Germany In The Spring By Adam Garfinkle

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Foreign Policy Research Institute
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GERMANY IN THE SPRING
by Adam Garfinkle

April 7, 2003

Adam Garfinkle  is Editor  of The  National Interest  and  a
frequent contributor  to this  space.   He wrote  this  from
Berlin.  Among   his  books   is  the  critically  acclaimed
"Telltale Hearts:   The  Origins and  Impact of  the Vietnam
Antiwar Movement"  (St. Martin's,  1995), written  under the
auspices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.


                   GERMANY IN THE SPRING

                     by Adam Garfinkle

Thanks to an invitation from the American Academy in Berlin,
I'm  in  Germany  --  with  the  air  warming,  the  flowers
blooming, and  the antiwar  marches humming right along like
so many  hives of  busy bees.  Yet, despite all the evidence
of palpable  nature around,  I do feel sometimes as though I
am in  a slightly  surreal world.  Herewith five  slices  of
recent experience as exemplars.

MARCHING ALONG
This past  Sunday's Der  Tagesspeigel Morgenpost  carried  a
photo of yesterday's large antiwar rally in downtown Berlin,
and above  it the  headline reads  "82 percent  of Berliners
oppose the  war." All  the newspapers here focus intently on
antiwar rallies,  speeches, supporting  op-eds and the like,
not just  in Germany,  but all over the world. The print and
electronic coverage of the war itself is highly professional
and without  any obvious  bias, but the war narrative of the
ruling Red-Green  coalition government  is everywhere  to be
seen and heard. That narrative is clearly in consonance with
majority opinion,  and helps mightily to shape and reinforce
that opinion.  Angela Merkel,  the leader  of the opposition
CDU who  supports the  U.S., is  more than  just busy; she's
downright thoughtful  most of  the time.  She  connects  the
strategic dots pretty well. The papers here don't ignore her
entirely, but they seem sometimes to be trying.

If you  talk to  people at  the antiwar rallies, it is clear
that most  are engaged  in a  votive rather than a political
act.  (Sometimes  these  acts  are  not  exactly  voluntary;
teachers in  colleges and  high schools  bring their classes
with them  to rallies,  but everyone pretty much seems happy
to be  released from  studying and teaching.) The sense of a
religious offering  is in  the air;  the mood is intense but
calm and celebratory. Everything is extraordinarily orderly.
It reminded  me of  a old  story by  Efraim Kishon,  one  of
Israel's greatest  humorists, about  a trip  he and his wife
took to  Zurich, where everything was so insanely clean that
it seemed  a cardinal  sin to  try to throw away a paper ice
cream wrapper,  for even  the waste  bins were  forbiddingly
spotless. I  swear that  antiwar rallies  in Berlin end with
the streets being cleaner than when they began.

Of course, this shouldn't come as such a surprise. This is a
country where  no pedestrian  dares  cross  an  intersection
against the  light, even  at 3  o'clock in  the morning, and
where dogs  are allowed into restaurants and bars with their
owners because  they're better  behaved than  most people in
other countries. (They really are, too.)

So one  hears at  antiwar rallies, and in op-ed columns, and
in cross-talk  in bakeries, busses and bars, that war is bad
because it  kills people.  Period and  full stop most of the
time. In  their never-ending  search for  the appearance, at
least, of holding the moral high ground, most Germans reason
in simple  moral categoricals about war. This is very handy,
for it makes the fact that most people know little about the
Middle  East,  Iraq,  or  the  nature  of  weapons  of  mass
destruction fairly irrelevant.

In short,  however, average  Germans are  a lot like average
Americans in this respect, only more so. But while Americans
can look at the uses of American power over the last century
and be  more or  less comfortable  with the outcome, Germans
cannot. They  know that  war is  bad because Germans started
and lost  two of  them in  the 20th  century, with no little
amount of  breakage in  the process.  Thanks to  two popular
recent books,  they also  tend equate  all bombing with what
the U.S.  and British  air forces did to Dresden on February
13, 1945.  A church  down the  street from here bears a sign
out front  reading,  "Kreig ist immer der falsche weg." This
pretty much sums up the majority attitude, as does the large
sign on  the local  theater in  Potsdam, which  reads  "Kein
Kreig. Nirgends."  Anyone who  doesn't share  it risks being
thought of as atavistic and even vulgar.

