Joschkar Fischer gave an interview to Spiegel in which he talks about his time as Germany Foreign Minister under Schröder. Fischer revisits the reason why Germany chose not to support the Iraq War. He makes convincingly the point that the decision had nothing to do with anti-Americanism, but more to do with a concern that America was taking on more than it could chew. Sugary excerpt:
It wasn't a quarrel. The chancellor sent me to Washington on Sept. 18, 2001, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. I met with several people there, including President George W. Bush and (then Deputy Secretary of Defense) Paul Wolfowitz. There was talk of 60 countries that were supposedly supporting and funding terrorism. After that I became deeply concerned that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were next in line. I thought it was a big mistake from the very beginning. A horrible government was in power in Baghdad, but I was convinced that this should not be at the center of the response to this crisis.
[...] Schröder said that no matter what the United Nations Security Council decided, we would not be part of it. This sidelined the German position of abiding by the Security Council's decisions. And it put us in a tight spot. As fate would have it, we became a member of the Security Council on Jan. 1, 2003. There was also the risk that we would end up having to oppose all of our Western partners. If Russia and France had agreed to the war, we would have joined Syria as the only naysayers. […] We were truly in a bind. I made it clear that if we were isolated I would not be a part of it, and that I would resign. But for Schröder it was clear that he had given the German public his word during the campaign, and that he couldn't back down now. It would have forced him to resign.
[…] In my view, we couldn't have let ourselves be isolated in the end. There would have been some damage on the domestic political front, but we would have come to an agreement. The truth is that it became much easier for us once Paris and Moscow had taken a clear stance, the right stance. While we're on the subject, allow me to set something straight. It was repeatedly claimed that there was an anti-American axis. That's nonsense. We and the French were deeply concerned that the United States was biting off more than it could chew in Iraq, and that it was taking a fatally wrong step. We told ourselves that we could not afford a weakened United States. The concern was that the United States would ultimately leave behind a vacuum that neither the Europeans nor anyone else could fill. That's precisely the situation we are in today.
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