Posted on 02/18/2003 6:18:16 PM PST by The Raven
From Andrew Sullivan's Blog:
THE GERMANS AND SMALLPOX: Josh Marshall [see below] picks up the baton on the growing story that German officials deliberately concealed evidence of Saddam's smallpox stockpiles last summer to avoid any campaign distraction from the notion that it's the U.S. that's the main threat to world peace. Josh cites this Deutsche Welle piece with the following astonishing sentence:
In the interviews, two German government ministers let readers know that there is little danger now that American-hating terrorists could unleash the small-pox virus on the German population.
Don't worry, in other words. By appeasing these thugs, we could deflect the horror toward the Brits and Americans. I do think that's an underlying assumption on the part of Germany and France. By taking the anti-American line, they risk nothing. They know the US will deal with the threat; but by appeasing the Islamofascists, the Franco-German axis hopes to avoid any blowback. This is what they call being an ally.
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Posts will be few and brief until tomorrow morning. But do take a look at this article at the Deutsche Welle website about a brewing scandal in Germany. A news report alleged that the German government had held back its own intelligence about possible stockpiles of smallpox in Iraq. The idea being that they would hold it back during last summer's election to sustain the government's opposition to US policy on regime change. Look at the response from two German government ministers, however, as reported by Deutsche Welle ...
In the interviews, two German government ministers let readers know that there is little danger now that that [sic] American-hating terrorists could unleash the small-pox virus on the German population. For a number of reasons, I think it's very unlikely that the Iraqis have weaponized smallpox or any smallpox for that matter. I certainly hope not. And I'm curious to hear more about just what these ministers said, the precise quotations and context and so forth. But, as it reads, that quote really does tend to confirm the least generous interpretation of German motivations in the current situation: why stick our necks out when it's the Americans who are going to take the hit anyway?
Think of where we might be had Carter won a second term.
Hmmm, probably still in the midst of a cold war with half of Europe still behind the Iron Curtain, home mortgage interest at a 25% rate, and the U.S. population fed on rations of peanuts and Billy Beer. IMHO, of course! ;-) Isn't everyone that Carter cut deals with dead?
Here are a couple of paragraphs from this article: In February 10, 2003, the government of Germany began building a new, anti-American Berlin-Moscow-Paris Axis. As one of the former Soviet bloc experts on German matters (and chief of a bloc intelligence station in West Germany), I had been waiting for something like that to happen ever since October 1998, when Joschka Fischer became Germany's foreign minister.
Fischer is an indirect product of the old anti-American intelligence community to which I once belonged. In 1975 Libya's dictator, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, informed Romania's tyrant, Nicolae Ceausescu through me that he was preparing a terrorist attack against the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and asked my boss to provide him with blueprints of OPEC's temporary headquarters in Vienna. Ceausescu agreed, and the Romanian espionage service (the DIE) complied. The December 1975 takeover of OPEC's headquarters in Vienna resulted in the seizure of 60 OPEC officials and staff members as hostages. The kidnapping was organized by Qaddafi and the infamous Ilich Ramírez Sánchez "Carlos" or "the Jackal."
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