WESTERN EUROPEAN NEWS DIGEST
Infrastructure Jobs Programs Become Political Issue in Germany, Italy
Our InDepth section this week provides the story on how new proposals for financing much-needed infrastructure programs, which are necessities for dealing with the collapse of employment, have now surfaced in Italy and Germany. These proposals, which echo initiatives put forward by economist Lyndon LaRouche and his wife, BueSo lead candidate Helga Zepp-LaRouche, have already stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy, which can be expected to continue.
Schröder Reiterates Opposition to Iraq War
During an interview aired the evening of Aug. 9, on Germany's first national television channel ARD, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder reiterated his determination to keep Germany out of any Iraq war. He said that what he had said on the issue of Iraq earlier in the week, "stays, is valid, and will stay." (More extensive coverage appears in InDepth.)
Schroeder's uncharacteristically bold declaration, along with the new German proposal for 1 million jobs, has created the potential for the revival of his electoral campaign, which had been dealt a serious blow by rising unemployment.
Italian Government Plans New Initiative To Stop Iraq War
According to Italy's leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera of Aug. 8, the Berlusconi government is working on a diplomatic solution to the crisis with Iraq, that is expected to become public in September. The leak says that a combination of Arab and European nations would issue simultaneous statements offering Iraq a lifting of the sanctions, if Baghdad accepts United Nations inspection without conditions. The four Arab nations mooted to be already involved are Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia.
"The target is to have the whole EU and the whole Arab world share the substance of this initiative," writes Corriere, adding that "the main question mark concerns Great Britain and France. The former, because since Sept. 11, [Prime Minister] Tony Blair has almost always supported George Bush's decisions. The latter because [French President Jacques] Chirac and his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin ... are doing all they can to gain the image of the first and foremost defenders of Arab rights in the West."
So far, the Italian initiative has been being pursued at the diplomatic level, in order not to expose higher political officials, Corriere reports.
British Paper Says Blair Could Go by December
"If Blair is seen as the poodle of a foolish ally ... Gordon Brown could be prime minister by Christmas," writes Martin Kettle, in a commentary published by the London Guardian Aug. 8, titled "Lord of all he surveys until he ignores their views." Kettle reports that Tony Blair commissioned an opinion poll, by the "Focus Group," the results of which have been kept tightly under wraps.
According to Kettle, the poll showed that "all senior Tory politicians are more unpopular than the euro. But the bigger news is that the poll has discovered on the eve of a possible attack on Iraq, that Bush is even more unpopular [in Britain] than the Tories.... [T]he finding about Bush is dynamite in the developing context of Iraq."
Kettle continues: "If British voters have little confidence in Bush, as this survey shows, then any confidence they may have in Blair's own foreign policy judgments is likely to be undermined by his embrace of a disrespected president. If Blair is seen not just as a poodle, but as the poodle of a foolish and arrogant ally, he could find his political capital to do other things draining rapidly away."
Kettle then analyzes Blair's situation in U.K. party politics, and concludes that there are only three options left for Blair: "First, that Blair knows something that we don't, which will significantly transform the terms of the argument in his favor; second, that he has played a bluffer's hand and is beginning to back away from a commitment he does not intend to carry through; or, third, that he is genuinely set on supporting the U.S. under whatever circumstances Bush decrees. The first is still possible. The second looks more likely than it once did. If it is the third, though, then Gordon Brown could be prime minister by Christmas."
Pro-Empire Propagandist Kagan Tries To Intimidate Europe
Major newspapers in Western Europe, including the French daily Le Monde, Germany's weekly Die Zeit, and The International Herald Tribune are featuring the latest attack on European opposition to a war on Iraq by neo-conservative hired pen Robert Kagan. This barrage, which included a full French translation which ran for three days in Le Monde, has caused intensive debate.
Kagan has just authored a piece for the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review magazine entitled "Power and Weakness," whose main point, indicated in the title, is very simple: America is strong, and Europe is weak; America is guided by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the primacy of "force," while the Europeans, obsessed with Kant's "Perpetual Peace," are against military solutions to international problems. But, Kagan sneers, the Europeans are completely dependent on the Americans, for their "peace." The Americans are from "Mars," the Europeans from "Venus." The Americans are like Gary Cooper, in the movie "High Noon," saving a group of people (Europeans) who don't like the fight in the first place. And so on, ad nauseam.
Kagan makes it crystal clear, that the only real issue in his hyperventilations, is that a war against Iraq is soon to begin, and the Europeans will either be forced to support it, whatever they may think, or, in any case, the U.S. doesn't give a damn what these wimpish Europeans think. He then says the U.S. must deal, in the future, with other "rogues," among which he includes not only "Iran's ayatollahs" and North Korean President Kim Jong-il, but China's Jiang Zemin.
Kagan currently lives in Europe, and was the first speaker, recently, at Aspen-Berlin, when the latter was taken over by Jeffrey Gedmin, formerly the head of the New Atlantic Initiative, which operates out of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. He has also been a member of the utopians' Project For a New American Century. In recent years, he was a chief collaborator of The Weekly Standard's William Kristol; the two teamed up for violent propaganda against China, and were pushing, before Sept. 11, 2001, for a U.S. confrontation with China a confrontation which, obviously, is still high on their agenda.
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