President Bush`s visit to Germany this week did not get the attention it would have deserved, yet some politicians could not abstain from Bush-bashing:
Jürgen Trittin, former German Environment Minister, Green Party, said: “Bush definitely made the world worse.”
Karsten Voigt, a Social Democrat and the government`s coordinator for relations between Germany and America, accused Bush of triggering a “deep crisis in relations between the two countries” by launching the Iraq war.
And even CDU foreign policy spokesman, Eckart von Klaeden, remarked: “I won`t miss George W. Bush.”
My favourite newspaper Die WELT, in contrast, suggests that the timing of these critical attacks just two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift is bad taste.
(…) George W. Bush and his government have made mistakes. (…) 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. (…)
And to my big surprise I found a brief chronicle of Bush bashing, German style, at SPON. An article that I would have expected rather at Davids Medienkritik because it actually denounces the absurdity of German Bush-bashing.
Excerpts of “With Bush Going, Germany Loses its Punching Bag” by Charles Hawley, SPON, 06/11/2008:
Germany never much liked George W. Bush. But he was able to unite Germans. Hating the US president was about the only thing the country could agree on in recent years.
One almost has to feel badly for German journalists, editorialists and political cartoonists. In just a few short months, Mr. Reliable will no longer be available for lampooning. The German media`s greatest foil is riding into the sunset. Soon, George W. Bush, in Europe this week for his final visit as US President, will cease delivering a steady stream of material for headline after Bush-bashing headline.
It`s too bad really. For much of the past eight years, anti-Bushism seemed to be one thing that almost everyone in Germany could agree on. On issue after issue, Bush seemed to find the position that was diametrically opposed to that which most Germans — and a large majority of Europeans — adhered to. And in doing so, Bush brought Germany together. Everyone — the government in Berlin, the media and the populace — agreed. The entire country has spent much of the past decade basking in the Bush-inspired knowledge that Germany was on the morally correct side of history in the past decade. (…)
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when Bush-bashing became Germany`s new national pasttime. Even during his campaign against Al Gore, George Bush Jr. was portrayed as the not especially bright heir to the Bush family throne. Political cartoons were suddenly full of cowboy hats and sheriff`s stars. (…)
As early as February 2002 — over a year prior to the invasion of Iraq — SPIEGEL ran its famous “Die Bush Krieger” (The Bush Warriors) cover, complete with Donald Rumsfeld dressed as Conan the Barbarian, Colin Powell as Batman, Condoleezza Rice as Xena the Warrior Princess, Dick Cheney as The Terminator and Bush himself as Rambo — complete with a pretzel hanging around his neck.
Once Chancellor Gerhard Schröder made his opposition to the US invasion of Iraq the key component of his 2002 re-election campaign, the gates were thrown wide open. Bush was blasted for his “Uncouth Diplomacy;” he was accused of being a “Born Again Conservative;” references to the American “Crusader” became common fare; and even the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung got in on the act, blaming Bush Jr. for “The New World Dis-Order” — a piece that also had the subhead: “The son has ruined that which his father built.”
The atmosphere became so poisoned in Germany that, in September 2002, then-Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin even decided it was ok to mention Bush and Hitler in the same sentence. “Bush just wants to distract from domestic difficulties,” she said of the bellicose rhetoric coming out of the White House. “That is a popular method; Hitler did it too.” (…)
When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in 2005, most Germans were horrified and once again a wave of sympathy for the US swept over the country. But this time, the dash of schadenfreude was impossible to ignore. The then-German Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin set off a minor trans-Atlantic tiff by saying: “The American president has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina — in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures — can visit on his country.”
The German media went even further. An opinion piece in Die Tageszeitung concluded: “I feel joy and sympathy concurrently. I am joyful at the moment that the most recent natural disaster didn`t once again hit a poverty-stricken country, rather it struck the richest country in the world. I even see a kind of justice for that which the residents of this country have done to the residents of Iraq. I would, though, be more joyful if I knew that it was just the houses of Bush voters and military members that had been destroyed. I feel very sorry for all the others.” (…)
With Bush now on his way out, however, it is hard to imagine how German media will fill the void. (…)
But I am pretty sure that his successor is going to make it more difficult for Germany to e. g. resist requests for more involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And who knows, maybe some day in the future, Germans will wish President Bush back. Until then: Good-bye, Cowboy!
More:
“The Punching Bag`s Farewell”, SPON, 06/12/2008
„Politiker reiten heftige Attacken auf Bush“, Die WELT, 9. Juni 2008
„Wie wir Bush begrüßen“ von Thomas Schmid, Die WELT, 11. Juni 2008