press review" "
The delicate international situation, with the “winds of war” that seem to be blowing ever closer, continues to monopolize the attention of the main European dailies. They are especially intent on reviewing the relations between the USA and Europe, and on analyzing the various attitudes of public opinion to a possible war in Iraq. “For Bush, the time has come to strike at Saddam Hussein”, is the headline on the front page of Le Monde (21/1), in which the French daily refers to the “ultimatum” of the American president to the Iraqi dictator. On the following day (22/1), the same French daily opened with the position of France on the threatened war: “Iraq: according to France, ‘nothing justifies’ the war”, is the peremptory headline. “France says the article has vehemently opposed the United States (…). While Washington considers that the time has run out for the regime of Saddam Hussein, the French minister of foreign affairs, Dominique de Villepin, has implicitly threatened to block any American resolution that would open the way to war, by using France’s right of veto in the Security Council”; a further proof of France’s rejection of any proposal of war is the alliance forged between French president Chirac and German chancellor Schroeder, which, according to the French daily, “is relaunching the Paris-Berlin axis”. And La Croix of 20/1 dedicates a whole page to the “mobilization against the war in Iraq”: “From Tokyo to Washington, from Damascus to Moscow, and in many cities of France comments Alain Guillemoles analyzing the scale of the protest movement tens of thousands of participants took part in protest marches on Saturday, in spite of the cold, to oppose any war against Iraq. Everywhere they focused their criticisms on the personality of George W. Bush”. The Iraqi crisis also continues to be at the centre of comments in the German press. “War, coup d’etat or exile for Saddam Hussein: these are the possible scenarios for Iraq”, says an editorial in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of 18/1. “ For the time being, the world can only expect war. All the rest seems a dangerous illusion. Exile remains a vague possibility. And the coup d’etat? In 35 years all attempts to topple Saddam Hussein have failed. But it cannot be ruled out that some desperado will pluck up the courage to shoot the despot, if only to save his own skin”. Writing in the Franfkurter Rundschau, Rolf Paasch comments: “With demonstrative impatience, the Bush government has pushed itself into a tactically unfavourable position. In its action against Saddam Hussein, Washington has a need for its European allies, otherwise it will be forced to mount a solitary intervention that no one in the country really wants. Generals, economists and the majority of the American population fear a war without a coalition”. “The Americans may militarily impose a change of regime. But more difficult to solve is the question of who could or should assume power in Iraq, when and under what conditions”, writes Wolfgang Günter Lerch in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 20/1. The weekly Der Spiegel of 20/1 comments: “In Europe the protest is growing against the war plans of the USA, and the German government is profiting from it”. “Yesterday a derided outsider, criticized for his anti-war position, … Schröder and his deputy Fischer have now been confirmed by an international atmosphere hostile to a conflict in Iraq and to the right claimed by the USA to mount a preventive attack”. Does Europe exist? The question is posed in the pages of El País ( 20/1) by the sociologist Alain Touraine : “The European silence says Touraine destroys Europe: the reform of the European institutions would have no meaning if it were not directly aimed at the chance given to Europe to take decisions of global importance, and thus exert its influence in all spheres, especially those of politics, if not like the USA, at least in so far as an independent power, its strength proportioned to that of its economy, may do so”.
