The Berlin-Baghdad Connection

The world leader most responsible for the war in Iraq had a terrible weekend. I am not referring to George W. Bush or Saddam Hussein, though the Iraqi tyrant did make the front page in his underwear.

Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party suffered a drubbing at the polls in Germany’s most populous state. As a result, the chancellor has called for a national election this fall, a year earlier than expected. His defeat and departure from office would be a healthy development for transatlantic relations.

German voters are focused on their nation’s sluggish economic performance. His own party’s activists and labor unions see the chancellor as a sellout for trying too hard to ingratiate himself to big business, and yet conservative Christian Democrats still pillory him for not being willing to go far enough.

But Schroeder’s recklessness on the global stage will be his real legacy. As the first German leader with no firsthand memory of life in the Third Reich, Schroeder asserted for a reunified Germany a more active role in world affairs. Within months of taking office, the dour but dapper chancellor had dispatched thousands of German peacekeepers to Kosovo as part of NATO’s Balkan intervention. This was all as it should be. The Federal Republic, a model democracy for decades, had earned the right to cease thinking of itself as a nation on probation.

Schroeder’s recklessness was triggered by the challenges of campaigning as a leftish reformer. Struggling in the polls a month before the last national election, in August 2002, Schroeder was the first world leader to stake out an absolutist position in advance of United Nations deliberations over Hussein’s fate. Germany, the chancellor stated on the campaign trail, was in no mood for a “military misadventure” and would oppose any use of force against Iraq, regardless of what the U.N. decided. End of story.

Germany’s own diplomats, led by popular Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of the Green Party, were caught off guard by this campaign bravado and annoyed that Germany had preemptively removed itself from the debate. Bush’s Texan swagger goes down poorly in Europe, and Schroeder’s move to reply to it with some swagger of his own worked. The chancellor scored a come-from-behind win.

But at a terrible cost. The leader of a post-Cold War Germany has every right to disagree with Washington, but opportunistically doing so for the sake of scoring short-term political points was highly damaging to the cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as to Germany’s claim to be a nation endowed with a unique moral suasion. By opting out of any U.N.-backed deliberation, the leader of the one nation that arguably owes the most to the principle of collective security, essentially “out-Bushed” Bush in acting unilaterally.

The full effect of Schroeder’s perfidy hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated, in part because Americans prefer to hold a grudge against France. As Condoleezza Rice reportedly formulated Washington’s postwar stance toward the coalition of the unwilling -- “Forgive Russia, forget Germany, punish France” -- Americans missed out on a lot of the diplomatic nuance in the run-up to the war. Americans couldn’t appreciate the extent to which the age-old jockeying for leadership within Europe among France, Britain and Germany had become the tail wagging the Iraqi dog.

If Germany, Washington’s erstwhile partner in NATO, hadn’t so categorically stated its intention to avoid any confrontation with Hussein, it would have been difficult for Jacques Chirac to choose to be the odd man out opposing Washington. The temptation for Chirac to rush to Schroeder’s side was too great. Chirac had long been jealous of the improving ties between Berlin and London. The Iraq debate provided him with the perfect opportunity to marginalize Tony Blair and reassert the Paris-Berlin axis at the heart of the EU. And the joint opposition of France and Germany to any use of force against Iraq made it easier for Vladimir V. Putin, not to mention Latin American nations at the U.N., to also oppose it.

The point here isn’t to argue whether it was right or wrong for nations to have opposed the war, but that it was catastrophically wrong for Schroeder to have assured Hussein that some options were off the table. That’s because Hussein might just have believed him.