Cold Shoulders

Germany, France and Russia seek to heal the transatlantic rift but the US and Britain aren't having any of it

Efforts to heal the rift between the US and "Old Europe" now that the war in Iraq appears to be winding down are getting off to slow, stumbling start. It's not for lack of trying. The key to getting the transatlantic ball rolling again may lie in London, but so far, the British aren't playing along.

There are reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin, seeing an opportunity in a previously scheduled visit to St. Petersburg by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, not only sent out a surprise last-minute invitation to French President Jacques Chirac but also secretly asked British Prime Minister Tony Blair to show up as well. Blair is said to have turned him down, and so, the meeting came off as a reunion of what conservative US commentators get a kick out of calling "the coalition of the unwilling." And indeed, all three leaders, despite admitting that it was good to see Saddam Hussein toppled, reiterated their opposition to war as a means of going about it. After all, the whole rational behind the war was supposedly that Iraq posed an immediate threat to the US with its weapons of mass destruction. "They either don't have them," Putin grumbled, "or they are in such condition that they could not be used. What does this mean? What was the war for?"

Schröder, in the meantime, has given it another go. On April 29, the head reps for Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg will be gathering in Brussels to discuss the European "rapid reaction force" the EU agreed to form (with Britain's support) in 1999. Won't Britain come along, at least to signal that the new force is not meant as a challenge to NATO? The British foreign and defense ministers have both turned him down.

Then, on Sunday, the pro-war, anti-euro Telegraph ran a rather sensationalistic story in which the paper claims to have found "top secret documents" proving "that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders." The not-so-subtle subtext: The Russians were spying for Saddam right up to the day the first bombs fell on Baghdad. Nevermind that the documents quoted seem rather innocuous and are dated over a year ago.

Relations with the US aren't healing too well, either. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, fully aware that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is still crucial to the big picture, has infuriated the US by meeting with Yasser Arafat, "a move widely seen as a direct challenge to US policy," according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. But for US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the rift is getting personal. In an interview with Der Spiegel in March, Fischer said Wolfowitz told him "that the US had to liberate a whole string of countries from their terrorist rulers, if necessary by force."

Wolfowitz has replied with an angry letter to the newsweekly claiming that he was "disappointed" that Fischer would not only speak openly about a private conversation but would also misrepresent his views. Which is, frankly, absurd. Even years before the Bush administration became the Bush administration, its members, including Wolfowitz, went quite public with precisely that position.

Even with the war seemingly in its final stages, transatlantic relations aren't well. Just imagine how they'll fare if the skirmishes, looting, shortages and general disorder in Iraq carry on for weeks or months.

Elsewhere

With his new novel, Crabwalk, out in English now, Günter Grass has recently been profiled and reviewed in the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Also in the NYT: A piece on Neco Celik, whose debut film, Alltag, chronicles Turkish-German life in Berlin.

More film: Johannes Schönherr "traffics in smut, shock and other crypto-traditional pleasures." David Lindsay talks to him in the New York Press.