This attitude  toward the use of force persists despite some
recent and  significant changes  here. Perhaps surprisingly,
the Green  Party has moved a long way from outright pacifism
-- more  than the SPD -- some of this movement the result of
the Kosovo  War and  its aftermath.  Some Germans, at least,
now credit  the concept  of a  "just war." Most Germans know
that there  are now  German military  forces in Afghanistan,
that the German navy has patrolled off the coast of Somalia,
and of  course that  there are  German units in the Balkans.
Most are  not embarrassed or upset by this, but most Germans
conceive of  the use  of force  as  police  work,  not  war-
fighting.  For  the  apparent  majority,  of  all  political
persuasions, the  "just war" concept remains unacceptable in
polite conversation.  This is  what has led Peter Schneider,
one of  Germany's leading writer/intellectuals, to pronounce
his country "peace-drunk." Those who accept the concept of a
just war  are considered,  he says, worse than murderers and
rapists in chic circles.

When Peter  Schneider and  Daniel Cohn-Bendit  -- the former
Danny the  Red of 1968 Paris, and now a member of the German
Greens -- accept the concept a just war, you know things are
changing. But  if you sample street opinion during this war,
you can  see how  difficult and  slow that change is. If you
suggest to  the typical  demonstrator --  anyone of  the  82
percent at  random --  that Iraq is a dangerous country, has
been proven  so by  its track record, and will only get more
dangerous if  it isn't  stopped, the  standard reply is that
Iraq isn't  a threat  because Hans  Blix said so. They don't
believe that  Iraq has weapons of mass destruction more than
has already  been identified  or destroyed, because Mr. Blix
would have found them. So why, then, are America and Britain
going to war? They answer without a hint of hesitation: Oil;
it's all about oil, greed and imperialism.

What about America's determination to bring democracy to the
Middle East?  They laugh. Those who accept its sincerity are
aghast at  America's infantile  idealism. Most will tell you
that Europeans  had grand  and beautiful  ambitions for  the
world, which  they saw  themselves as being above - and look
what happened.     Expressions of  American idealism tend to
evoke a "been there, done that" sort of response.  Something
to think about, because there may well be something to it.

Most people,  however, don't  believe   that such talk about
democracy is  sincere in  the slightest,  anymore than  they
believed a word of what Secretary of State Colin Powell told
the  UN  Security  Council  about  Iraq's  weapons  of  mass
destruction programs. Taking their cue from mass circulation
magazines like  Der Speigel,  they all  know that  George W.
Bush is  a stupid  cowboy who  got elected president through
corruption and stealth.

Much of  the mass-circulation  press in  Germany, though not
all, has  long been in the hands of the 68er generation, and
it has  not been charitable, to put it mildly, to all things
American. The most popular cameo here, on t-shirts, handbags
and heaven  knows what  else, is  Che Guevara.   His picture
adorns the  cover of  the latest issue of the biggest gossip
magazine in  the country  - the  German version of "People."
This helps  to explain  the size  and popularity  of current
antiwar sentiment, which is partly anti-Bush but also partly
anti-American in  motivation.  As  is  true  in  the  United
States,  the  antiwar  rallies  and  activities  in  Germany
resemble a  large gaseous  planet in  structure. Most of the
visible  circumference   is  made   up  of  light,  orbiting
elements, but  the solid organizing core is much harder. The
role that ANSWER (a.k.a. the Workers World Party) has played
in the  United States is played here by the Communist Party,
the residua  of former  West and East German factions, which
has taken  the lead  in organizing the demonstrations.  With
the Red-Green  coalition government against the war, nothing
much  here   "pushes  back,"   so  to  speak,  against  this
organizing. Within both the antiwar core and the government,
there  is  also  a  good  deal  of  mostly  sub  rosa  anti-
Americanism  that   has  nothing   to  do   with  the   Bush
Administration or  the post-9/11  world. These  elements  in
Germany have  been anti-American  for decades,  fearing that
American Cold  War policy  might have  to  be  validated  at
Germany's expense,   and  they are using the present context
as a  vehicle to  advance that view in a new forum (that the
American war on terrorism might harm Germany's security)  --
with very considerable success, it must be said.

