- BERLIN, Germany -- As the
planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September
11, 2001, the entire world halted in a moment of terrified confusion. The
terrorist attacks were perceived not just as an assault on the US, but
as an attack on the values and the way of life that we hold dear.
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- In Europe, the governments of each and every country
issued declarations of solidarity, while the populace felt deep compassion
for the victims and their families. Now, only 17 months later, millions
of individuals out of the very same populace took to the streets of Rome,
Paris, London, Berlin and many other European cities to express their concern
and their protest against the current US policies. What went wrong?
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- Although many Europeans feel that they are closely related
to the United States of America, they have been coming to doubt the status
of the US as the moral leader of the "free world." These sentiments
are not only a reaction to the policy concerning Iraq, but they are rooted
within a general uneasiness that has been growing since the US government
adopted its highly conservative and harshly unilateral course. Significant
to this course were the withdrawal of support for the Kyoto Protocol, the
revocation of the ABM Treaty and the attempts to undermine the establishment
of the International Criminal Court.
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- Outside the US, these steps were perceived as an offence,
an act of disloyalty in what we thought to be a common goal. The result
was a great loss of trust in a powerful ally. Since then, the Bush administration
gave us little encouragement to alter our sentiments. Countries, which
have been loyal allies promoting close relations with the USA, were dismissed
as ungrateful and old-fashioned cowards for pointing out they do not agree
with the recent policies launched by the US government. People joining
protest marches against the course the Bush administration is pursuing,
are defamed as anti-American.
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- Concerning the multinational institutions and alliances,
a similarly destructive policy is being monitored. By pressing a decision
several UN security council members oppose, the Bush administration is
not strengthening, but willingly undermining the authority of the United
Nations organisation. The same can be said of the current situation within
NATO. By disrupting these valuable alliances, the Bush administration is
putting the safety of the US citizens at stake. Furthermore, in posing
the threat of employing "mini-nukes" on future enemies, as was
outlined in the National Security Strategy issued on September 20, 2002,
the Bush administration adopted a unilateral, misleading course, which
is disrupting the strength of law in favour of promoting a vision in which
the law is to be enforced solely by the strongest.
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- Similarly, we have become concerned and alarmed at the
developments inside the US. With the neo-conservative hawks within the
Bush administration gaining strong momentum in the aftermath of September
11, we felt that trauma and fear were exploited in order to enact undemocratic
measures. We watched the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act; we saw, how
those who spoke out against the government's actions found themselves defamed
as unpatriotic and un-American, as well as later the humiliating÷and
indeed unlawful÷treatment of the Afghanistan War POWs, who were
denied their rights for specious reasons.
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- From the other side of the Atlantic Ocean we witnessed,
how those inalienable rights of individual freedoms the USA has been praised
for were gradually limited for alleged higher security and aggressive patriotism.
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- Concerning the matter of Iraq, we do agree on the fact
that the Iraqi people deserve to be granted their right to live in peace
and without being oppressed by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Still, we
do not believe that inflicting even more grief and sorrow upon the Iraqi
populace, killing and mutilating a great number of those people, of whom
the US government says it intends to liberate, could serve the purpose.
Instead, it would destabilise the entire region and give rise to a further
radicalisation in the Islamic world.
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- Explaining, why it would be necessary to wage a war against
Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell pointed out that Saddam Hussein posed
an immediate threat to worldwide peace and stability. Yet how can a country,
whose arsenal of biological and chemical weapons had been diminished, according
to Scott Ritter, former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq and Republican
Party member, by 90 percent in 1998, due to the UN inspections, a country
which was never capable of building nuclear weapons, currently surrounded
by more than a hundred thousand soldiers, without alliances and under the
permanent surveillance of UN inspectors, be an actual threat to world-wide
stability? Considering the strict embargo prescriptions and the subsequent
economical desolation as well as the notoriously poor condition of her
army, the argument that Iraq could pose any immediate military threat whatsoever
is unconvincing. The second point Mr. Powell made was the alleged links
of the Iraqi government to al Qaeda. Yet even the CIA admitted it could
not prove the existence of such relations, while the French secret service
clearly denied them. Given the secular character of Saddam Hussein's regime,
relations with the deeply fundamentalist Islamist al Qaeda are as absurd
as the pope backing Fidel Castro.
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- As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is continually
demanding in his declarations, we Europeans ought to be grateful to the
US. US forces liberated half of Europe, enabling democracy, prosperity
and stability to take place in a region, which used to be torn by wars,
dictatorship and Nazi barbarism. We came to enjoy economic support, military
protection and great pieces of music, movies and literature. Many of us
name the USA among the best places in the world to live.
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- We are not anti-American, it is the short-sighted and
dangerous crusade of the Bush administration that we strongly oppose. We
are deeply concerned about the course the Bush administration has been
taking since its installation, leading a majority of people in several
European countries to fear that George W. Bush nowadays poses a more imminent
threat to world peace than the dictators Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.
We Europeans feel that obtaining measures in order to change the indeed
repulsive situation inside the Iraq is not a game, as Mr. Bush's statement
might lead people to assume, but a serious and risky business. This is
why we took to the streets last weekend and this is why we will not agree
with the aggressive policy the current US government is promoting.
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- Copyright © 2003 Frauke Kempka and Chrescht Benek
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- Frauke Kempka and Chrescht Benek are University students
in Berlin, German
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