“Iraq: Europeans against the war”, is the front-page headline of Le Monde (15/1), which tries to anlayze the future scenarios opened by a war that seems to be becoming ever more probable, after the repeated signals of “impatience” shown by the American president. “Challenged by a public opinion strongly hostile to a military operation against Saddam Hussein says the French daily European governments are trying to gain time”, while the Pope in his address to the diplomatic corps calls war “a defeat for humanity”. And the strong “no” to war pronounced by John Paul II is taken up by La Croix (14/1), which opens with the words of the Pope and dedicates its editorial to his latest address. “ To the alleged common sense, that presents peace as a secondary consequence of the efforts of war writes Bruno Frappat it’s time to oppose a higher wisdom: if you want peace, prepare for peace! (…).What the Pope wants to say today, at the dawn of this disturbing 2003, is that conflicts must never be produced, in the cold calculation of decisions, unless all the other options have been tried, attempted, exhausted”. 2003 is also a “decisive” year for the work of the Convention on the future of Europe: the point is reflected on by Pierre de Charentenay and Noel Treanor in Europe infos, the monthly of COMECE (no. 45, January 2003), who express the hope for a “mobilization of all governments and all the great national institutions, political parties, Churches and associations of every kind” to raise the awareness of public opinion in our continent to the importance of the process of enlargement now underway and on the work of the Convention, which “almost 2/3 of Europeans haven’t even heard mentioned”. The Iraqi crisis continues to monopolize the attention of German commentators. “ Without the sabre-rattling of America, the United Nations would have remained hoodwinked by Iraq, the major powers would not have voted the toughest ever resolution on Iraq, and Baghdad would not have subjected itself once again to an inspections regime“, writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Faz) of 12/1. In the Faz of 13/1, Dirk Schümer criticises the scientists involved in the production of atomic weapons in Iraq and in cloning. “While the politicians and the propagandists who hired them are hounded as devils, those researchers continue their own activity undisturbed and uncontrolled”. In the view of Rolf Paasch of the Frankfurter Rundschau of 14/1, “ the duration of the controls on the presidential palaces of Saddam and on the Iraqi factories producing fertilizers does not depend on the nerves of George W. Bush or on the strategic preferences of his military planners, but on the objective needs of a thorough inspection. Unless Iraq does not openly violate the rules minutely fixed by the Resolution. Only in this way can the regime be ‘contained’ assuming nothing is wanted but war“. “ Blood for petroleum the real issue at stake in Iraq“, headlines the weekly Der Spiegel of 13/1, which compares the current nuclear policy being pursued by North Korea with the Iraqi crisis. The Spanish paper La Vanguardia ( 12/1) publishes a comment on the euro by Antonio Argandoña, professor of economics at the University of Navarre: “We asked ourselves at the beginning whether the change to the euro were favourable for the European economy. The conclusion is clearly positive, and is seen to be so by citizens. In the eurobarometer for November, 62% of Spaniards considered that adaptation to the euro has been an advantage. 83% of Spaniards thus felt themselves more European than they did before”. Argandoña argues that the advantages of the euro are “the elimination of exchange-rate risks, the lower cost of transactions, monetary stability, low interest rates and greater transparency”.