The President's  overt,  old-timey  religiosity  makes  most
Germans feel  particularly creepy,  and this  also helps  to
explain the  tone of  German feeling.  Many Germans identify
standard issue  religion as having been an accomplice in the
crimes of  European  colonialism,  militarism,  racism,  and
disaster--not without at least some justification, it should
be noted.  German churches  today, Protestant  and  Catholic
both, are  epicenters of  pacifism, but  polls tell  us that
only about 15 percent of Germans attend church services more
than once  or twice  a year.   In smaller towns, that number
seems  low  -  at  least  according  to  my  own  first-hand
experience.   Still,  George  Bush's  kind  of  Christianity
strikes the  majority of  Germans as  something  akin  to  a
freak-show act  from a previous century. His acknowledgement
at a  news conference  that he  prays  daily,  and  that  he
appreciates deeply  the prayers  of others offered on behalf
of himself  and his  family, stuns  most viewers  here  into
baffled  silence.   They  cannot   imagine  any  continental
European head of state saying such things in public because,
in fact, none of them do.

TO THE GENERATION GAP
But these  are  the  attitudes  of  a  mere  82  percent  of
Berliners,  or   maybe  only   72  percent,   adjusting  for
journalistic inflation.  Not every  German thinks like this,
including, it  seems, increasing numbers of younger Germans.
I attended  a competition  among young journalists -- mostly
in their  mid- to  late-20s -- vying for working fellowships
in the  United States. Most of the several dozen competitors
had been  to the  United States  and wanted  very much to go
back. I  shared a  podium with  a distinguished German civil
servant, an  elder middle-ranking  diplomat,  who  was  most
judicious in his comments. He was skeptical of the then not-
yet-begun  war   on  prudential  grounds,  but  critical  of
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's diplomacy, which had isolated
Germany from  America and  within  Europe.  I  expressed  my
support for the war on prudential grounds but criticized the
Bush  Administration's   new  expressions   of   "liberation
theology" and other signs of hubris and impending overreach.

The  young   journalists  were   electrified  by  these  two
presentations. They  were not  used to hearing analytical as
opposed to  moral opposition to war expressed in German by a
German with  gray hair.  And they  were not  used to hearing
support for  the war  expressed in  prudential  rather  than
idealist  terms   from  an  American  with  a  beard.  Their
reactions  were  divided,  however.  One  fellow  began  his
response by  saying that,  "As a German, I see war as only a
very last resort_.." When he finished I asked him whether he
had really  thought through  his "last  resort" thesis. "Are
you aware,"  I asked, "of Winston Churchill's efforts before
September 1,  1939 to  rally the world to stop Hitler before
it was  too late, before a war broke out at a time and place
of Hitler's  choosing  that  would  be  maximally  long  and
destructive to  all concerned? As a German, you aren't happy
in retrospect  that Churchill  failed, are you-or happy that
antiwar isolationists  in America kept the United States out
of the war against the Nazis effectively for another two and
half years?  So why do you argue now that war should only be
a last resort?"

Before he  could  attempt  an  answer,  one  of  his  female
colleagues spoke up to praise my elder German colleague, and
said: "Why  can't  our  leaders  think  realistically  about
matters of  war and  peace as  you have  just done?  If  our
leaders spoke  realistically, it  would  enable  the  people
think realistically  as well." Later, at the luncheon table,
this young  woman answered  her own  question for  me:  "The
68ers," she  said, "who  run  this  country's  politics  and
media, collect  as much  German war  guilt as  they can, and
they  deny   arguments  saying  that  British,  French,  and
American appeasement  made the  war longer  and worse.  They
deny that  America  achieved  German  reunification  against
British, French  and Russian opposition, that American power
had anything to do with a positive outcome for Germany. They
do this  because  their  guilt  is  the  seedbed  for  their
pacifism and escapism, without which they wouldn't know what
to think,  without which  they would have to engage the real
world with its real dilemmas."  I froze in mid-chew. A shock
of insight from an attractive 24-year old woman can do that.

She and  those who think like her will have to swim upstream
here -  that's for  sure.   In the Berlin Wall Museum, right
next to Checkpoint Charlie, for example, success in the Cold
War is  directly equated  to personal bravery, people power,
and  non-violent   resistance.     Positively  depicted,  in
addition to  all of  the brave  and indigenous  Germans  who
escaped from  East Berlin, are Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and the anti-nuclear demonstrations in Germany in
the 1980s.   So  are the  uprisings in East Germany in 1953,
Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, Romania in 1989, and Russia
in 1991.  NATO is never mentioned.

