From Der Spiegel: “Die Bushkrieger” 8/2002
Illustration: Jean Pierre Kunkel.

When it comes to the Bush administrations’s war on terror and the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, the German weekly Der Spiegel has certainly come a long way. Back in February 2002, the Hamburg-based center-left magazine published the (in)famous cover story “The Bush Warriors: America’s Campaign Against Evil,” which featured a controversial drawing of President Bush dressed up as Rambo and flanked by Colin Powell as Batman, Donald Rumsfeld as Conan the Warrior, Dick Cheney as the Terminator, and Condoleezza Rice as Xena, the Warrior Princess. In essence, the article argued that the United States, in response to the 9/11 attacks, had embarked on a world-wide military crusade led by a bible-wielding, trigger happy Rambo in the Oval Office. From a purely artistic point of view, the pop-art style piece by French-born artist Jean Pierre Kunkel was certainly well done. From a political perspective, however, it is, in retrospect, quite striking that less than six months after the 9/11 attacks (and well before the 2003 Iraq war) one of Europe’s most influential magazines already saw America and Europe on diverging paths in the fight against Islamic terrorism, arguably the defining challenge of our times. Over the past few years, as the transatlantic rift widened due to fundamental differences over hot button issues ranging from climate change to Guantanamo, Der Spiegel has, in general, been very critical of the Bush administration’s foreign and domestic policies. Against this backdrop, I had my own “O’Hanlon-Pollack moment” when learning that this week’s cover story of Der Spiegel— titled “Baghdad Babylon: SPIEGEL-Reporter with U.S. Soldiers in the Iraq War,” provided an unexpectedly upbeat assessment of the current surge strategy in Iraq. For three weeks in July, Der Spiegel reporter Ullrich Fichtner and his photographer traveled across Iraq under the auspices of the U.S. military to get a first-hand impression of the situation on the ground. Online, the 15-page in-depth Iraq trip article titled “The Hellish Peace” is only available to Spiegel subscribers: During an online-chat yesterday about his recent trip to Iraq, Ullrich Fichtner provided the following assessments: