Germany, Iraq and the European Union

It would have seemed an exaggeration to say, immediately after September 11, 2001, that there was a direct link between the attacks on New York and Washington and the crisis in the European Union.

It also would have seemed far-fetched to assert that there was a link between Arab/Muslim expansionism and the new “German Europe.”

However there are, as in all wars, historic reasons for certain nations and certain religious or national groups to share an enemy. The Iraq crisis has demonstrated that such links are not at all imaginary.

It also hardly seemed credible, as the democracies of Britain and the United States prepared to remove a dictator in Iraq, that the leader of nato “ally” Germany should refuse to take a call from the U.S. president, or that a German minister should compare President Bush to Hitler and yet another minister should call him a “dictator.”

Meanwhile, the French president (who personally negotiated the supply of a nuclear facility for Iraq) is contemptuous of the U.S. and insults 10 Eastern European states for supporting the British/U.S. policies on Iraq!

With “allies” such as these, who needs enemies?

The Franco-German enmity should come as no surprise to those who really understand the nature of the struggle against German imperialism and European fascism that raged between 1939 and 1945.

The Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein is not a religious regime but an anti-religious, secular socialist and nationalist dictatorship—in other words fascist, very much in the tradition of Europe in the 1940s. Iraq’s historic and modern links to the German State are even more intimate than those to Jacques Chirac’s France.

Planned in Germany

The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. were planned in Germany. Those who see Israel as their enemy would tend to seek sympathy in a nation not exactly renowned for its historic affinity to Jews. Those who see the U.S. as a threat are more likely (given the ranting anti-Americanism of German ministers mentioned above) to see German Europe as a counter or at least a competitor to that threat. They would never see Britain in that light.

During the First World War, Germany and the Ottoman Empire were allies, and German agents were sent to “set the east ablaze” in the hope of creating such a wave of Islamic anti-British feeling that the Muslims would rise up in revolt. In the 1920s, the Germans still ran the officers’ training corps that they had founded for the Iraqis!

The vast majority of the supply of chemical factories to Iraq in the 1980s came from Germany! The evidence from an Iraqi defector (bbc program “Correspondent,” March 3, 2001) showed that Germany contributed 80 percent of the resources needed to establish the Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

It is also significant that Germany encouraged and indeed armed Bosnian and Albanian Muslims during the war that broke up Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Indeed, Bosnian and Albanian Muslims were recruited into German Waffen SS divisions during World War ii.

Of interest in this connection is the significance of the fez, the hat which was part of the 1940s Handzhar (Bosnian Muslim Nazi) uniform. The fez was widely worn in the Ottoman Empire and symbolized both Muslim fanaticism and Ottoman power. By setting up a division of Muslim troops wearing the fez, the Nazis were appealing to Islamic fanaticism, and promising a return to the Ottoman spirit. (To show how seriously Himmler and Hitler took their alliance with Islamic fanatics, even the Handzhar Waffen SS division’s commanding officer was required to wear the fez.) Handzhar was set up for Bosnian Muslims—the name resurfaced in the 1990s in Bosnia as the German-inspired breakup of Yugoslavia reached its zenith!

According to German documentation of the visit to Hitler by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 30, 1941, the latter told the führer that the German Reich was “admired by the whole Arab world.” “The Arabs were Germany’s friends because they have the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists.” “The Mufti welcomed the statement that Germany recognized the aspirations to independence and freedom of the Arabs just as she supported the elimination of the Jewish national home” (Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series D, vol. xiii).

Hitler told the Mufti that “Germany was resolved to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well.”

Echo of the Past

In an echo of what is happening today in Germany’s refusal to attack Iraq, Hitler’s Germany told the Mufti that “the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from the Caucasus. As soon as this happened the führer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived.” Today as the new Reich reaches out to Poland, and subsequently to Bulgaria and Romania, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder even dares openly and aggressively to oppose U.S. and British policy against the dictatorship in Iraq!

It is today an insidious tactic of Germany and France—who together have provided Iraq with more facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear production than anyone—to demand that Iraqi refugee scientists, never mind scientists in Iraq, openly expose themselves to death at the hands of Saddam for telling to the international media the truth about the weapons programs they worked on. This is particularly obnoxious when the German secret service knows all too well the nature of the materials supplied to Iraq.

Friedbert Pflueger, foreign-policy spokesman of the main opposition Christian Democratic parties in Germany, recently accused the Red-Green coalition government of deliberately keeping the German and world public uninformed of bnd (German Intelligence Service) evidence of the continued existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. “If we trust our [intelligence] services, and I do, then we know that there exist weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

In February 2001, the bnd compiled a report, and Intelligence Chief August Hanning told Der Spiegel magazine that, “Since the end of the U.N. inspections [December 1998], we have determined a jump in procurement efforts by Iraq,” adding that Saddam was rebuilding destroyed weapons facilities “partly based on the German industrial standard.” The lists of suppliers to Iraq contain many of the leading German firms, at least one of which, Preussag, is intimately connected to Chancellor Schröder.

As the Franco-German empire in Western Europe (in the disguise of the European Union) consolidates its power over other nations—including the constitutionally castrated Britain—so the French and German governments have become more aggressive and arrogant. The expansion to the east by the European Union was to be the achievement of the German historic destiny frustrated in 1918 and 1945. For France and its Napoleon admirers, the eastern expansion would prove the visionary nature of that “great leader of Europe,” who was stopped in his imperial tracks by Wellington!

But the arrogance of the Franco-German political class never anticipated that the Eastern applicants for membership of the EU would be anything other than sycophants and blind followers of the Franco-German project. The Iraq affair has exposed both the aggressive nature of the imperialist European superstate and the fact that those nations that just escaped from the dictatorship of the Soviet Union will not willingly tolerate a similar oppression by the EU.

Those who forget history are condemned to relive it. The tragedy in Britain is that its politicians never even knew any history in the first place. Fortunately the Bush administration is learning fast. The true nature of its so-called Allies on the continent of Europe has never been more evident.

Rodney Atkinson is one of the most highly praised political economists in Britain. An occasional adviser to ministers of government, he is a prolific author on the subject of the uniting Europe. His most recent books are Europe‘s Full Circle and Fascist Europe Rising. For more information, visit his website at www.freenations.freeuk.com.