Iraq
The question about the involvement or non-involvement of the Danish Ministry of Defence in the leaking of a story about the deployment of Danish elite troops in Iraq in 2007 has been making the rounds in the media during the last week.
Now, to me there is something deeply problematic about the way the MoD handled the Afghanistan story and to put it bluntly, I wouldn’t buy a used car from someone working there, but somehow the leak story is a minor – and probably not too important – part of a larger story concerning Iraq, something which Niels Krause-Kjær indirectly points to in his latest blog post.
What has had me wondering for quite some time is this: The invasion in Iraq was deeply controversial in a lot of countries and it is fair to say that Tony Blair, José Maria Aznar and maybe one or two other European heads of government effectively lost their mandates due to their decision to support Bush43.
But Denmark stands out as a spectacular exception – it may not be the only country where the government survived Iraq without damage, but the way Anders Fogh Rasmussen and the Danish government has managed to make Iraq in general and the question about the breach of international law in particular a complete non-issue in Danish politics is very interesting.
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Category: Politics | Tags: Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark One comment »
February 11th, 2010 at 00:25
Interesting question. In the USA, the war was initially suported by a majority, but since about 2005 most people have considered it a mistake and want the troops back home. And the Republicans lost badly in the elections in 2006 and 2008, and it also played a major part in the Democratic presidential nomination.
In Britain, there was never majority support of the war, but the main opposition party also supported the war. The war-supporting governments lost the next elections in Spain and Italy, although Berlusconi has since returned to power. But strangely enough, in Denmark, where the war was supported by a much smaller majority in the parliament, it does not seem to have had much political impact, not even after it had gone south.
And what about Afghanistan? In many countries opposition to the war has been increasingly higher. Last year, for the first time there was a majority opposing to war in the USA. This had been the case in Canada and Germany for many years. A majority wants to in the UK and in Norway too. But in Denmark, which according to this article has lost nearly twice as many soldiers per capita than the USA, the antiwar movement still seems to be weak.
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/scandinavia-at-war/