Meanwhile, in Germany
: A few updates from the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung:
: Germany and France stonewall the issue of forgiving Iraq’s debts — hiding, as has become their new habit, behind the U.N., as if they are not soverign nations capable of making their own damned humanitarian decisions.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary of the United States, has asked Germany, France and Russia to forgive debt to Iraq totaling around EUR20 billion ($21.8 billion), of which it owes Germany EUR4 billion. But the German chancellery remained tight-lipped, saying only that the United Nations was in charge of forgiving debt.
:Meanwhile, Joschka Fischer, the German Green foreign minister who is apparently up for the new position of EU foreign minister, got into an diplomatic tussle with Wolfowitz:
[Wolfowitz] accused Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of twisting the contents of an exchange between the two men in Washington just days after the collapse of the World Trade Center in September 2001.
Fischer told Der Spiegel magazine:
