FORMER GERMAN chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s opposition to the US-led war in Iraq secured his government’s re-election in 2002 but planted the seed for its own downfall three years later, according to Joschka Fischer.
Germany’s former foreign minister says his relationship with the German leader was undermined permanently by Mr Schröder’s announcement, without consulting Mr Fischer, that Berlin would not support a United Nations resolution in favour of war on Iraq.
Mr Fischer was suspicious of US claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, but argues that Mr Schröder’s all-or-nothing stance had left them with no room to manoeuvre at the UN and left Germany risking diplomatic isolation on the vote.
Mr Schröder’s announcement and his plain-speaking response poisoned their working relationship, Mr Fischer says, and, with it, the basis of the coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens.
“The fronts between us hardened further and, as a result of having no other options, peaked in mutual resignation threats,” he writes in a new volume of memoirs, “which had the sole effect of increasing the mistrust between the chancellor and myself.”
The memoirs cast a new light on dissent behind the scenes of Berlin’s opposition to the US-led war in Iraq, which left relations with the US in a disastrous condition.
Until now, the narrative was of a tight co-operation between Paris and Berlin, but Mr Fischer says that until the end, Paris refused to be drawn on how it would come down on the war.
The so-called Red-Green project reached the end of the line, he writes, after Mr Schröder leaked to the media an idea to dispatch UN peacekeepers to disarm Iraq. What Mr Fischer describes in the book as an "abstract proposal" was beefed up into a Der Spiegelcover story.
“After reading the article it was clear to me that the chancellery of Gerhard Schröder – and with it, too, the Red-Green coalition – had reached the verge of the abyss,” he writes. “Each further mistake – be it ever so small – carried with it the serious risk of of collapse.”
Mr Schröder pulled the plug on his government three years later, and a year early, complaining of a lack of SPD backing for welfare reforms.
Mr Fischer, once a left-wing radical, now works as a syndicated columnist, and as a consultant for BMW, energy giant RWE and the Nabucco gas pipeline project.