Schroeder Writes Off The Iraqi People

LONDON - At a meeting with trade union leaders in the last week of the campaign, Germany's Social Democratic Justice Minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, accused Bush of using the same "classic tactic" as Hitler used: exploiting war to divert attention from domestic troubles. Daeubler-Gmelin later expressed surprise that anyone might take offence at her remarks. "I didn't compare the persons Bush and Hitler, but their methods."

In truth, if anyone in the world today is exploiting war for domestic political purposes, it is Daeubler-Gmelin's own boss, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. For more than a decade, over-taxed, over-regulated Germany has struggled with chronic unemployment. In 1998, the charismatic, jovial Schroeder won the chancellorship by promising to reduce the number of unemployed below 4 million within 4 years.

Four years later, the number of unemployed remains exactly where it was in 1998.

Obviously, he needed a new issue. He chose Iraq.

Eight weeks ago, Iraq was not a controversial subject in German politics. After all, Schroeder's opponent, the solid and serious Christian Democrat Edmund Stoiber had also declared his opposition to a U.S. war upon Saddam Hussein. To move votes, Schroeder had to up the ante: Stoiber, he pointed out, only opposed war if the U.S. went it alone; whereas he, Schroeder, opposed war under any and all circumstances. Under his leadership, Germany would not participate in a war with Iraq even if the United Nations and the NATO Council voted in favour of it.

Think for a minute about what an amazing statement this is. For six months, Americans have listened to Europeans warning them against unilateralism -- against setting their own national will against the international community. And nobody has clucked louder at them than the Germans. Now, quite suddenly, it is the Germans who are the unilateralists, disdaining their allies, NATO, even the UN.

UN, Schmu-en says Schroeder -- it is German national interests that come first.

And what a set of national interests they are, too! The single most important suppliers of Saddam's technologies of mass-murder have been German companies. They sold him the dual-use factories that now manufacture poison gas and bio-weapons. I don't like dragging Hitler into conversations where he does not belong. But since Daeubler-Gmelin mentions him, it's worth pondering this fact: If Saddam ever does make good on his threat to "burn up half of Israel," the poisons he will use for this second Jewish holocaust will come from many of the same companies that supplied the gas for the last one.

Schroeder's methods of diverting attention from a crummy domestic economy worked, sort of. His Social Democratic-Green coalition has eked out a bare majority in the Bundestag. But his victory is not one of which Germans can -- or will -- long be proud.

By coincidence, I happened to spend the evening of the German election in the apartment of Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, and the likely leader of a democratic post-Saddam Iraq. Does it seem ridiculous to think of a democratic Iraq? Not more ridiculous than it would have, 60 years ago, to talk about a democratic Germany.

Chalabi showed me a photograph taken in Baghdad at that darkest year of Hitler's tyranny, 1942. Eight Middle Eastern men stood shoulder-to-shoulder in Western pin-striped suits: Three of them were Sunni Muslims, three were Shi'ites, one was Christian, and the last was Jewish. They were the directors of the Iraq Vegetable Oil Company -- a major exporter of farm products and the largest firm then listed on the Baghdad stock exchange. One of them was Chalabi's own father. That was what Iraq used to be: not a perfect democracy by any means -- but a society that might have evolved toward a better and freer future.

That evolution was brutally interrupted. Iraq's relatively benign monarchy was overthrown in 1958 -- since then, Iraq no longer grows enough grain to export. The men in the photo were driven into exile and their property confiscated. The stock exchange was closed. The Jews were robbed and expelled; the Christians oppressed; the Shi'ites massacred. Dictator followed dictator, each crueler and more dangerous than the last -- until we reach Saddam, the cruelest and most dangerous of them all.

Where would Germany be if the Western powers had not believed that it could be something different and better than it was in 1942? Why are we so determined to believe that Iraq can never be different and better than it is today?

For all the terror and horror of modern Iraq, it has produced an exile leadership that is more humane and decent than that of any any other Arab country. When the United States (and its friends and allies) fights Saddam, it will not be fighting against Iraq - it will be fighting for Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. America and its allies will be fighting against the Iraqi dictatorship. They will be fighting for the Iraqi people. That's a fight that the confident new united Germany ought to understand and support.