Some labels are hard to shake. Get tagged as a self-promoter, or a horn dog, or a cheapskate, and that characterization is going to follow you around like a strip of toilet paper trailing from your heel. But none of those is half as tough to overcome as that most lethal of putdowns: being dismissed as a nice guy, mild but harmless. That was the situation Art Howe faced when he arrived in Oakland, Calif., late in 1995 to take over the job of A’s manager from Tony La Russa, an intense man who vibrated like a Chihuahua and often gave the impression he would bite your nose off if you did not show him sufficient respect.
How did Howe handle that? His first move was to do nothing, and I mean that literally. It was my job back then to cover the A’s for the San Francisco Chronicle, but I was gone in the off season, so the Chronicle’s slash-and-burn columnist Glenn Dickey was handed the task of writing up Howe’s arrival in town. Dickey had wrongly speculated in print earlier in the week that a likable bullshit artist named Jim Lefebvre, a former A’s hitting coach, was the leading candidate to replace La Russa. In his article announcing Howe’s hiring on the front page of the Chronicle sports section — the morning Howe arrived for his welcome press conference — Dickey went on at length about Lefebvre and made clear his low regard for Howe. He even ridiculed his hiring as “just another step toward anonymity for the A’s, once the most colorful team in baseball.”
At the end of the press conference when Dickey went up to shake Howe’s hand, Howe raised his hand to shake until he heard “Hi, I’m Glenn Dickey.” Then he dropped his hand. It was an unmistakable snub of the powerful, head-hunting columnist for all to see. In fact, four different people all told me about it later, saying “It was amazing!” or “I couldn’t believe it!”
It was a brazen, ballsy way to start his time in Oakland, and he paid for it, repeatedly. But that’s Howe. And that’s the key to his story: Howe knew just what he was risking in refusing to kiss anyone’s ass, and he would make the same decision again, even knowing the consequences, and again and again. He’s a calm nice guy on the outside, but get to know him and you find he’s tough in ways that are not at first obvious. That’s why his team made it to the playoffs, despite a wretched 8-18 start to this year’s season.
“Obviously his greatest coup is that when the team was down this year he didn’t panic, he stayed calm, and his players stood behind him,” Phil Garner, the Detroit Tigers manager, tells me in a phone interview. “He’s very solid and even-keeled. He doesn’t seem to get too high, and doesn’t seem to get too low. I don’t know if that’s the only way to be, but it’s one way. Dusty Baker gets high as a kite, and his players feed off that. Art was a good player, a sound player who did not make mistakes. That’s the way he manages, and that’s what he expects from his team. He wasn’t flashy, but he was a grinder, he did his routine every day. He had really terrific hands, very good defensively, and was very sturdy.”
Howe, 55, had a respectable career as a player, batting an unspectacular .260 over 11 major-league seasons, seven of those playing for the Houston Astros. But he was always the kind of guy you want on your side. His strength was defense, and though he’s known as a third baseman, he played only 400 of his 840 big-league games at third, and also 284 at second, 130 at first and 26 at shortstop. He was, in short, the kind of player always eager to do whatever it took to win — lying to a manager about whether he had played second base before, just to stay in the lineup, playing hurt, whatever.
Howe had some tough seasons with the A’s and his long-term job security has been in doubt as often as not. But the A’s 102-win regular season this year bumps Howe’s Oakland numbers up to a solid 497-474 mark, and he trails only La Russa (798-673) in wins for an Oakland A’s manager. (Howe was 392-418 in his five seasons managing the Astros.) Howe, in short, is right on the threshold of moving up a notch, from well-liked baseball man, widely admired but never more than that, to something else. It just might be that his managing style makes more sense now than ever, as even young players have big money at their disposal.
“One of the things that always bugged me was I would hear people say he’s such a nice guy, but he can’t be a good manager because he’s too soft,” says Howe’s wife, Betty. “They figured you needed to be more in-your-face, like a Tony La Russa.”
“Well, Art treats these guys as men. They are doing a man’s job. He corrects them, but his philosophy is not to get in their face. He calls them in the next day if he has a problem. He’s done that quite often, if he has to, and he’s gotten results. People don’t know about it. But he gets it done. I think they listen to him because they are treated with respect. It’s hard because even though you have young players, they might be making five times as much money as you are. So you’d better be able to relate to people if you’re going to last very long.”
The point is not to argue against the style of La Russa, for example. The St. Louis Cardinals manager goes to war out there, every day, and he surrounds himself with a collection of smart, colorful assistant coaches who make up a formidable brain trust. La Russa thinks everything out, and then thinks it out again a few more times. It’s probably safe to call him brilliant. But in his brilliance, La Russa may be too much for players. I remember the sad case of a player named Brent Gates, a young guy with a body like Gumby and a face that, well, you just have to describe as “elfin.” Actually, I did describe him as “elfin” one time in print, and Gates looked that word up in a dictionary, saw that it meant “fairy,” and thought I was calling him queer or something. He hated me forever after that. And yet, when La Russa decided to move Gates from second base to third, Gates actually got the word from yours truly. He looked like he was going to keel over on the spot. And though he hit .290 as a rookie, Gates is out of the game now. Many feel that La Russa was too tough on him.
That is one thing Howe has never been. The question is, can he be tough when he has to be? As his wife pointed out, his style has always been to call players in quietly, a day later, to discuss a sore subject without getting the media involved. Even so, if you are around Howe for even a few days, you know he’s a man who would prefer not to make waves. He’s having too good a time, just showing up for another day of baseball.
I covered Howe during seasons when he never really needed to be tough. But times are different. General manager Billy Beane has been easily the best executive in baseball the last two seasons, and has assembled a remarkable collection of talent. When I covered the A’s, they had a hard time finding a single ace pitcher to anchor their rotation. Now they have Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, a combined 56-25 this regular season and quite possibly the best collection of three starters in baseball right now, and they are all just starting out.
I think Howe probably was too nice at times, during the years I covered him, but it’s hard to say for sure. All I know is that this season, when Howe benched mercurial young shortstop Miguel Tejada for not hustling and running out a ground ball, it was a different Howe than the man I watched. Howe not only yanked Tejada right out of the game, he told reporters just what he had done and why. It was a calculated risk, and it paid off beautifully. Tejada apologized to his teammates and seemed to gain a new maturity and consistency heading into the playoffs. Anyone who knows Howe knew it was not easy for him to lean on Tejada like that. He did it because he had to.
