Stardate 20020923.2003

(Captain's log): Two different people from Germany have written to say that the following was not correct:

As it is, Schröder and Stoiber have gotten into a bidding war to see who can declare themselves more willing to impede any American war against Iraq. The latest "I'm more anti-American than you!" has been to promise to deny the US the ability to use bases in Germany in any way for purposes of fighting in Iraq. It was first sort of talked around on the left, and Schröder ended up saying, more or less, "we probably would prevent them from doing so and we might even end up forbidding the use of German air space." Then Stoiber piped up with "I'd forbid it, too."

Now Stoiber's headquarters is backing away from that, and starting to spin. Seems he meant that he'd forbid America use of German facilities, but we'd still be permitted to use the military bases which we've built in Germany which are actually ours.

What both said was that this idea of banning American use of German airbases originally came from Stoiber, not from Schroeder.

Yes, Stoiber did say this. (And it was instantly recognized by everyone as a gaffe, and they started to back away from it almost immediately.)

But I had thought that I had seen earlier references to this idea from the left before that. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to prove it.

As part of my normal process of running this site, I do a sort of web equivalent of keeping a file of newspaper clippings. I have a directory where I keep links to various news articles I've found which I think are interesting or which I think may become interesting later that I think I might need to find again. I started doing it when the war began, and right now there are more than 11,000 links in there, under a number of subsidiary categories. Of course, the whole point of that is to keep what I think I might need but not what I won't, and when I first encountered that idea about use of German air space and bases, I don't seem to have kept a link to it.

By the way, in case anyone is curious, the reason so many of them are to ABC is because I'm using these two pages there. ABC carries both AP and Reuters. (The Wapo is AP-only.) Their links don't rot. (Yahoo rolls old news off into the bit bucket. It used to be two weeks, but I think it may be 4 now.) And they don't require any kind of membership or registration or log in to access their articles. (As do the LA Times, NY Times, and now Nando Media.)

Returning to the subject at hand, let's try an experiment in collective wisdom (or fault-tolerant distributed computing). What I remember reading (or am hallucinating that I remember) was that initially the idea of forbidding American use of assets in Germany began as something that was being talked about among German antiwar leftists. Schroeder was then asked about it, and said words to the effect that it was something that the German government would have to seriously consider when the time came. He didn't say "yes", but he also didn't say "no".

And then, later, Stoiber was asked about it and made his gaffe. That's what I remember. The experiment is to see if anyone reading this site can actually provide me with a reference that backs up my memory, or otherwise demonstrates that Schroeder commented publicly about the idea before Stoiber made his gaffe. Please send me mail if you have a specific reference.