Using Bush as an Acceptable Cover to Bash America

Read Manfred Gerstenfeld's hard-hitting interview with Jeffrey Gedmin, the director of Berlin's Aspen Institute, which Davids Medienkritik correctly terms "the interview of the year". Here is an excerpt from the excerpt:

"Dependency on America during the Cold War has bred terrible European resentment. Americans have underestimated how deep that runs. …

"Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said that Germans were tired of being a satellite of the United States. All this before we had made any decision about what to do in Iraq."

"I remember passing the American embassy on Unter den Linden and seeing a sign hanging out there for weeks from protesters, which read: 'Mr. Bush, remember Nüremberg. Death by hanging.' It leaves me to believe that part of this debate about Iraq — and maybe much of it — had to do more with containing the United States than with whether Saddam Hussein should be removed."

"Why has it become so acceptable that — at elegant dinner parties — very distinguished people openly say, 'I'm not anti-American, but Bush disgusts me and makes me physically sick? He is a war criminal and a real threat to world peace.' I can only interpret such statements as being partly about Bush and partly about using him as an acceptable cover to bash America.