“Believe me, it hurt him to do that,” Betty Howe tells me. “He came home and told me, ‘I hated to do that to Miguel. I had to send a message to the team.’ He was sending a message to everyone else, ‘Not on my team.’ It really hurt him. He likes Miguel, he loves Miguel, and he knows that on top of everything else, Miguel has the language barrier.”
“The Latin players have so much pride,” Betty Howe says. “Miguel’s problem is he just gets down on himself. He hit a little rut where he was getting lax. I think it was because he wasn’t hitting like he wanted to. The one game, he did not run all the way out to first base. The second basemen fell down, and got up and threw the ball and Miguel was out. It was at a crucial time when we still had to be winning ballgames. We knew if we weren’t winning by the All-Star Game, management would probably dismantle the team. Art pulled him. When the team went out to take their defensive positions, Miguel was not at shortstop.”
“Art did it for Miguel, and he did it for the team. He called Miguel in the next day and said, ‘Miguel, you’re a team leader, and you want to be a team leader. People look to you for an example.’ He didn’t rant and rave. But he did tell him he was disappointed. To me that’s kind of Art being a father, and Miguel being a son. That’s the way Art manages, kind of like a father with a son, giving that knowledge you have and passing it along. That’s how he was with our three kids, who are all grown now. Art didn’t really rant and rave. I did. I’m the ranter and raver. That’s not to say Art doesn’t have a temper. He does have. If you push him too far, you will be very surprised. He just controls it.”
Maybe it’s not a good idea to manage a ball club for a living when you’re as comfortable with yourself as Howe is. Dusty Baker, who I happen to believe is the coolest man alive and who I would hire in a nanosecond if I ever owned a baseball team, has an edgy energy about him. Not Howe. He always looks like a man who just sunk a long, long birdie putt, and will tell you about it if you’d like to hear. He does what he does, his own way, always laconically and happily, and that drives his critics crazy and warms other people to him.
Plenty of people will probably be pointing fingers after the A’s fell to the Yankees with an error-filled effort Monday night in the Bronx. The A’s became the first team ever to win the first two games of a playoff series on the road, then end up losing the series. Worse yet, Tejada made a costly mental mistake, failing to advance to third on a Jason Giambi single to right field, a lapse that ended up costing the A’s a run and earned Tejada a spirited chewing-out from Giambi, captured by Fox Sports.
It may well be true that a more in-your-face manager would have set a tone all season that made such lapses at such a critical time unthinkable. But an edgier approach might not have let young talent flourish the way Howe’s leadership did this season. Those are questions to be thrashed out over time, starting next spring when the A’s set about trying to polish what they have over a full season. What’s clear is that, whatever criticism he might or might not face after the A’s collapse, it’s unlikely to have much effect on the way Howe does what he does.
“Baseball managers generally fall into one of two categories,” New York Post columnist Tom Keegan tells me. “The majority base decisions on what they think will enable them to keep their jobs. They make moves they can defend to the media and to their bosses, their general managers. They never enjoy managing because they are consumed by paranoia. They forever smell the GM’s breath, always envision the next unflattering headline and hear the boos from the crowd, even in their sleep.”
“And then there is Art Howe,” Keegan continues. “He falls into the second group. Even if Howe had hair, he wouldn’t be losing it from constantly worrying about his job security. He’s good at his job, he knows it, and he’s not going to let anyone convince him otherwise, even his general manager. He cares more about doing what he considers the right thing than what anybody else thinks.”
Novelist William T. Vollmann, author of a dozen books including “The Rainbow Stories” and “An Afghanistan Picture Show,” has a different perspective on the Taliban than most of us. Not only has he read the Quran at least twice, as he explained last year in a New Yorker article about the Taliban, he has also interviewed Taliban leaders face to face and spoken with many ordinary Afghans about the regime. His experience with Afghanistan goes back to the early ’80s, when as a young writer he joined the mujahedin in the mountains for several weeks. He did not actually fight, he said Wednesday in a phone interview with Salon — that is, he did not fire a gun “at anyone.” But he was very much with the fighters in their struggle.
Vollmann offered this sobering warning in that New Yorker piece: “Americans worry that Afghanistan has become a petri dish in which the germs of Islamic fanaticism are replicating — soon Afghans will be hijacking American planes and bombing embassies everywhere. And their fears are not necessarily unfounded. The Taliban are unemployed war veterans, ready and even eager to return to the battlefield. ‘In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,’ Afghans often told me. ‘In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we’ll beat the Americans!’”
To start with the obvious question, where were you on Sept. 11? And what was your reaction to the news?
I was in Bangkok. I don’t watch television, so I saw the news in the Bangkok Post on the evening of the 12th or the 13th. I felt very, very sad. I still feel extremely sad about it. In the Bangkok slum where I was conducting my research, I saw that a lot of the Thais were very, very happy, particularly some of the people I knew with ties to Muslims in southern Thailand. And I wasn’t a bit surprised. But it’s always painful and unpleasant. For the past few years, I’ve known better than the average American, I would say, how much we are hated around the world. Some of that hatred is justified, and a lot of it is just that we are the big kid on the block, and any time the big kid gets a punch, a lot of people are going to be happy about it. That’s human nature. It’s not even anything personal. But it’s still a little sad and unpleasant.
Back in 1982, you spent several weeks in the mountains of Afghanistan with the mujahedin fighting against the Soviet army. What was your impression of them?
They were my heroes. I’ve never met anyone who was so serenely confident of doing the right thing, so willing to sacrifice his life for his homeland, so brave and so disciplined. The case of Afghanistan vs. the Soviet Union is the clearest case of good against evil that I’ve seen in my lifetime. I thought it was terrific the way they got their country back. I’m deeply saddened by the fact we stopped helping them once we got what we wanted, which was for them to be a thorn in the Russians’ side. I feel like we sort of let them down.
At the same time, they obviously share some of the blame for their problems. They never could get it together to be unified, at least until the Taliban came along. They never have trusted each other. They are very quick to blame outsiders for all of their problems. Of course that’s partly justified. Outsiders have done a lot of meddling in Afghanistan through the centuries. The average person in Afghanistan has become very used to thinking of themselves as playthings of foreign powers. That’s what makes it so easy for them to think that our indictment of Osama bin Laden is some kind of great power strategy. That’s why I think it’s very important that we go the extra mile and explain to everyone what we’re doing and why.
