In an era when American relations with Europe have reached the point that the U.S. Congress's cafeteria no longer calls french fries by their proper name, former George Bush Sr. administration official Robert Kimmitt argued that America's relationship to Germany remains strong despite recent disagreements over the conflict in Iraq.
As a member of the first Bush adminstration from 1989 to 1993, first as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and then as U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Kimmitt has a rare perspective into the task of building a coalition against Saddam Hussein.
Kimmitt stressed the differences between the first Gulf War and the current conflict. "I don't think you can really compare the situations in '90 and '91 that clearly." Kimmitt said. "This time I think the shift from the war on terrorism to weapons of mass destruction, possibly regime change, without as clear a connection to terrorism, made it tougher to put together the coalition."
Kimmitt praised the current Bush team's efforts to get U.N. Resolution 1441 passed and placed the blame for the failure of a second resolution across the Atlantic Ocean. When asked about comments from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Germany and France were acting as the "Old Europe" in their opposition to military action against Iraq, Kimmit replied that "rhetoric that gets into the public domain can sometimes make quiet diplomacy very difficult."
Over the past few months, many have joined Rumsfeld in calling the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance between the United States and its European partners into question. Though France has borne the brunt of American criticism -- White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said last month that France rejected a proposal to test Saddam Hussein's willingness to disarm before Iraq did -- Germany and its recently re-elected chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have drawn the ire of U.S. officials as well.
As a former ambassador to Germany, Kimmitt defended Berlin as an American ally. "I think that Germany was and is a very strong member of the coalition against terrorism." He also noted that Germany has committed troops to Afghanistan and recently convicted the first Sept. 11 accomplice from Hamburg.
However, Kimmitt did point out that chancellor Schroeder used his opposition to the war in Iraq to divert attention from Germany's domestic problems in his recent re-election campaign.
"I think he knew that he was unlikely to win the election on the basis of his employment pledge," Kimmitt said. "He said in 1998, if I don't have unemployment below three and a half million people by the time of the next election, you shouldn't re-elect me, and of course there's a significant number of people over four million unemployed."
Kimmitt did not believe that Schroeder intended to tap into anti-American resentment, but he worried that good intentions had been lost in the furor of the most tightly contested campaign in democratic Germany's history.
"I'm afraid that over time, as Schroeder repeated that comment and sort of upped the decibel level, what started as an anti-war statement took on anti-American overtones," Kimmit said.
Nonetheless, Kimmitt argued that German pacifism is sincere and should be lauded as a positive development.
"There is a strong anti-war feeling among the Germans, and given the history of the last century I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing," he said, adding that the effects of the two world wars and the Cold War "have had a very searing effect on the German psyche."
When asked about the future of America's trans-Atlantic alliance, Kimmitt appeared most concerned about the United States' relationship with France. "I'm generally sanguine about improvement with the German-American relationship, but I'm less sanguine about movement in that direction with France."
Kimmitt argued that where Germany tries to work through honest disagreements with the U.S. practically, France often intentionally forms policy at odds with American interests.
"France needs to get a better sense of what its position in the world is and not feel that it's going to define itself, as someone once referred to, as the 'un-cola,'" Kimmit said.
