Stardate 20020920.1040

(On Screen): I'm really going to be glad when the German election is over, and I don't even care who wins it. Once the voting has happened, it won't be necessary for the German politicians to spend all their time competing to see who can be more publicly and stridently anti-American, in attempts to woo leftist voters.

If they have to do that, I wish they'd be honest about it. At the very least, if one of them is going to be anti-American then they should do it all the way. I'm getting rather sick of seeing spin comments to the effect that "The relationship between Germany and the US is extremely important to us and we don't think that our recent comments calling them blood-drenched brutal warmongers actually will harm that relationship in any way, because friends as deep and true as Germany and the US can disagree about things like whether Americans are drenched in blood."

Or whether Bush is actually just like Hitler.

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.

Those threats are moronic anyway. There are legal, practical and political reasons why such a ban could never actually take place. My friend Andrew in Germany tells me that the German parliament would never approve. There are also treaties in place regarding those military bases and I would be very surprised if they give the German government veto power over their use.

And there's the practical matter that unless Germany is actually willing to go to war with us, they can't actually stop us from using those bases for whatever we damned well feel like if we get annoyed enough to ignore their protestations. Are they willing to put antiaircraft batteries near our air bases to prevent jets from taking off and landing?

And if they really start to make trouble for us, we'll pick up and move. It's going to hurt them a lot more than it hurts us.

But that's all details. Their protestations notwithstanding, all this posturing and grandstanding and more-anti-American-than-thou-ism actually is causing serious and long term damage to Germany's relationship with the US. And that's going to be around a long time after the memory of this election has faded away.