How would you assess the U.S. approach so far in going after bin Laden?
The way I look at it, he’s either guilty or he isn’t. If he’s not guilty, we’re definitely doing the wrong thing. If he is guilty, we should be fighting one person instead of a lot of bystanders who are going to take his side if they think he’s innocent. It just seems like very elementary logic to me. We have repeatedly failed to make our case to the common Muslim in the street in Pakistan or Afghanistan and probably elsewhere, too. Maybe it’s not too late to make it. I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of proof we have. I was really disgusted when Condoleezza Rice said we have this proof but we didn’t see any need to give it to Afghanistan because that country does not follow our standards of jurisprudence. I hope we do have proof, and our radio stations should be broadcasting that to the people of Afghanistan as often as they can.
I’ve never met Osama. He’s probably a horrible person, and if those statements attributed to him are true, he’s probably very, very happy with what happened. Did he take part in it? Very, very possibly. If nothing else, he’s a poster boy. If there were lots of Latin American terrorists, say in the ’60s, going around and attacking us and they had a lot of Che Guevara posters, does that mean we should drop a nuclear bomb on Cuba? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t feel sorry if Osama bin Laden were harmed, but that’s as much as I can responsibly and fairly say.
I don’t want to sound like I’m completely negative about everything the government is doing. I didn’t vote for Bush, and I’m not happy particularly that he’s president. But I will say I’m impressed that he didn’t start bombing Afghanistan the day after Sept. 11. The more time that passes without him bombing Afghanistan, the more I respect him.
Day by day, we hear more about likely U.S. backing of the Northern Alliance in its Civil War with the Taliban. Do you think this is a good strategy?
I did interview Burhannudin Rabanni, years ago in 1982, and he seemed like as much of a fundamentalist as anyone. In terms of what they believe, compared to what the Taliban believes, it’s probably apples and oranges. But I say just look at it pragmatically. The Taliban controls 90 percent of the country. The Northern Alliance controls 10 percent. If you want to go and arm the 10 percent against the 90 percent, you’re going to cause untold misery. And who is to say the Northern Alliance won’t turn on us? To me it seems like a fairly pointless strategy. All it will succeed in doing is to piss everyone off.
How do you see this playing out?
It really depends on how much knowledge of Afghanistan the Bush administration sees fit to pick up. If we want to launch a frontal assault on Afghanistan, then we’ll have to be prepared for lots and lots of genocide. Maybe the only way to accomplish our aims is some kind of nuclear bomb, because everyone would fight, as they like to say, until the last drop of blood.
The Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masoud, the one assassinated recently, was a very brave fighter against the Soviets, like bin Laden. He was widely hated in the Taliban area and the northwest frontier with Pakistan, where I interviewed a lot of people. They said he was not only very corrupt but very cruel. I was often told that every potential Afghan leader was a war criminal.
The great thing about the Taliban was they took peoples’ weapons away. They’ve done lots of terrible things themselves, but from an ordinary Afghan’s point of view, it’s probably better to stay with what they have. It seems to me the best thing to do is to really try to explain our case to the Taliban, and to do it in company with the Pakistanis, who they listen to. Presumably the government of Pakistan is somewhat convinced of our case or they wouldn’t agree to do what they’re doing.
If we try to take our time, and do it right, and involve Muslim intermediaries as much as we can, that seems like the least risky thing to do. We don’t want them to declare a jihad and have everyone come to their aid like they did in their struggle against the Soviets. The ordinary Afghan is not guilty of anything, and is still grateful to us for all the assistance the CIA gave to the jihad against the Russians.
You quoted an Afghan rug merchant in your New Yorker article last year saying of the United States, “First you created one Osama. Now you are creating many, many Osamas.” I imagine you see that as being more true than ever now.
Right. It would probably be millions. Put it this way, suppose there’s someone you’re predisposed to like or to feel kinship with, because he has something in common with you, maybe someone you went to school with, and then suddenly the big bully comes and starts punching him. You’re probably going to take your friend’s side, because that’s all you know. That’s how these people feel. All they are hearing there is that the Americans are threatening Afghanistan, calling on the people to topple the Taliban. They are not explaining to the average person why they think Osama did this.
So the Afghanistan people, considering their paranoia about outsiders and the things they do, and the fact we have been extremely stupid in not making our case, are probably going to get awfully pissed off when we start bombing them. If we target any cities, I imagine we will kill lots and lots of innocent people. One aspect of their culture that made them so effective against the Soviet Union is they believe in blood feuds. I think it’s very, very easy by killing one Osama to make 10 more, and by killing 10 to make 100 more. Unless we lay out our case and let them know that justice is being done, we can expect a big blood feud.
Given all that you know about the Taliban, what’s your assessment of the regime?
I wouldn’t want to live in Afghanistan for the rest of my life. I’m an American, and I’m proud of the fact that I can keep guns in my house, I can listen to the radio, I can have whiskey and pork in the kitchen, I can have pornography, I can read “Mein Kampf.” I love the openness and relative freedom in my own country and the fact that I can have all these things. That being said, I respect the desire of Muslims who want to live under Islamic law. According to a lot of thinking, the Taliban government, for all its problems, is the most perfect manifestation of Islamic law. I know a lot of people are unhappy with the Taliban inside of Afghanistan. And a lot of people are unhappy with the Taliban outside of Afghanistan. It has done many stupid and brutal things. I talked to a doctor who was told he was not allowed to have anatomical diagrams to teach medical students.
When I was interviewing the Minister of the Interior, Mullah Abdul Razzaq, I asked him what should be done about the cases of widows with no family members, who therefore have to either work or beg on the street, both of which are illegal. He didn’t really have any good response. It sounded like basically they would just get arrested. I think that sort of thing is wrong. On the other hand, the majority of Afghan women have always been uneducated and illiterate, and the fact that education for them has been curtailed is not such a terrible thing for them as we more educated people might think. That’s not to be patronizing or condescending, you just have to look at it in pespective. From the Soviet invasion until the Taliban took over, women could be murdered, abducted and raped, and often were. Now the average woman is safe from being murdered and raped. People’s possessions are safe. One reason that the Taliban is quite popular is they took everyone’s weapons away. They said from now on we’re not going to follow my law or your law, we’re going to follow the law as laid down in the Quran.
