When Bush Goes, the Germans Lose Their Bogeyman

The cliché of a stupid, fanatical George W. Bush is near and dear to us Germans. Bush helps us forget our own weaknesses and feel superior. We won’t have it so easy with a new US president. We’ll miss our favorite bogeyman. Now he’s making his farewell visit to Germany.

As it happens, we’ll soon have two Bush visits in a row: father and son are coming to Berlin. On Tuesday and Wednesday, George W. Bush makes his final visit to Germany as President of the United States.

Of course he can’t be allowed to show his face in the German capital-–his swan song takes place at Meseberg Castle, 42 miles north of Berlin. He’ll meet with Angela Merkel, the Chancellor he regards so highly, in a government guest house in an idyllic setting, there to discuss the most important questions of world politics-–from the coming G-8 economic summit in Japan, to the peace initiatives in the Middle East and the next steps against Iran’s nuclear program.

But a sense that Bush is already history will overshadow the talks – as long as he isn’t planning an unexpected and spectacular attempt to change world history, like actually bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Not even a single anti-Bush demonstration is in the works.

No major demonstration against the man the Germans have so fervently hated and scorned for so long is apparently planned. The fact that his last visit won’t take place in Germany’s center of power is appropriate to this picture – even if the deeper meaning of shipping him off to provincial Brandenburg is being argued in official German government circles.

It’s going better for his father. In a little less than a month, George Bush Sr. is expected to dedicate the new US embassy on the Potsdamer Platz in the heart of Berlin. Papa Bush’s administration, in hindsight, represents a transfigured time during which the United States fostered a multilateral “realpolitik” and trans-Atlantic relations were harmonious.

Memories connect him with the short-lived peace euphoria represented by the fall of the Berlin Wall. His appearance in Berlin acts as a symbol of Germany’s subliminal hope that his son’s disappearance might also wipe the slate clean of his whole reign.

But George W. Bush might be wrongly blamed for those current world conflicts and threats he’ll soon leave to us-–he didn’t invent them. It was admittedly comfortable to dump all the blame for these unfortunate events on him. It helped that he didn’t have to give forthright answers for what he did. Bush’s catastrophic image gave the German government an ideal alibi to dodge sending more troops to Afghanistan or redeploying them to the southern provinces. Because Bush coined the term “war on terror,” we neglect to this day to explain to our people that we’re in a war in Afghanistan-–not due to an alleged trigger-happy George Bush-–but because Islamic terrorists declared war on the entire western world on September 11th, 2001.

Many refuse to believe Bush’s warnings about Iran’s nuclear weapons program

The more Bush demanded increased German military support in Afghanistan, the more the German government was able to dodge this need. Because Bush overestimated the danger of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, many now refuse to believe his warnings about Iran’s nuclear armament program. While all western governments believed the faulty intelligence concerning Saddam’s military potential, they disagreed only on how best to oppose him. And there’s no difference now between Bush and European governments in recognizing the danger of a nuclear Iran. Bush’s world political balance sheet shows unquestionably serious mistakes and miscalculations, but his undeniable successes are being cropped out of the overall picture. The advances he achieved in disarmament negotiations with North Korea, the deal with Libya resulting in their voluntary abandonment of weapons of mass destruction, the almost revolutionary new friendship pact between the USA and India, the enormously expanded American aid programs to Africa – all this doesn’t count. Even Iraq, where the situation after years of despair has meantime stabilized doesn’t penetrate German awareness any more. If he walked on water tomorrow we would all say, “We knew it, he can’t even swim.”

Germans already loathed Bush before the Iraq war

The purported reason for Bush’s Beelzebub image is the Iraq war. But Germans loathed him long before that entered our thoughts. His electoral victory in 2000 over today’s environmental hero, Al Gore, was considered illegitimate and the man himself an intellectually underdeveloped, Christian fundamentalist zealot. That last preconception became most stubbornly rooted among us – although Bush, as a study found, used far fewer religious terms in his speeches than did former presidents. Bush never made a single political decision, especially not concerning war and peace, which he tried to justify with religious motives. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop serious people like Protestant Bishop Huber from presenting Bush as a textbook example of the misuse of religion.

The cliché of a stupid, fanatical Bush has become near and dear to the Germans because it abets a fallacious conclusion about Bush from the negative perspective. Every mediocre stand-up comedian can assure himself jeering applause whenever he cracks a dirty joke and can momentarily feel himself a part of the enormously superior culture of an enlightened “Old Europe.” Momentarily forgotten then is the Pisa shock (trans. note: the Pisa Study of educational achievement found German students relatively low on the list compared to other countries), the status of our own elites and the lack of ability among a large segment of German society to understand the necessities and opportunities of globalization. Bush-bashing acts like a narcotic that enables one to ignore reality and live in provincialism. With the new US president, whoever that may be, we Germans won’t have it that easy. That’s why our favorite bogeyman will be sorely missed.