German Press Review: Another Bombing in Iraq

Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung commented on the suicide attack which killed at least 24 people in Baghdad on Sunday saying: “Terror is total. The violent opposition against the U.S. occupation in Iraq has no limits and lost direction. Not only American soldiers and foreigners are killed.” The paper said the terrorists are also aiming at all those who are trying to accept that after the fall of the dictatorship a new time has come. “The bomb attack killed civilians who wanted to earn a little money to feed their families,” the paper pointed out. “They had to die because the terrorists oppose any progress and try to shatter anything that could help improve the living conditions of the Iraqis.”

“There will be no peace in Iraq unless an Iraqi administration is introduced which will be acceptable to Shiites, Sunnites and Kurds alike,” argued the Dresdner Neuste Nachrichten. “The United States has to pull back, while the United Nations and Europe have to get involved, the time has come to solve the transatlantic row,” demanded the paper. But it also said that the U.N., France and Germany are right in asking for an assurance from the United States. They should make sure that their involvement in Iraq will not be a guise under which the U.S. will continue to pursue its unilateral geopolitical and economic interests. “There is only one basis for the involvement of the U.N. and of ‘old Europe’ and that’s a U.N. mandate.”

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Americans and their ‘coalition of the willing’ haven’t won this war yet,” wrote the Kieler Nachrichten, arguing that every human being, whether a soldier or a civilian, who is killed reduces the hope of peace in Iraq. “The relatives of those American soldiers killed in Iraq pay a high price for their trust in the arrogant power policy of their president,” the paper opined.

The Frankfurter Rundschau reminded its readers that in less than half a year from now the United States plans to transfer the governing power in Iraq to a transitional government. When this timetable was launched last November, the paper said, Washington still believed that it could do without the United Nations. But now the U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, urgently needs help in legitimizing a half democratic process which is increasingly opposed in Iraq itself.