NP? poisoned relationships

[Doug Millison]

worth reading,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,798531,00.html

" [...] That Bush has been in trouble on the home
front this year is not seriously open to doubt. If
November's mid-term elections were fought on issues
such as the economy or corporate governance, the
Republicans would be on the defensive. The war against
terrorism and Iraq, by contrast, is their issue. Every
Washington commentator has been pointing out this week
that the Republicans are trying to keep Congress
focused on Iraq for as long as possible at the moment,
in order to ensure a good result in November. 

That hardly makes Bush a Hitler. But then Herta
Däubler-Gmelin did not say he was. Her crime, of
course, was to bracket the two men in a single
multi-clause thought. In terms of scoring a direct hit
on the conservative Republican ego, it was almost the
equivalent of the shock of September 11 itself. It
penetrated the carapace of Republican self-regard with
the directness that the hijacked planes hit the twin
towers. 

For these are politicians in the grip of a vision of
themselves as neo-Churchills, not neo-Hitlers.
Churchill's stock has always been exceptionally high
in the US, of course, but it has risen still further
as post September 11 Americans don the mantle of the
world's embattled lone defenders of freedom. Bush now
keeps an Epstein bust of Churchill in his office
(shamelessly loaned to him from the British
government's official art collection by Tony Blair).
And only last month, Rumsfeld himself made a speech in
California comparing Bush - "that lone voice
expressing concern about what was happening" - to
Churchill. 

Then there is the current obsession among American
conservatives that Europe is in the grip of a wave of
violent anti-semitism. Europeans underestimate at
their peril the degree to which many Americans, not
just many American Jews, see Europe as the place where
the locals kill Jews, and America as the place where
the locals don't. So when a German politician, even a
distinguished social democrat of the postwar
generation, mentions Hitler, the effect on some US
opinion is almost as provocative as if she had praised
him. 

In the obsessive world of American conservatism,
Germany is, for the moment, a marked nation. If
Rumsfeld, who is historically one of Washington's
pro-German rather than its Anglophile politicians,
takes the abrupt view that he does, then what about
the rest? One can be sure that others in his party - a
party in which not to possess a passport is sometimes
a badge of honour - will have even more contemptuous
views. Germany may be the world's third-strongest
economic power, but in the eyes of some in Washington
it could be on the verge of consignment into the
ever-growing dustbin of US-defined failed states. 

There is, though, a great paradox in all this. The US
administration that prides itself on avoiding the
entrapment of nation-building has managed,
inadvertently and against its real intentions, to
shape the future of one of its most important allies.
The US has intervened in European elections plenty of
times in the past to help rightwing parties. But this
must be the first time in many decades that
Washington's efforts have managed to dash the prize
from the right's hands and place it in those of a
social democrat. [...] "

=====
<http://www.dougday.blogspot.com/>
<http://www.online-journalist.com/index.html>

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