Their interpretation of the Quran is very harsh. They are very, very strict. Maybe they are fanatics, but they are doing the best that they can. You have to remember that most of these people got their education in the religious schools, the madrasahs. That was the only education available. They would study in the schools in the winter and in the summer they would go and fight the jihad against the Russians, and a lot of them were killed. When you’re a soldier, things have to be black and white. When basically all you’ve learned is how to fight and how to die, and all your legal, moral, religious and social education comes from one book and maybe you can’t even read that well, then you’re going to end up being the equivalent of a Talib. You’re going to tend to see things in black-and-white terms. But the Taliban are very popular. I met so many people who said, “In 1979, I took up arms against the Russians for the Islamic jihad, and when the Taliban came to take away my arms, I was very, very happy, because the jihad had succeeded.”
Last question: Have you been flying the American flag?
I don’t own a flag. There are a lot of flags in the neighborhood. My little daughter, who is almost 3, really enjoys counting them as I take her down the street to get ice cream. And the good Muslim girl from Algeria who takes care of my girl is a little bit afraid, and in the house where she lives with another Muslim couple, they are flying the American flag.
Osama bin Laden remains the prime suspect in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but any hopes of actually capturing him may be more fantasy than reality — at least for the time being. Instead, United States military planners appear to be focusing on more achievable goals, meaning a long campaign against countries that harbor or sponsor terrorists.
That probably will begin with military action in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban. One likely scenario will be for a renewed campaign by Afghanistan’s umbrella rebel group, the Northern Alliance, reinforced with American and Russian weapons. In such a move, the Northern Alliance, which controls a stretch of Afghanistan’s northern border region, would grind its way south, backed by American air power, and take the Afghan capital of Kabul, throwing the Taliban into disarray.
Monday, Russia announced it would step up its efforts to arm the group, which Russia has supported since the 1990s. One likely benefactor would be Mohammad Zahir Shah, the 86-year-old former king of Afghanistan, who lives in Italy and who has been in touch with the Northern Alliance about forming an anti-Taliban coalition.
“This business of going after bin Laden is Mickey Mouse,” said Maj. Charles Heyman, editor of Jane’s World Armies. “It’s really something that is dreamt up in the media. Afghanistan is bigger than France, roughly the size of Texas, and 70 percent of it is mountains. Imagine looking for someone in Texas.”
But to anyone familiar with recent Afghan history, the strategy poses inherent risks. The Taliban itself came to power with at least tacit support from the United States before it became America’s new public enemy. Heyman says there are other concerns, most notably that the group is unpopular with the Afghan people and has been accused of stooping to gangsterism. But, he says, arming the Northern Alliance may be the best short-term solution in the global war against terrorism.
“The long-term result of destroying the Taliban’s military capability is that almost certainly it lets the Northern Alliance in,” Heyman said. “Allied forces can then withdraw quite easily. Having withdrawn, and destroyed the Taliban’s capability, it would then be possible to say to Sudan or Somalia: ‘You have terrorist training camps on your territory, either get rid of them or suffer the same fate that the Taliban did.’ Phase 1 is Afghanistan. Phase 2 is another couple of countries, probably Sudan and Somalia. And then Phase 3, you spread your net wider.”
But to get that far, the U.S. will first have to plunge into startlingly new political and diplomatic territory. Joining Russia in arming the Northern Alliance, whether covertly or otherwise, involves the United States in the region, no matter how the coming weeks play out. It will take ongoing and flexible diplomacy to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued support. It will also put the U.S. in league with the three Central Asian republics along the Afghan border — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan — all of which face internal instability, which they see as being fueled by the Taliban and its aid to Islamic militants.
Bush and Putin held a lengthy phone conversation on Saturday, variously estimated at between 40 minutes and nearly an hour. Many suspect a tacit deal between the two leaders whereby the U.S. gains access to bases in the Central Asian republics still dominated by Russia, and in return Russia gets carte blanche to try to stamp out what it describes as “terrorists” fighting for Chechen independence.
An effort to oust the Taliban will set a number of precedents. Never before have U.S. military units deployed on the soil of the former Soviet Union. And it may mean the United States will look the other way on Chechnya, despite repeated charges of human-rights abuses by Russian troops, Heyman says.
“This is almost a rerun of Roosevelt and Stalin,” Heyman said. “There is common cause. Putin would love for the Americans to finish off the mujahedin and the Taliban, to wipe them out militarily and to cut them off. We’re seeing a rerun of 1942, with Putin saying ‘I’ll deal with the Islamic fundamentalists in my area and you deal with them in your area.’ They may even be going to something like zones of influence. Quite clearly, the United States can’t police the whole world, but it can police some sections of the world, and the Russians can police other areas.”
The nightmare years of the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Russia’s version of the Vietnam experience, probably rule out direct participation of Russian soldiers. But just about everything else appears possible.
“I don’t think involvement of Russian troops in Afghanistan can be publicly supported in Russia,” Mikhail Margelov, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, told the BBC on Friday night. “I can foresee the participation of the Russian army in giving corridors for U.S. planes and giving military bases on the territory of Tajikistan or other neighboring C.I.S. countries that belong to Russia.”
The Northern Alliance can hardly believe the sudden change in its fortunes. Just days before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington it lost its most charismatic leader, Gen. Ahmed Shah Massoud. The assassination of Massoud, described by novelist William Vollmann last year in the New Yorker as “a brave and brutal Tajik fighter,” left the alliance dispirited and seemingly without a future. Now, suddenly, it has a superpower behind it.
“America is our friend,” a Northern Alliance fighter named Abdurazek told the Guardian’s Ian Traynor. “We want America to bomb the Taliban. And then only Allah knows what will happen.”
Out of caution or patriotism, U.S. media have for the most part downplayed the importance of northern Afghanistan. When London’s Guardian reported on Friday that two U.S. transport planes had landed in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, bringing surveillance equipment, there was little follow-up in the U.S. press.
But sources in Tashkent confirm that at least one U.S. plane has landed, and over the weekend other agencies were confirming the development as well — which is almost sure to include the arrival of U.S. special forces. U.S. attack helicopters left over from NATO exercises earlier this month are also reportedly at the ready near Tashkent. U.S. bombing runs in support of the Northern Alliance seem likely to commence, probably sooner rather than later.
