compulsory reading, German Politics, media

Skydiving. The Life and Death of Juergen W. Moellemann.

There are a lot of things one could say about Juergen W. Moellemann. And I am pretty sure that the German media is going to say pretty much all of them in the coming days and hours of reporting the details of the circumstances surrounding his dramatic death earlier today, when he – in what clearly looks like suicide for an experienced parachute enthusiast who often performed jumps as campaign events – jumped, then separated himself from his main parachute and did not use the spare one. Only fifteen minutes before this happened, the German Bundestag had lifted his Parliamentary immunity and police had entered several of his houses and his company’s offices with search warrants investigating several charges, especially tax related campaign funding fraud.

Despite his political record as federal minister, his self-declared role as vocal advocate of Palestinian cause, and last year’s unfortunate and eventually unsuccessful attempt to push the German Liberals even further to the non-economic right than they had gone on their own – including some forays into what many said was a verbal anti-semitism previously unheard of in post-war German politics that caused a huge stir of protest, and ultimately led to his latest political downfall, the sort-of-forced resignation from the party whose deputy leader he once was – most people will probably remember Juergen Moellemann for his abilty to crash and rebound. The teacher-turned-politician’s all-too-evident desire for public attention was certainly helpful to achieve this. And his ability to perform a good political show is hardly matched by anyone in the German political arena.

Political commentators in Germany have often dwelt upon how Moellemann’s high-risk hobby reflected his high-risk political life. Today, it seems the latter one was indeed the riskier activity. He had manoevered himself into a situation where he apparently felt that no parachute would assure a safe landing.

So he decided he did not need one anymore.

PS: Check Stefan Sharkansky’s Shark Blog for English coverage of the story.

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Iraq, oddly enough, quicklink, sex, USA

Make War. Then Love.

Well, not quite love, but it’s closest capitalist pseudo-substitute. According to this Reuters report, a Nevada brothel has come up with a truly unusual marketing ploy.

It is offering 50 “free rides” to US military personnel with Iraq exposure – “‘We want to feel patriotic and feel we are doing something for our servicemen,’ [a brothel representative] said. ‘If we owned a Dairy Queen we would be giving away free ice cream…'”

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Iraq, oddly enough, quicklink, sex, USA

Make War. Then Love.

Well, not quite love, but it’s closest capitalist pseudo-substitute. According to this Reuters report, a Nevada brothel has come up with a truly unusual marketing ploy.

It is offering 50 “free rides” to US military personnel with Iraq exposure – “‘We want to feel patriotic and feel we are doing something for our servicemen,’ [a brothel representative] said. ‘If we owned a Dairy Queen we would be giving away free ice cream…'”

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Iraq, US Politics

Does Pride Indeed Cometh Before The Fall?

There are moments in life when we have to wonder how things would have turned out differently if we had taken a different road at a particular crossroads.

Today, I am wondering if it was the right decision not to read “Die Welt” on a daily basis, because the Frankfurter Allgemeine provides more than enough Conservatism for a single breakfast. Plus, journalists at “Die Welt” are contractually obliged to be pro-American. I don’t mind people being pro-American, the FAZ balanced significantly balanced the press bias in the run up to the war. But would like to have the journalists to come to that conclusion when looking at the world, not at their bank statements.

I am also wondering how I would look at this world if I had not preferred London and the LSE Government Department over the offer to join the Nitze School of Advanced International Relations in Washington under (it turned out leaving for the US DoD) Paul Wolfowitz back in 2000.

The first question came up when I realised that I found out about an interesting story “Die Welt” “ran” on Monday because it was quoted by the Guardian today. The second one when I had digested the content.

Well, I guess, part of the problem is that the original story was entitled “In North-Korea, Wolfowitz prefers a solution based on local powers” instead of “Yet another shocking admission by the US Deputy Secretary of Defense.” which, but I am evidently just guessing here, might have been a “pro-American” editorial decision.

I can’t believe the journalists would not have realised she had hit the jackpot. On the other hand, google-news doesn’t list any other newspaper that ran the story on Monday. Be that as it may, the US DoD published the transcript of the press conference, and this is what Paul Wolfowitz actually said last Sunday –

“Look, the primarily difference — to put it a little too simply — between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.”

It may be torn out of the context, but that really doesn’t change a lot.

What is going on here? Who let Wolfowitz off the leash? Why his sudden urge for ex-post truth?

Could it really be carelessness induced by smugness? Or Pride That Cometh Before The Fall? Whose Fall you’re asking? Good question – does anyone in the US administration wants to get rid of Tony Blair, quickly? Hands up, please. Der Spiegel quotes some Labour MP’s who say that “WMD-gatetm” is already worse than Watergate.

Man, I would like to get an uncensored copy of the phone conversations between Downing Street and the White House these days – it’s probably a good thing Americans only understand half the British swearwords.

UPDATE: The Guardian has pulled the story off the website. Also, check the comment section for interesting remarks and links to two discussions regarding this subject.

Rereading the quote from Wolfowitz after receiving comments by Florian and Markus I realize last night was another moment in my life when things would have turned out differently if I had taken a different road – this time, not writing stuff quickly late at night. I was wrong to say that the quote’s context doesn’t change a lot.

The North Korean comparison does make the statement a lot less clear. Now I think there are two possible interpretations, one being that economic sanctions wouldn’t work because Iraq swims in sea of oil of which it could sell enough to remain a threat, the other one being that Iraqi oil was so important for strategic reasons that there was no other way to handle the situation. I guess Wolfowitz wasn’t really let off the leash again and he intended to say the first.

