THE RELUCTANT ALLY: German Domestic Politics and the War against Saddam Hussein

On September 11, 2001, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany promised the United States “unlimited solidarity” in the fight against terrorism. Only one year later a severe crisis in both American-European and American-German relations broke out. Germany not only refused to support a U.S. invasion of Iraq as part of its war on terror but also declared that it would not support even UN military action against Iraq. Germany’s ostensibly strict opposition to U.S. policy toward Iraq differed strongly from the country’s active role in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, where, for the first time in postwar German history,