Secretary of State Colin Powell seemed almost to confirm the military buildup in Uzbekistan on Sunday. Asked about persistent reports of U.S. military planes landing there, he told ABC “not to my knowledge,” then added: “But, of course, we do have repositioning of forces taking place.” As veteran foreign affairs columnist Jim Hoagland wrote Friday in the Washington Post: “The Pentagon let it be known Wednesday that U.S. combat aircraft were headed toward the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The leak was in itself an effective tool in raising the pressure on nearby Afghanistan to rid itself of prime suspect Osama bin Laden and his camps.”
Uzbekistan, which has a population of more than 25 million, was used by the Russians during their 1979-89 war against Afghanistan as a key staging area. The Uzbeks, like the Russians, have their own troubles with Islamic fundamentalism, and ample motivation to join the fight against the Taliban regime. The government believes the Taliban had a role in a terrorist bombing that killed 16 people in Tashkent in early 1999.
The Uzbek government of authoritarian leader Islam Karimov has cracked down on free speech and other human rights in its battle against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which it believes has bases in Afghanistan and has ties to bin Laden. But it faces the risk of an internal backlash if it openly sides with the Americans.
“It’s very delicate, primarily because in Uzbekistan there has been a lot of suspicion by the government that a lot of the terrorists live here with us,” said Josh Machleder, an American living in Tashkent who reports for Internews. “Uzbek authorities have gone on a huge campaign, and there are many people sitting in jails for having any kind of link to Islamic fundamentalism. There’s the risk that it may be inciting forces that are lying dormant here. It may awaken a sleeping bear.”
Other serious problems loom as well. For example, the international heroin smuggling trade route runs right through neighboring Turkmenistan, with lesser quantities coming through Uzbekistan itself. In the turmoil of a wartime refugee crisis, drug trafficking and other criminal activity could be expected to escalate wildly. But there is a widespread sense among the people that action needs to be taken against terrorists.
“We don’t just know about this terrible international terrorism from the newspapers, but we also unfortunately had to face it on the 16th of February 1999 during the explosions in Tashkent,” Kamol Rakhimov, chairman of a textile company, told Transitions Online. “We cannot stay indifferent to what had happened across the ocean.”
Tajikistan has a much longer border with Afghanistan, running from Uzbekistan all the way along the small finger of Afghan territory that protrudes toward China. But so far, it has been much more coy about military cooperation with the United States, and may only offer such cooperation if it is kept quiet. At least 1,000 Russian troops are still stationed in Tajikistan, making the matter of hosting a U.S. military presence more delicate.
President Emomali Rakhmonov said Saturday that the Tajiks would “cooperate” in the “struggle against terrorism,” but pointedly did not spell out just what that meant — and what it did not mean.
The Tajik government, like the Uzbek government, must worry about the twin threats of Islamic fundamentalists and a refugee crisis as Afghans come pouring out of their own country. According to Moscow political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, keeping their own fragile governments in power could be the biggest problem.
“For Tajikistan, as for the other neighboring Central Asian republics, the main threat is not possible aggression by the Taliban but the internal situation,” he told the Washington Post. “In all of them the ingredients for so-called Islamic revolution are present: poverty, youth unemployment, absolute corruption and inefficiency. Sooner or later they will face this threat. But for the Taliban, the main ambition is to take control over the whole of Afghanistan, not a global Islamic revolution.”
As for the third of the three Central Asian republics bordering Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, analysts agree it’s likely to play a less important role. That’s partly because of geography. It lies to the west, away from the roughly 10 percent of Afghanistan controlled by the Northern Alliance. But as the country most disrupted by the drug trade emanating from Afghanistan, it, too, has strong motivation to offer assistance against the Taliban.
Nearby Kazakhstan does not border Afghanistan, but its offer Monday to let the United States use its airspace — and military bases and airfields — adds still more credibility to military options emanating from the north. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev told CNN that not only would his country help, but that he expected all of his Central Asian neighbors to offer similar help.
It’s all very good news for the Northern Alliance, which can now more readily receive military and technological help from Russia as well. “It’s probably no secret to anyone that Russia, like certain other states, has for several years provided moral and other support to the Northern Alliance,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told Itar-Tass news agency offer over the weekend.
No, it’s no secret — and the Taliban knows it has a problem. It released a letter on Monday directed to Uzbekistan, saying the U.S. spy plane the Taliban allegedly shot down came from Uzbek territory — and warning its neighbors not to “act unwisely” and aid the U.S. effort. But whatever else is true, it’s clearly too late for warnings like that to stem the flow of events already set in motion.
Just in case there were any doubts that Europeans are united behind President Bush and his anti-terrorism coalition, more proof came Friday night, when the 15 leaders of the European Union gathered in Brussels for an emergency meeting, and announced that they had lined up as one behind a range of counter-terrorism measures in support of U.S. efforts.
The internationalist tone of Bush’s speech to a joint session of Congress Thursday night no doubt helped his cause. The loss of so many thousands of lives from dozens of countries in the World Trade Center attack has Europe determined to take tough action along with the United States. That applies even to the leaders of the generally pacifist Nordic states.
“Solidarity, that is important, that we stand united for democracy and open society,” said the Swedish prime minister, Goeran Persson. “We have a very strong mandate to take military action and if the United States does so, they have our support.”
There is still evidence that European leaders are worried about a too-aggressive military response by the U.S. Their statement emphasized the need for “targeted” military action that is planned within the larger context of diplomatic and political initiatives. Many would also prefer to see action taken under the auspices of the United Nations, which the Bush administration has so far not embraced. Qualms remain about the American appetite for revenge getting out of hand, and military action spiraling out of control with it.
But the Europeans’ resolve to back the United States in its time of need has never been at issue, and even the minor-chord concerns about tactics quieted noticeably after Bush’s speech Thursday night. The United States does not at this point appear to want extensive military involvement from other countries. British, French and German special forces are all likely to see action, for example, but the number of soldiers involved figures to be small.
So each of the 15 countries will help militarily “according to its means,” the leaders said in a declaration. But they also lined up to support the pledge Bush made early in the crisis: that this would be a fight both against terrorists and the countries that aid them, saying that the targets could be “states abetting, supporting or harboring terrorists.”
The leaders endorsed 37 concrete measures to bolster their effectiveness in fighting terrorism by improving police and intelligence across borders, developing a European search and arrest warrant that will let suspects in one country be perused by all 15 states, closing legal loopholes that let suspected terrorists elude capture, agreeing on a common list of terrorist organizations, and other strategies.
