SPIEGEL Will Not be Amused

The Bush-haters of SPIEGEL will not be amused: John Vinocur delivers a devastating blow to the SPIEGEL's journalistic integrity:

Politicus: A decent American disappoints Europe By John Vinocur (IHT) Tuesday, June 29, 2004

PARIS: With Europeans lining up and shelling out to read Bill Clinton, he turns out to be a guy who insists on reminding people that two-thirds of the Democratic Party in Congress voted George W. Bush the specific powers he needed to make war in Iraq. Then, piling it on, he goes and says that France and Germany wrongly made light of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. (...)

For Der Spiegel, the Hamburg newsmagazine that has never found an American president subtle enough to match its tastes, this was clearly a problem as it completed its second installment of extracts. In its table of contents last week, it announced a conversation with the former president about "Bush's Iraq debacle."

In the headline over its interview, it promised Clinton's take on "the Disaster of the Bush Administration in the Iraq War."

As it turned out, the single time the word "debacle" came out of anybody's mouth in the Q-and-A, it belonged to the Spiegel people asking Clinton questions. The former president verbally sprinted in the other direction.

It was this kind of whoosh: Clinton said his successor was now moving toward a turnaround in Iraq that

might take two to five years to achieve. In Clinton's view, sovereignty was being returned to the Iraqis, a new UN resolution had been passed, and the Iraqis were freeing the Americans from having to decide on everything.

"I believe that's good," he said. "Maybe our government has really learned that it's better that way."

Although you couldn't tell from the magazine's promotional material or headlines, Clinton also took pains to recall why the Democrats had backed Bush's request for war powers and, with it, to criticize the French and German attitude at the time, which he said would not have supported the use of force even if Saddam had refused to cooperate with the United Nations.

Clinton told Spiegel that whatever the state of the Iraqi Army, he didn't agree "with the German and French position that Saddam never did anything that he wasn't forced into" and "didn't constitute a threat." Clinton said: "If he did have chemical and biological weapons reserves, he would have been a danger. He could have passed them to someone else or sold them." (...)

If Clinton, from his spotlight of the moment, persists these days in saying a lot of things some Europeans would prefer not to hear, the explanation may come down to his being, very irretrievably, like Bush or Kerry, just another American. The U.S. Census Bureau's latest figures count 282,421,906 of them.

(Hat tip Erik Svane)

Comments

[Thomas]

Das scheint - was einen kaum wundern dürfte - bei den Leuten vom Spiegel System zu haben. Kürzlich hat SPON Ex-Verteidigungsminister Cohen interviewt. Die Zusammenfassung versprach "scharfe Kritik" an Bushs Irak-Politik. Die gab es dann allerdings nur vom guten, alten Marc Pitzke in seinen Fragen. Cohen stellte nur einmal einen Unterschied in der Bewertung der Gefahr durch Saddam fest und sagte, daß es noch nicht klar sei, wie der Irak sich entwickeln werde.

Und schon der Titel des Interviews ist eine Täuschung: "Krieg ohne Ende". Nach Lesen der Zusammenfassung muß man denken, der Irak sei gemeint und dies sei Teil der "scharfen Kritik" an Bush. Es geht aber dabei um den "war on terror". Und nicht wegen Fehlern durch Bush, sondern wegen der Terroristen sieht Cohen diesen Krieg als "Krieg ohne Ende" an. Und vor allem spricht er genau wie Bush von Krieg! Es ist nämlich eben nicht, wie man bei uns so gern schreibt, nur "Bushs Krieg gegen den Terror".

Mein Posting dazu hier:
http://myblog.de/comment.php?id=166485&blog=wuldorblogger#comm

[Don]

Clinton is doing very well as an ex-president, I think.

I laugh every time I read a European get a tear in their eye about Clinton. How great he was and how well they treated the US under his administration. Followed by how bad Bush is....

Well.... Who was in office in 1998, the year that Chirac fatally undermined the Iraq sanctions? The year(s) that Europe decided to try to force the extremely unbalanced ICC and Kyoto treaties down the throat of the US? And refused to amend those treaties to make them ratifiable? Bill Clinton was president. He tried strenuously to get our European 'friends' to compromise in all these things with no result.

Clinton must have asked 'With friends like these, who needs enemies?'

Europeans are looking to Clinton to sell out Bush and agree with them, but he's an American first and always. So they will have to settle for the malodorous Michael Moore......