Irwin Stelzer traveled to Berlin to meet with some unnamed German journalists and didn't like what he heard:
My interlocutors--who on other subjects had wide-ranging views--all emphatically agreed on one thing: Bush should stop talking about "freedom." Several people had counted the times our president had used the F-word. They noted that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had avoided using it at all. The Germans prefer "stability" to disturbing the status quo by trying to spread "freedom."
They also agreed that nothing would induce Schröder to provide any help to America in Iraq, although he will continue to give marginal assistance in training Iraqi police and soldiers elsewhere. Most felt that Germany had done enough by sending troops to Afghanistan. None expected Schröder to abandon his election-winning anti-American rhetoric.
An underlying theme was that America has overreacted to September 11, which most of those I spoke with saw as an incident rather than part of a "war." Said one, "We know war, and we don′t like it."
But before heaping scorn on his German colleagues for not jumping on George W. Bush's "Freedom Express" he might have tried to understand the widespread skepticism in Europe for US -style freedom. He might have asked the citizens of Fallujah about their newly-won freedom. He might have tried to interview the detainees in Guantanomo, or others that have been tortured through extraordinary rendition (too late to interview these). Or he might want to ask why the free press in the US has been transformed into a Bush spin machine, In any event, the debate over the true meaning of the F-word in Germany rages on.
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