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German Conservatives Defend Bush

The Punching Bag's Farewell

US President George W. Bush took a drubbing in the German media this week, but a handful of establishment figures and newspapers say the criticism wasn't entirely fair. After all, they argue, if the US hadn't gone to war, Berlin and Brussels might still be dealing with Saddam and the Taliban.

"Unfriendly background music," is the phrase used by the respected conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to describe the raft of highly critical commentaries and reporting on George W. Bush's final visit to Europe as an American president.

The paper was reacting to comments such as "memory of Bush will darken America's image in the world for years to come," as the country's other leading daily, the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it. There was even Bush-bashing from within the ranks of Chancellor Angela Merkel's own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, whose foreign policy spokesman, Eckart von Klaeden, remarked: "I won't miss George W. Bush."

Karsten Voigt, a Social Democrat and the government's coordinator for relations between Germany and America, earlier this week accused Bush of triggering a "deep crisis in relations between the two countries" by launching the Iraq war. Noting that Bush was staying at Meseberg Palace in the countryside far from populous Berlin, the head of the business-friendly liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), Guido Westerwelle, said "anyone who is entrenched and barricaded, isn't visiting a country, but rather avoiding any contact with it. Other than a few photo ops, this visit is meaningless." Members of the Left Party and the Greens also sharply criticized the president.

But conservative voices could also be heard defending Bush. Otto Graf Lambsdorff, a political legend in Germany and honorary chairman of the FDP, cautioned against knee-jerk Bush criticism in a public radio interview on Wednesday: "I strongly caution us in Germany not to attack him in a way that is insulting and disregards the fact that an American president has incredible power right up until his last day in office."

The CDU's spokesperson for defense issues, Bernd Siebert, also spoke of "critical commentary in the media during the president's visit that had portrayed him in an unfair light." He reminded Germans of the United States' historical friendship with Germany and called on people to emphasize things that unite the countries rather than divide them. "It has always been good form to communicate differences with direct dialogue rather than through the media," he said.

Germany Hides Behind Multilateralism

In editorials, conservative papers also defended Bush from the broadsides. The timing of the critical attacks, just two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, is in bad taste, suggests Die Welt. "George W. Bush and his government have made mistakes," the paper writes. "The biggest is that they believed too easily that democracy could be exported with guaranteed success. But anyone who believes Bush falls outside Western constitutional ideas and values is overlooking two things. First, it was the US (and not Germany and France) that was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. The US had strong existential reasons to react decisively. And secondly, it's not as if the multilateralism that is so highly touted by Germans would have made the world any more peaceful. Many times, it was just used as an excuse for Germany to keep out while it remained silently confident that in a serious crisis the US would already be on the scene."

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also accuses Germans of using multilateralism as a tool not to act. "Most critics of Bush don't really want the US to pull back and just mind its own business," the paper writes. "Most of the accusations are that Bush junior used his power erroneously and counterproductively. Unfortunately, the Iraq war does provide some evidence of that. America had to pay for its hubris with many dead soldiers, serious damage to its credibility and massive outflows from the treasury. But to accuse Bush in the same breath of not doing enough to fight for human rights is dishonest. The Europeans, those über-moralists when it comes to geopolitics, wouldn't have gotten their hands dirty in Afghanistan and Iraq. Up until today, the European Union would otherwise still be criticizing the reign of terror of Saddam and the Taliban -- strongly, of course."

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