Pace

Foreign troops are still stationed in Germany. Since WWII we have Americans, French and British. The Russians have all pulled out. Elvis Presley was stationed in Germany and serenaded to soldiers and Germans alike. I believe also James Blunt’s family lived in Germany.

The American military bases in Germany are said to be of strategic importance. In the movie “Taking Chance” you can see one such air-base, Ramstein. A lot of American military planes go through there. Apparently detained suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists were also flown around the world via Germany.

The problem for Germany is that these were unregistered flights. The American forces have until now also not disclosed details on the flights. As part of Bush’s “war on terror” most of these suspected terrorists were subsequently held without trial, indefinitely, and later tortured in secret prisons in Eastern Europe or Guantanamo. Germany does not support the torture of prisoners. But, indirectly, has given the Bush administration a hand in it.

I’ve only recently heard that foreign nuclear arms are also stationed in Germany, and, not safely at that. German politicians have no real influence over this question (neither does the German people) but NATO does. Germany does not have any nuclear arms of its own and is a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

As a sad last news for this blog entry: Germany’s arms industry is thriving. 60 years after the end of WWII and only 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany is the third largest arms exporter in the world after the US and Russia. Our defence budget is also much larger than I thought: in 2008, at $ 46.8 billion, we have the sixth largest defence budget in the world, just behind Russia.