Like some of their American counterparts, many European critics of Bush have been pleasantly surprised to see a new, more confident Bush suddenly emerging as a statesman and a multilateralist. Bush has learned that when it comes to reaching out to allies, often small gestures count for a lot. The decision to have British Prime Minister Tony Blair seated next to first lady Laura Bush during the speech was one such gesture. More importantly, the speech hit the emotional high points most everyone agreed it needed to, but it also showed a deeply reasonable side that was just what the Europeans needed to hear. There was nuance and perspective there, just the qualities whose absence characterized Bush’s early dealings with Europe.
“There was a sense of relief after the speech,” said Jochen Buchsteiner, foreign editor of the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, summing up the reaction of German and European politicians and journalists. “In a way you could say his speech was a slap in the face to biased anti-Americanism. This was not the Texas cowboy talking about a showdown, but a president talking about ‘patient justice.’”
That does not mean that Bush has silenced all his critics in Europe. But by the end of the week, there was more than enough evidence to reject the sense conveyed at times in some U.S. media reports of European jitters about backing Bush in his war against terrorism.
“We are going to back the Americans,” said Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations, one of Europe’s leading commentators on U.S.-European relations. “America saved the democracies of Europe twice in the 20th century. How would it look for us to betray them now?”
Moisi has been an outspoken critic of Bush, and wrote in the July/August Foreign Affairs magazine that “President Bush’s foreign policy to date sounds inexplicably anachronistic and arrogant to Europeans.”
But even he was willing to give Bush “between a B+ and a B-” for his speech before a joint session of Congress. He would have given it an A, he said, but “in a way you’re still missing Clinton in terms of quality of communication.”
Most tellingly, there seem few signs of Europeans bickering or carping among themselves. Bush welcomed Blair in Washington with all the warmth and appreciation that comes with the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. Only one problem: That special relationship had been in real question in recent months, and respected voices had floated the idea that it had run its course.
Meanwhile, Britain had begun to move closer toward the EU, after years of resistance, working to form a joint European Union policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example. And Thursday night, Blair had the honor of standing for all of Europe. Neither the French nor the Germans appear to have felt slighted, even though they are traditionally seen as the tandem that has the most power in European politics.
“Blair took the lead, especially in oratory, in words, on backing the Americans,” Moisi said matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t mean that the French are negligible or the Germans are secondary.”
You could argue that these are all special relationships now, not just the longtime British-American friendship, as represented by the close ties between Roosevelt and Churchhill and Reagan and Thatcher.
“The special relationship was maybe sleeping in a way, and now it’s awake,” said Buchsteiner. “There is a special relationship between the U.K. and America. But I think Germany is surprisingly close to America these days. I mean, both Schroeder and Fischer leave no doubt that Germany is supporting America’s actions. This is not easy for a red-green government.”
European leaders are also following their citizenry, who overwhelmingly favor supporting the U.S. in its battle against global terrorism. Moisi cited a poll by the French paper Liberation that showed 73 percent of the French public and 79 percent of the British public support having their countries involved militarily in the U.S. pursuit of the terrorists it believes are responsible for last Tuesday’s gruesome attacks.
The poll found that 53 percent of Germans support direct participation in a military campaign. The lower level of support there should not be surprising, since Germany has had only two brief military engagements — in Kosovo and Macedonia — in the half a century since the Third Reich was defeated. Also, Germany is led by a coalition between the left-wing Green Party of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and the left-center Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Even so, both leaders have strongly backed the United States — and quickly pushed through parliament authorization of military action, which in the case of the Macedonia campaign came only after weeks of debate.
The support of the U.S. allies in Europe may become much more important in the weeks ahead. London’s Guardian newspaper reported Thursday that it had obtained a diplomatic cable revealing that the U.S. government hopes to win European approval of a plan to “topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and replace it with an interim administration under United Nations auspices.” The Guardian also reported that on Tuesday, two U.S. transport planes flew secret missions to Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, on Afghanistan’s northern border, and a potential staging area for military action against Osama bin Laden and his associates.
That report could not be independently confirmed Friday, and a State Department spokesperson said the government would have no comment. But it would hardly be surprising if U.S. diplomats are talking in private communications about their desire to topple the Taliban government. Nor is it the least bit unlikely that U.S. planning calls for the creation of a new government there. The interesting part is that the Bush administration, which has openly scorned U.N. nation-building missions of the recent past, would call in the United Nations.
But these are times that upend the assumptions of even the recent past — such as the notion that Bush cannot get along with Europe, and that Europe could not get along with him. As the French analyst Moisi noted, “These are exceptional times, and exceptional times call for exceptional measures.”
Up until last week, President Bush had been almost flamboyant about alienating U.S. allies around the world, especially in Europe. Now suddenly the former Texas governor is a committed multilateralist, trying to learn to play the role of global good citizen, mending fences with a sense of purpose sadly lacking in U.S. diplomacy in recent months.
Is it for real? Will it last? Impossible to say, of course. But it’s not too early to welcome the rejection of the go-it-alone foreign policy of Bush’s first nine months in office. Bush has in recent days opened the door to the rest of the world, diplomatically and in some sense personally, and there seems no going back to the days when he seemed eager to tune out everyone but Mexico and Russia.
Last week was a confirmation, if the Bush administration really needed one, that the problems festering in foreign countries really matter. Now top officials have set about lining up foreign leaders behind the effort to fight the terrorism sponsored by Osama bin Laden and his allies, in a way that previously seemed unthinkable under this president.
Of course, he’s belatedly learning lessons his father always knew. Speaking Thursday in Boston, the former President Bush said Tuesday’s terrorist attacks should “erase the concept in some quarters that America can somehow go it alone in the fight against terrorism — or in anything else for that matter.” Yet that was precisely what the second Bush administration was doing. So much for those stories about how the elder Bush was advising his son on foreign policy. If so, he wasn’t listening — until now.
And European leaders have repaid the new attention. Last week NATO invoked treaty language declaring the attack on the United States an attack on all of NATO for the first time in its history. Keeping the fractious Europeans in line won’t be easy. But the indications are that Britain, France, Spain, Italy and possibly even Germany — a country that went half a century with no military actions — are prepared to offer military support to Bush’s war on terrorism.