ON THE 18TH FLOOR
Die Welt's  executive offices  are at  the top  of the Axel-
Springer Verlag  building in  Berlin, built just adjacent to
where the  Berlin Wall once stood. Some of these men may be,
technically speaking,  members of  the 68er  generation, but
they do not act or think like that generation.

The editorial leadership of the paper hosted me at a private
lunch, and the conversation was most edifying. There clearly
are people  in Germany  who can get to the second paragraph,
and well  beyond, of  an analytical treatment of the war and
related security issues. They may have prudential misgivings
about American  policy, but  they know  that the collapse of
the U.S.  position in  Southwest Asia  before Saddam's petty
imperialism would  harm Europe  far  more  than  the  United
States. They  know that  Chancellor Schroeder's  "unilateral
and pre-emptive"  electoral diplomacy  last August  -- their
words, not  mine --  opened the  way for  Jacques Chirac  to
hijack German  interests and prerogatives. They know that it
is American  strength in  the  world  that  allows  Europe's
experiment in peaceful, federal unification to go on without
risk, and  that it  is American  economic  strength  --  the
engine of  global economic expansion -- that allows the EU's
protectionism and  stultifying  managerial  conservatism  at
home to persist.

They are  concerned  about  Atlantic  relations,  and  about
recent  polls  showing  that  only  11  percent  of  Germans
consider the  United States  to be  Germany's closest friend
(down from  50 percent  in 1995),  while France  ranks at 30
percent.

So why don't you say all this in your editorials, I asked? I
learned that  sometimes they  do, and  so does  Die Zeit and
some other  papers. These  positions are  supported by  many
German diplomatic  and military  professionals, and  by many
businessmen with  international experience. But the majority
of Germans, I was led to understand, don't read such things.
They are  not interested in politics -- except sometimes the
insular politics  of EU  federalism. International  politics
are about  power, armies,  nationalism, corporate  interests
and  war,  and  these  are  all  things  Germans  have  been
anathematized to in school and later in life.

Germany was  also enfolded  in both  an inner  and an  outer
multilateralism --  the EU  and NATO  -- and  its  sense  of
independent policy formulation was minimized by more than 50
years of  being thus  enfolded. Those relatively few Germans
who can  think strategically,  and are not embarrassed to do
so, do  it well;  the majority, however, don't wish to think
this way  and are disinclined to listen to those who do. The
political environment  today, during  the war, reflects both
currents. Serious  people do  air their  views, but with the
ambient level  of political  attention raised and colored by
the war,  and with  the sitting  government catering  to the
populist know-nothingism of the day, they are, by and large,
failing. I  have heard, too, from some elder Greens that the
political-psychological dynamic  set in  motion by  this war
has set  back the  maturation of German views that had begun
with the Kosovo crisis.

Isn't it  odd, I  said, that at just the moment when Germany
is of  necessity emerging  from the  outer enfolding  of the
Cold War  era, it has a government least capable of engaging
in  independent  strategic  thought.  "Odd,  perhaps,"  they
replied, but  better "sad."   A  senior editor  of Die  Welt
took me  over to  the great  plate glass windows facing east
and west  and said  to me that, a dozen years ago, one could
look out  of these  windows and see two different worlds. To
the east  was in  a kind  of shabby  black-and-white, to the
west a  scene in  technicolor. Little  by  the  little,  the
differences disappeared,  and now  the view to the east from
the 18th  floor doesn't look much different from the view to
the west.  Inside people's  heads, however, things have been
slower to  change. Here  is a case, he explained, where what
you see is not necessarily what you get -- at least not yet.

I thanked him for lunch, and for more than that.

WITH THE MINISTER
A minister  of the current government, a member of the Green
Party, came  to Wannsee,  to the  American  Academy,  for  a
private session with an American "group of seven." To make a
long and  somewhat  strange  episode  a  bit  shorter,  this
minister made  Dennis Kucinich  and Howard  Dean  seem  like
Machiavellian realists  by comparison. The minister insisted
that Iraq  was no  threat to  its neighbors or to the United
States --  because Hans  Blix said  so. He  insisted further
that Iraq  was not  special among  its neighbors, that there
were lot  of undemocratic states in the area, so why pick on
Iraq, and why pick on it now?