UPDATE: The Guardian has a correction of yesterday’s report online. Thanks to Markku Nordstrom for the info.

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Iraq, media, web 2.0

Blogging Your Way To A Civil Society?

Papascott links to Jeff Jarvis, who believes that Salam Pax – the blogger who shared the sights and sounds of his life in Baghdad and is now writing a forthnightly column in the British Guardian – is an example of how sponsoring Iraqi blogging could create a true Iraqi Civil Society –

“What comes out of this: A hundred Salam Paxes. A thousand Salam Paxes. The intelligent, caring, involved future of Iraq will come online to share their experiences and opinions and hopes and fears and Iraq will be better for it; so will the world, for we will build bridges to Iraqis online. History has never had a better, cheaper, easier, faster means of publishing content and distributing it worldwide. Now is the time to take advantage of this for sake of democracy and freedom and nothing less than that.”

I am not too convinced that the outcome of setting up “blogspots” in Baghdad would necessarily be the creation of a happy modern all-Iraqi civil society, even assuming that enough people would care to learn how to use the technology. I suppose there is hardly anyone who would be able to tell how blogging would fit into institutionalised Iraqi patterns of societal communication.

Thinking of the almost violent way the pro-/anti-war debate evolved in the western blogosphere in the first few months this year, I would say that there is no guarantee that blogging does enhance the way any civil society works – just read my post about Rebecca Lucas below. In fact, remembering how Karl Deutsch has described long ago in “Nationalism and Social Communication” that increased communication does not per se translate into more understanding between the communicating parties, one might be tempted to think that blogging actually requires a significant amount of civil society and mutual understanding to start with in order to deal with all the Rachel Lucases around. Otherwise, it might just ignite a fire no one wanted to light.

I am not saying this would be the case in Iraq. But given the way a “modern/pseudo-socialist” authoritarian government has been superimposed on a semi-tribally-organised, ethnically and religiously diverse country I’d say that there is a certain chance for a negative development.

So while I think that the idea put forth by Mr Jarvis is clearly worth to be tested, those involved would have to be very attentive and careful not to become too hopeful about the possible positive effects of such a project.

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compulsory reading, Iraq, US Politics

Body Language. N’Sync.

Tonight, CNN dug out footage from the “scandalous” Munich Security Conference from February this year where Joschka Fischer lashed out at Donald Rumsfeld in English – “You have to make the case, excuse me, but I am not convinced.”

Back then, Michael Kelly [who tragically died in Iraq as embedded journalist] excused Fischer in the Washington Post by saying that there is no need to convince Fischer because of his violent 1968 past. CNN is not alone these days to remember Fischer’s skepticism. Less and less people, journalists included, are inclined to trust the US government’s statements.

In particular, a lot of British MPs who supported Tony Blair after his pro-war speech on March 18 are less than happy with the renewed public uncertainty about the true reasons for the war the British forces just had to fight. It’s a long way to go to November 2004, the next US Presidential elections, but if the Bush administration cannot contain the “they lied to us”-tsunami, given their abysmal economic policy they might well be swept away when the wave hits the shore. And how could they possibly contain the British outrage? Wolfowitz might actually have handed the Democrats the opportunity they had hoped for to escape the post 9/11 “patriotism”-trap. Maybe now there’s a chance that it will once again be “the economy, stupid.”

As for Wolfowitz, in my opinion the whole confusion stems from the fact that Wolfowitz inadvertently crossed a fine line. He spelled out the secret subtext everybody had “agreed” never to tell.

Different actors had different bundles of motivations to go support the policy of ousting Saddam Hussein [or to oppose it] – just as Wolfowitz says in the interview (see left column for the link). For Tony Blair, being “America’s staunchest ally” was probably an important element in his equation to go to war – and – legitimately so.

However, one fundamental ambiguity was never satisfactorily clarified prior to the war – the ambiguity between the US government’s body language and its words – the former was clearly “regime change – it’s strategically important [and the guy tried to kill my dad!], let’s find a rationale to sell it”, the latter one was, “regime change, if Saddam Hussein is guilty, so let’s talk about the burden of proof.”

[ note: this is something we should not forget over the Wolfowitz debate – according to the UN weapon inspectors Iraq never accounted for a significant amount of biological and chemical agents that could be used as weapons of mass destruction. So it would be equally wrong to suggest that Iraq never had, or never even tried to get hold of, weapons of mass destruction. The risk and the amount of these weapons posed were subject to diverse assessments and public statements, some of which seem to have been exaggerated. ]

Of course, all the relevant players knew they were probably playing the body language game. But formally, through the international system, they had to and they were in fact playing the “burden of proof”-game. That’s where so many of the diplomatic problems stem from.

And that’s why there is so much public outrage about the Wolfowitz admissions – someone who has taken the US government’s pre-war words literally and supported their policy simply must feel now that he was not told the whole story. As opposed to Condi Rice, whose recent stipulation that Iraq might have had “just-in-time” WMD assembly lines was as much “admission” as one could reasonably expect without revealing the subtext, Paul Wolfowitz has crossed the line.

Thanks to him, the US government’s body language is now in sync with its words. It was about time for the administration of a President whose personal mantra is one rather unusual for a politician – I say it, I mean it. Or could that be another body language trap?

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