Although the American media has repeatedly questioned how solid Bush’s European support really is, most of the cracks that appeared to open up in the alliance have quickly been repaired. Much was made, for instance, of German President Johannes Rau saying it was “his impression” that German troops would not be called for in the expected military campaign. London’s Guardian characterized this as Rau having “ruled out” German military involvement. But Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose position matters most, nixed that, insisting, “I cannot and do not want to rule out” German military involvement.
Likewise, Italian defense minister Antonio Martino was quoted Sunday denying that Italian troops would take part in any U.S. military action. But Tuesday he told the BBC he’d been misquoted, and that assuming U.S. intelligence continues to indicate the involvement of bin Laden, Italy will honor its military commitment.
Certainly many Europeans are a little uncomfortable with Bush’s “war” rhetoric, which Sunday he ratcheted up to the level of “crusade.” And the reality is, until the allies have a better idea what Bush plans, they don’t know how involved they are prepared to be. Some NATO allies, like Spain, are more ready to get involved militarily than others. There are likely to be fascinating subplots. Britain’s Tony Blair has been an articulate champion of America in recent days, as has Germany’s Schroeder. But both hope to exert influence on Bush and urge him to moderate U.S. military retaliation. Blair and Schroeder will meet face to face on Wednesday for talks, and on Friday they will join other E.U. leaders in Brussels for an emergency meeting to discuss the crisis.
Elsewhere, the diplomatic tangles are no less intricate. The Bush administration had tilted toward India, of late, against its fierce rival Pakistan. Now, of course, Bush needs Pakistan as a potential staging area for an offensive against Afghanistan, so the U.S. is said to be offering debt forgiveness, some easing on sanctions and possibly even some support in Pakistan’s conflict with India over the Kashmir region .
Likewise, China became America’s New Enemy after intercepting an American spy plane last March, in the first mini-test of the Bush administration. But the world has changed. China has its own problems with Islamic fundamentalists it believes are encouraged by Osama bin Laden; it is unlikely to oppose U.S.-led military action against the Saudi exile, though it is unlikely to become a partner in the effort.
The Bush team has also reached out to Iran, and is already seeing those efforts pay off. President Mohammad Khatami was quick to denounce the terrorist attacks last week. “No Muslim can be pleased about such a human catastrophe,” he said. Iran has self-interest in mind, since it opposes the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and supports the Northern Alliance waging civil war against it. But given the deep hatred expressed for so many years in references to the United States as “the Great Satan,” the early signs of rapprochement are striking.
As promising as these early diplomatic efforts have been, it’s worth noting that the war on terrorism could flame out. Military obstacles are enormous. The famously rough terrain of Afghanistan was enough to defeat the Soviet army, after all, and digging terrorists out of the mountains could take years. Short-term military involvement from the allies may matter less than durable political support.
What’s clear is that Bush finally understands he needs the rest of the world in a way he never did before, a major departure from his first nine months in office.. Bush did not try to ignore the rest of the world just because he was uncomfortable with foreign policy, which was clearly not his strength, or because he and his advisors worried he would mangle names. Those were factors, but more important was his desire to define the new Republican administration, across the board, as the opposite of the Clinton administration.
“Under George W. Bush, a fundamental change has already taken place in American foreign policy: The foreign world is again, well, foreign,” wrote Fouad Ajami approvingly in the New Republic last June. “Gone is the Clintonian emotional expansiveness that took in friend and foe alike, displaying a false identification with places near and far. That neurosis about acceptance, that compulsive need for seduction, drove Bill Clinton and took him everywhere Air Force One could land. There is nothing of this in Bush.”
This push toward disengagement — intellectual, political, moral — with the rest of the world, we now all know, was dangerously misguided. The world really is more connected than ever, which is why literally billions of people outside the United States have been so deeply affected by the horrors of last week.
The 200,000 Berliners who gathered near the Brandenburg Gate last Friday to pay their respects to America and American values, for example, hummed “Amazing Grace” with palpable emotion and shed tears that were just as real as tears shed anywhere else over this tragedy. Again and again, around the world, people in foreign countries have repeated the message that this was an attack on them, too. Through television and the Internet and cellphones, we really are more connected than ever. This was Clinton’s message, and it turns out to be more than just rhetoric. That is why it’s crucial for Bush to accept the responsibility that comes with world leadership, and to cultivate foreign leaders not just at photo ops, but through real exchanges of ideas and sensibilities.
Of course, there was manipulation in Clinton’s style, as well as an undercurrent of desperation in his attempts, late in his administration, to score a foreign policy triumph that might create a legacy more lasting than impeachment. And it’s easy to mock Clinton and his big, sloppy empathy. But historical and technological currents really were carrying the U.S. to a new kind of engagement with the rest of the world, one that Clinton was uniquely prepared to recognize. Plus, the man could listen, a trait allies appreciated.
That’s what Bush needs to begin to do. The president’s relationship with the rest of the world will be fostered by the apparent ascension of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who never backed the administration’s go-it-alone posture, and who is respected by foreign leaders. Powell’s up and down fortunes have risen during the current crisis, and that’s good news for the rest of the world.
The rest of the world is looking for calm, sober leadership. No president could help being pumped up, as Bush was, by arriving at the bombing site and hearing that crowd of rescue workers chanting U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A. But allies are looking for acknowledgment that the U.S. will consider the world’s interests when striking back against bin Laden. Bush will need to listen, really listen, to what his friends in Europe are saying. Talk of mounting a “crusade,” for instance, against Islamic fundamentalists we condemn for crusading is not the way to keep the Europeans in the fold.
European allies will be urging Bush to stay focused on the goal of retaliation, as opposed to revenge. One can be achieved. The other never can, as it spawns an unending cycle of violence. It may be too much to ask that Bush pause, even with American public opinion strongly behind him, to listen to advice from the European allies. But stranger things have happened, just in the last week.
Americans are not the only ones who have been glued to their television sets since Tuesday’s horrific attacks in New York and Washington. All across Europe, TV stations have followed the story nonstop, often forgoing commercials, and a deep sense of horror has taken hold that could make it easier for President Bush to build international support for retaliation.
Many Germans saw Tuesday’s events as an attack against them as well, since the terrorist strike was clearly intended as a blow to the West. But Germany’s sense of being closely involved with the American drama was heightened Thursday when news broke that three of the men involved in the hijackings lived in Hamburg and may have planned part of the attacks from here in what is being described as a terrorist cell.