This was much too much for the Americans assembled. Iraq not
special? Did the minister not remember the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait, and  its attack  on  Iran  before  that?  Could  the
minister think  of any other local state with such a record?
Did the  minister not  recall the  16, now 17, unrequited UN
Security Council resolutions, chapter 7 resolutions at that,
that Iraq  was in  violation of, and could the minister name
any  other  country  in  a  similar  circumstance?  Did  the
minister forget  somehow that, according to Ambassadors Rolf
Ekeus and  Richard Butler  -- not just according to the U.S.
government --  Iraq had  manufactured  enough  nerve  agent,
anthrax and  other toxins to kill literally every man, woman
and child  on the  planet? That  it had actually used WMD to
murder thousands  of its  own citizens?  Could the  minister
name any  other country in such a category? Had the minister
forgotten that when inspectors last worked in Iraq, in 1998,
missing growth  media and  chemical weapons  precursors were
listed, literally by the ton, that have never been accounted
for? Did  the minister  think that  in the  four years since
1998 Iraq  has come  to have less such prohibited materials,
and, if so, what would be the logic for such a conclusion?

These questions  made nary  a dent. The minister simply said
that war  should always  be  a  last  resort  and  that  the
inspections  were  working.  Did  the  minister  think  that
"progress"  in   the  inspection   process,  asked   another
participant, was  owed to  anything other than the threat of
force   -- but then again, how could there be "progress" if,
as he  claimed, if  there was  probably no  WMD there  to be
found in the first place?

Whereupon another  American, who  happens to  be against the
war on  prudential grounds,  argued that  had the  U.S. Navy
sunk one  Serbian ship off the coast of Dubrovnik in 1992, a
quarter of  a million  civilians  would  probably  still  be
alive. Is  surgery the  "last resort"  in the face of cancer
known to be growing? How could Germans, who know that Hitler
could have been stopped earlier, who saw with their own eyes
the way  the Euromissile debate played out in the 1980s, who
watched the  way the Cold War was won and Germany reunified,
conclude that  strength, including  the threat  and  "other-
than-last-resort" use  of force,  was  not  an  asset  in  a
serious diplomacy?

But it  was Mikhail  Gorbachev, as  all the  Greens and  SPD
supporters know,  who ended the Cold War. That's why Germany
has since made him an honorary citizen.

This remark,  even more  than  several  others,  temporarily
removed most  of the  oxygen from  the room.  It had by then
become clear  that the  minister was living in a world other
than one we recognized. It may be true, as some critics say,
that the  Bush Administration  inner circle lives in its own
closed world of logic in which Al-Qaeda and the Ba`ath Party
are imagined  somehow virtual  subsidiaries of  one another.
But such  a circle  has nothing  on the  world of  SPD-Green
coalition, where senior members of government cannot seem to
reason their way out of a mini-mart.

AHMED AND ME
This past  Friday morning,  I agreed  to do  a "conversation
interview" for  Die Welt.  I was to talk with Ahmed Berwari,
the  German   representative  of   the  Patriotic  Union  of
Kurdistan. Journalists  from Die Welt were to ask questions,
guide the conversation, and take down the results. We met at
a chic  restaurant just  a few yards from Checkpoint Charlie
and the  Wall Museum, an Italian spot called Sale y Tabacci.
The journalists knew that Mr. Berwari was an Iraqi national,
and that  in previous  weeks he  had been  quoted widely  as
having opposed  a  war.  The  journalists  invited  along  a
photographer, who  had with  him little  flags, one American
and one  Iraqi. It  was fairly clear that they expected some
sort of  debate, with me as an American supporting a war and
Ahmed as an Iraqi opposing it.
What a surprise they were in for.

Mr. Berwari  was frank  about the  recent evolution  of  his
views about  war. Both major Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq
had opposed  a war  because it  threatened what was, for the
Kurds,  about  the  best  situation  they  had  ever  known.
Saddam's forces,  or the  Turks, would  be in  a position to
smash Kurdish autonomy in a war. But since the Americans had
made it  clear that  they  intended  to  destroy  the  Iraqi
regime, restrain  the Turks,  and protect  the Kurds  with a
northern front,  the Kurds  were now  in nervous  but  still
enthusiastic support of the effort.

"Why?"   asked    the   journalists,   seemingly   genuinely
disappointed and puzzled. Ahmed did not know what to say. So
I asked  them: "Have  you ever  heard of  what  happened  at
Halabja?" Vaguely,  they had;  somehow, however,  they could
not put  the pieces  together to explain why the Kurds would
be happy to see Saddam dispatched to the other world.

