THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE LOOKS AT GERMAN PREDICTIONS regarding the war and concludes that in hindsight they look like an anti-American feeding frenzy:
POLNot so long ago, prominent German politicians were outdoing each other forecasting worst-case scenarios for the Iraq conflict. The predictions ranged from “millions of victims of U.S. rockets” to “millions of Iraqi refugees desperately fleeing the country.”
While few are willing yet to eat their words publicly, the media is having a field day with the wildly inaccurate pronouncements.
“They were all wrong with their horror scenarios,” snorted the Bildzeitung, Germany’s largest nationally distributed newspaper. Under the heading “The embarrassing predictions on the war by our politicians,” the paper recently listed some of the most erroneous ones.
On March 21, Social Democratic parliamentary President Wolfgang Thierse, one of the country’s most influential leaders, told a Cologne newspaper, “Millions of people in Baghdad will be victims of bombs and rockets.”
Environmental Minister Juergen Trittin of the Green Party, the junior partner in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s coalition, grandly declared on Feb. 26, “The German government possesses various studies expecting up to 200,000 victims of military operations in Iraq. And it is feared that another 200,000 persons will die from indirect results of the war.”
Greens Co-chair Angelike Beer predicted that “U.S. aggression in Iraq will result in the explosion of the Near and Middle East.”
The ZDF TV network, considered one of the prime practitioners of anti- American war coverage, is also playing the postwar blame game.
“All the so-called experts were wide of the mark with their forecasts,” noted Theo Koll, moderator of the prime time news feature show “Frontel.” Among the footage shown to prove his point was Development Minister Heidemarie Wielczorek-Zeul, a Social Democrat, emotionally predicting on a talk show that “3 million Iraqi refugees will be flooding neighboring countries.” . . .
Television’s role in molding public opinion was underscored by a recent survey of youngsters at a Meunster high school who had taken part in anti- American peace marches.
None knew where Iraq is located geographically. Nor did any of them know anything about Hussein’s brutal regime. All said they got their information about “the American barbarity” from German media reports — chiefly those of ARD and ZDF.
One of Germany’s great literary figures, author-playwright Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 73, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “The great compassion shown by the media for the relatively few victims of the Iraq war stands in bizarre contrast to its lack of interest for the victims of 30 other and often far crueler wars currently being fought all over the world.”
And we’re always hearing how ignorant Americans are. Heh. On the other hand, while they drastically overestimated the consequences of the war to the United States and Iraq, they drastically underestimated the hostility among Americans that their behavior caused. And I think they still do.