KLEINER BUSH, WAS NUN?

. . .What are the German papers saying about the fall of Baghdad to the Americans and British? Some claim that the events of the last few days are a cause for celebration, but limited celebration. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung's editorial by Peter Muench, for example, speaks of the end of an "idolatrous cult and of a mass murderer," symbolized by the tearing down of statues of Hussein. In the rest of a long piece discussing the requirements of a successful transition from Baath Party rule, Muench mentions several tasks still ahead:

• Addressing basic needs of the Iraqi people (food, water, safety)


• investment in infrastructure, in the billions of dollars for certain


• De-Baathification

Although Muench doesn't mention this, it seems to me that the problem here is likely to be similar to the problem that presented the allied forces with respect to de-nazification: how to provide for enough punishment to satisfy the moral craving for retribution, but how also to acknowledge the deep complicity of even ordinary people in sustaining the regime at a variety of levels? In Germany, widespread civilian destruction and the desire to rebuild West Germany in particular (in order to keep the communists out) led to an incomplete process; the pressures in that direction will be even more pronounced here, I would imagine, given the fact that the U.S. has tried to leave the civilian infrastructure intact and would like to leave Iraq fairly quickly (if public pronouncements of the Bush administration are to be taken literally). It is going to be very hard for U.S. military authorities, and for whatever regime is left in their wake, to deal with this matter in a way that satisfies both moral demands for justice and the hard realities of the need for political stability.

Most German papers report on both celebrations and looting. See the Frankfurter Rundschau here, the Tagesspiegel here, and taz here, which has a sour commentary by Dominic Johnson bemoaning the lack of clarity in the U.S.'s post-war plans (they could mean "anything"). The Berliner Zeitung has the most complete coverage, at least according to my tastes: an article that discusses the attempts by the U.S. to keep control over post-war policy in Iraq, including boxing out the U.N. so far and developing an aid plan through US-AID that includes the participation of U.S. companies (The difficult task of peace"); a brief portrait of Tommy Franks's success as a war strategist ("The new master [Herr] of Iraq"); an article on the U.S. army's "triumphant" entry into Baghdad, including quotes from civilians who thanked the troops and destroyed pictures of Saddam Hussein. One man is quoted as saying: "I couldn't find any flowers, so I'm giving you a branch from an Iraqi tree." Finally, the Berliner Zeitung throws a little cold water on the party with two articles. One notes the serious humantarian needs of the Iraqi population, in particular with respect to drinking water. Hospitals are in rough shape, cholera is raising its head, the increasing heat makes clean drinking water even more necessary, and an attack on a Baghdad power plant last week has sharpened the crisis. Another, by Roland Heine, looks backward at the justifications for war in an article entitled the spectacle of chemical weapons. Roland's money lines are worth quoting in full:

The war aims of the U.S. were, and still are, neither the destruction of Iraqi WMDs nor the freeing of the Iraqi people from a bloody dictator. During the dictator's bloodiest phase, namely the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. provided massive support to this regime. What we are experiencing in Iraq is another phase of the war of world order that the U.S. announced in spring 2001 under the slogan "war against terrorism." In his State of the Union speech in January 2002, U.S. President Bush blamed not fewer than 60 nations for supporting terror and placed, in actuality, a third of the nations of the world under the threat of war. The USA wants to order the world as it sees fit, and the case of Iraq is just the most recent example of this desire.

For the record, I've tried to read the 2002 SOTU in a way friendly to Heine's analysis, but I'm finding it pretty hard to do so. I'm not quire sure how "terrorist training camps in over a dozen countries" and the discussion of outlaw regimes adds up to either 60 countries or a third of the world. But I don't think that Heine's weird math is fatal to his point. Just recall today's AP story on John Bolton's warning to Syria that it could share Iraq's fate.