One journalist  asked me if the war was legal. I said it was
as  far   I  understood   the  doctrine   of  self-help   in
international relations.  The preamble  to  the  UN  Charter
contains the  relevant language; I suggested they review it.
Then there  are, I  reminded them,  the 17  Security Council
resolutions holding  Iraq in contempt of world opinion, most
of which,  being chapter 7 resolutions, justified the use of
force. But  German experts,  I was  told, hold  that without
Security Council  authorization for  the use  of force,  all
such uses  are not legal. I was also told that never before,
since 1945,  had force  been used  to  depose  a  government
without UN  Security Council  authorization. Recalling  what
happened in Panama, Grenada, Kosovo--and not to speak of how
many African governments have been made and broken by France
and French  troops --  I found  this  a  pretty  astonishing
claim. Pretty  soon, too,  I was  told that  Iraq was  not a
threat to  anyone, since Hans Blix said so -- and isn't this
really all about oil?

Ahmed then  suddenly got  quite animated about the matter of
what is and is not lawful in the eyes of the United Nations.
Tens of  thousands of  Kurds were murdered by Saddam and his
henchmen, and  no one  brought  the  matter  before  the  UN
Security Council.  Does that,  he asked them, with some heat
in his  otherwise calm  voice, make  it alright? Hundreds of
resolutions brought  against Israel  in the General Assembly
for its  supposedly terrible treatment of Arabs, but not one
resolution brought  calling  attention  to  far  worse  Arab
treatment of non-Arab minorities in Iraq, Sudan, Algeria and
elsewhere.

Ahmed then  pointed out in some detail how about half of the
efforts of the Iraqi regime in the war were directed against
its own  people. Hospitals  had been  used in  Nasiriya  and
Najaf to hide tanks, ammunition, chemical weapons suits and,
more ominously,  nerve-gas atrophine antidote injectors. One
journalist asked  me how  I knew  that  Iraq  possessed  any
chemical and biological weapons when Hans Blix said he could
not find  any. I asked in return: Why do you think the Iraqi
regime  would  send  chemical  weapons  suits  and  antidote
injectors to  the south  of the  country if they didn't have
such weapons, and maybe even intend to use them again? I got
no answer.

As if  oblivious to  most of  what went  on,  the  tag-along
photographer at session's end suggested that I hold the U.S.
flag and  Ahmed the  Iraqi flag in a joint photo. Ahmed took
one look at the Iraqi flag and make it crystal clear that he
had no  intention of  identifying with it. At that point, if
the Mad  Hatter himself  had emerged  to pour  tea,  neither
Ahmed nor  I would  have been  terribly surprised.  When the
interview was published on Sunday, March 30, it nevertheless
had large  letters reading  "Irak" under  Ahmed's photo  and
"USA" under mine. Go figure.

If Germans  feel any  sense of  Schadenfreude over America's
early difficulties  in the  war, they  aren't saying  so  in
public. The popular magazine Focus calls the war a "debacle"
on the  cover of  its current issue, but doesn't gloat about
it. It  is galling,  however, to  know that  many do express
such sentiments  in private--galling because someone's being
superficially right  for unserious or plain wrong reasons is
far harder  to take  than their being right or wrong for any
set of  sensible reasons. Chancellor Schroeder's use of last
summer's floods  and the  threat of  war in  his re-election
campaign amounted  to help  from two of the four horsemen of
the apocalypse,  and it  turned out  that two  of  four  was
enough for  the purpose  at hand.  But for Schroeder to make
still  more   political  capital   out   of   Anglo-American
difficulties is  just plain  unfair, especially  in light of
his otherwise plunging popularity since his re-election. The
Chancellor is  therefore in some ways the guy who got it all
wrong, and prospered anyway.

Will he  continue to prosper?  It's hard to say.  Opposition
contenders seems  to be  taking turns  trying  to  undermine
Angela Merkel.  On the other hand, the SPD party in Hamburg,
where it is very strong, and has been for decades, is making
trouble for  Schroeder.   The key, perhaps, is the declining
economy -  but the  opposition CDU/CSU  doesn't yet  seem to
have found  any  better  solutions  to  the  problem.    The
coalition is  very unlikely to fall and the next election is
years away.   Chancellor  Schroeder will  be  around  for  a
while, it seems.


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