With This Much Disk Space, Who Needs Friends?

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/226581/with-this-much-disk-space-who-needs-friends/



Germany no longer plays a major role in America's new worldview, nor in its international ambitions.

With This Much Disk Space, Who Needs Friends?
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany
By Stefan Kornelius
Translated By Ron Argentati
15 November 2013
Edited by Gillian Palmer

~snip~

The United States is as active now as it was before the Berlin Wall came down. With such different conditions over 20 years, it's no surprise that the two nations have embarked on divergent paths. The pendulum has swung erratically during that time. The years under George W. Bush saw the development of a different security policy, a worldview and a sense of threat not shared by a majority of Germans. Barack Obama began with major modifications, but in the critical areas of intelligence gathering and the use of unmanned drones, the chasm between Germany and the U.S. continued to widen.

The majority of Germans did not concur with America's quantum leap in security policy; today, they do not share the same feeling of impending threat or agree on what methods should be used to oppose it. Meanwhile, Germany cannot propose any alternative strategies for dealing with al-Qaida, Gadhafi, Iran or cybercrime, for example. All that is needed for the crisis to blossom are a few ingredients like constitutional excesses (Guantanamo, torture, etc.) and the usual culture war cliches that have been around — unchanged — since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville. Materialism and overweight cowboys are still with us today in myriad variations.

Thus, the image of what German policy and those responsible for making it should be is distorted. German politicians today are saddled with the often ugly business of silently weighing national interests against morals and concurring with the American security architecture from which they profit — as long as they don't have to deliver too many unpleasant messages to the German people.

The list of those responsible includes the German interior minister, the chief of the German intelligence services and the minister of defense. Blame is also shared by the Green Party: Srebrenica had nothing in common with Auschwitz, even if it facilitated military participation in the war there. And in that vein, no, as everyone now realizes, Kunduz wasn't really about access to drinking water and safe routes for kids walking to school.