Mohammed Atta, the 33-year-old who likely flew American Airlines flight 11, and his cousin, Marvan Al-Shehhi, 23, who was on American Airlines Flight 175, lived in a $500-a-month apartment in Hamburg’s Harburg neighborhood, according to the Bild Zeitung newspaper. The two men left Germany in March 2001 for Florida, where they enrolled in flight classes at Huffman Aviation in the Gulf Coast town of Venice. German commandos reportedly stormed eight apartments in Hamburg and arrested one suspect after being tipped off by the FBI Wednesday night.
Atta and Al-Shehhi were enrolled as electrical engineering students at Hamburg-Harburg Technical University, and a third suspect who perished in the Pennsylvania crash is also believed to have studied there. Neighbors quoted on German public television said the suspects lived fairly “anonymously” in their Hamburg neighborhood.
Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile explicitly named as a suspect Thursday by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, is believed to have ties to operatives in the Hamburg area. But so far officials have been unable to nail down a firm connection between the terrorist mastermind and the men suspected of attacking the U.S.
Even before news broke about Hamburg’s apparent role in the events leading up to this week’s calamitous developments in New York and Washington, the talk in Europe has mostly been of solidarity with the United States. There’s a sense here that what happened in the U.S. was an attack against all of humanity and that no one will be safe in the United States, Europe or anywhere else until the terrorist threat is eliminated.
In fact, some are calling it an attack on Europe, since many European nationals also perished in the destruction. More than 100 Britons have been confirmed dead, and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw estimates the number could rise to the “middle hundreds.” Four Germans have been confirmed dead, and the German Foreign Ministry has registered hundreds of missing persons since the tragedy.
People all across Europe had reacted to the news with often dramatic expressions of grief. Thousands have turned up at U.S. embassies to pay their respects. Government leaders have urged people all across Europe to observe three minutes of silence Friday in honor of the thousands who perished on Tuesday.
Flags have been at half-mast at the Reichstag and other federal buildings since shortly after the horrific news hit. Thousands of grief-stricken Germans attended special masses. Even the first night of Berlin’s version of Oktoberfest was called off — and the main event in Munich may also be canceled. The sense of shock may fade in the coming days, but it’s doubtful that a reinvigorated sense of solidarity with the United States will.
The fences protecting the blocks surrounding the American Embassy here have been transformed into impromptu memorials, with people laying flowers, candles and cards in front of them. Hundreds waited in line to sign the embassy’s official book of condolences.
Some demonstrators carried signs begging the United States not to launch World War III in retaliation. Another pleaded with the U.S. not to take “rash steps.” But largely the demonstrators and their signs seemed to be offering unconditional support for America and its victims.
That sentiment has been echoed by European government ministers, most dramatically at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where officials have for the first time invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, saying they are prepared to view this attack on the United States as an attack on all of NATO. The action was taken partly because NATO hopes to be involved with the inevitable military retaliation, so it can help define its terms. But it’s also clear that President Bush already has more international support behind him than even his father did in assembling his Gulf War coalition. The sense across Europe is that this is a time for closing ranks swiftly and unmistakably.
“This is an act of solidarity,” NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson said. “It’s a reaffirmation of a solemn treaty commitment which these countries have entered into.”
Of course, Bush could squander that support by overreacting. And some observers caution that even Article 5 doesn’t commit specific states to get involved with a U.S. military response. On Thursday, Defense Minister Rudolph Scharping noted that the NATO vote does not mandate that Germany undertake any military action. The U.S. must decide whether it will take retaliatory steps, he said, and Germany can then decide whether it wants to help or not.
But it all represents a dizzying turnaround from the turbulence in U.S.-European relations that had generated so much press attention in the first months of the Bush administration. Just six months ago, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder visited the White House and found his first face-to-face meeting with Bush so disappointing, he reportedly told people he thought the U.S. president had trouble remembering his name, according to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.
That was the same day that Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, setting in motion months of difficult dealings between Europe and the United States. The split over global-warming policy culminated in July with the European agreement in Bonn, Germany, to go ahead with the Kyoto process, even without the U.S.
This week, that was all forgotten — at least for the time being — along with European worries about Bush’s mania for missile defense. Like Tony Blair, Schroeder could hardly have been a more steadfast, even passionate, ally in the wake of the attacks Tuesday. Visibly shaken, Schroeder told the German parliament Wednesday that the terrorist attack was “a declaration of war against the entire civilized world,” earning a unanimous show of applause from different political parties.
A day later, Schroeder powerfully invoked history: “When it came to defending the freedom of Berlin, John F. Kennedy said ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ It was the expression of an unbelievable solidarity. Today I think Germany has an occasion to return this solidarity.”
Just as a reminder of where this is all heading, the new U.S. ambassador, former Indiana Senator Dan Coats, was sworn in Wednesday — 10 days ahead of schedule. Considering that Berlin has been without a full-fledged U.S. ambassador for most of the last year, once John Kornblum announced his plan to step down, it seemed a potent reminder of the need for closer U.S.-German relations as this most unclassifiable of wars unfolds.
Germany and the rest of Europe have often felt that President Bush takes them for granted, but that’s all out the window now. And Bush is trying to mend his ways. Suddenly he’s calling Schroeder on the phone to confer, something he has pointedly not done at key junctures in the recent past.
Europe and the United States, it appears, may have little choice but to maintain the close relationship they have had for decades, even if a more assertive Europe grows into a more pronounced role.
And for now, the German people are standing behind Americans, as are the citizens of the rest of Europe and most of the world. At times that support has been poignant. In Berlin, many locals have tearfully recalled the Berlin Airlift that kept this city alive in 1948.
At the makeshift memorial set up outside the U.S. Embassy, a postcard of the World Trade Center was taped to a flower and set against the cyclone fence. “We are so sad and shocked. — Olgo and Elmo Kraft, Berlin,” the card read. Another, from an elementary school in Berlin stated: “We will pray for the lost souls in this tragedy.”
Germany’s most important politicians and thousands of citizens converged on Berlin Cathedral Wednesday morning to mourn the losses. The cathedral was so packed that hundreds had to stand at the plaza outside.
As Peter Struck, a Social Democrat parliamentary leader, said simply: “Today we are all Americans.”
