and President Bush, and only 26 percent held Saddam Hussein responsible. Another poll conducted April 3 for the Stern magazine showed 89 percent of Germans do not regard America as a role model.
The deputy editor in chief of Stern, Hans-Ulrich Joerges, asserted in a recent issue that many Germans greeted early U.S. military missteps in Iraq with "clammy joy" and "perverse partisanship."
A study commissioned by the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper pinned part of the blame on German television networks, which it said constantly criticized the U.S.-led military action as an illegitimate attack in which innocent civilians were the primary victims.
"Saddam's terror was no topic for the German TV media, but criticism of America was," the study concluded.
"If Americans would have watched German television during the war, and Germans would have viewed U.S. programs, their respective moods . . . would have been reversed."
The conservative daily Die Welt blasted the coverage by the huge, publicly owned ARD TV network, saying, "Every night new catastrophes were being depicted, ranging from the allegedly inflamed Mideast, the fury of the Arab masses . . . and the bloodbaths caused by allied bombs among the civilian population."
Television's role in molding public opinion was underscored by a recent survey of youngsters at a Meunster high school who had taken part in anti- American peace marches.
None knew where Iraq is located geographically. Nor did any of them know anything about Hussein's brutal regime. All said they got their information about "the American barbarity" from German media reports -- chiefly those of ARD and ZDF.
One of Germany's great literary figures, author-playwright Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 73, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "The great compassion shown by the media for the relatively few victims of the Iraq war stands in bizarre contrast to its lack of interest for the victims of 30 other and often far crueler wars currently being fought all over the world."
Enzensberger also had bitter words for the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched against the war chanting "No blood for oil." It came, he said, "from the mouths of people who greatly value their automobiles, their heating systems and their vacation trips, and whose indignation would quickly find another target if the gas stations would be empty, the thermostat below freezing and all flights to . . . Mallorca were canceled."
Now that Hussein has been deposed, the allegations of American arrogance seem to be moderating, and more Germans are feeling the need to mend frayed transatlantic ties.
"Thanks to Chancellor Schroeder's policies, German-American relations are in shambles," declared top Christian Democratic Party leader Wolfgang Schaeuble. "We must do everything to quickly repair them."
"We need the Americans much more than they need us -- economically and militarily," said Willy Hasenstein, a veteran Social Democrat from Munich. "And that's why we should make peace with them."
