From the News Telegraph Web Site


Transatlantic anger
(Filed: 11/02/2003)


The newspapers of "old Europe" and those of America gave free vent to a growing sense of transatlantic anger and frustration yesterday.

The Washington Post, the very grandest newspaper in the United States, and the New York Post, its most terrier-like tabloid, rarely agree on much. But they were as one on the perfidy of wavering European allies and, above all, France.

In Washington, condemnation came from Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state. Dr Kissinger gave warning that Nato faces its gravest crisis since its creation five decades ago.

France and Germany must hope to see Saddam Hussein survive as the head of a regional superpower, with weapons of mass destruction, Dr Kissinger wrote.

New York's tabloid Post sent Steve Dunleavy, its most pungent columnist, to the largest American war cemetery in Normandy. "Surrender" screamed the front page headline above a photograph of American headstones. "They died for France but France has forgotten."

Dunleavy wrote: "These kids died to save France from a tyrant named Adolf Hitler. And now, as more American kids are poised to fight and die to save the world from an equally vile tyrant, where are the French? Hiding. Chickening out. Proclaiming: 'Vive les wimps'."

But in France, the secret plan to disarm Iraq was tentatively celebrated by newspapers in Paris as Europe's revenge on the hawks in Washington, particularly Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary.

Newspapers of every political leaning cautiously welcomed the idea and speculated that a diplomatic union in Paris, Berlin, Beijing and Moscow could provide a powerful alternative in the United Nations to what is perceived as a unilateral American drive to war.

"Resolution against resolution: Those in favor of an immediate war against those in favor of prolonged inspections; it's now the Bush clan against the Chirac clan," noted the conservative Figaro in an editorial.

In Germany, the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was highly critical of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's handling of the crisis. Under the headline "Final Attempt", it accused him of isolating Germany and dressing up as a peace plan what it sees as an attempt to buy time.

Under the headline "Alliance in an Uproar", the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung said the rift between Germany and America put Nato's existence under grave threat.
 

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