The Bu$h malAdministration has quietly scored a major diplomatic coup. Whether the story will be trumpeted worldwide as yet another major victory by Mr Bu$h remains to be seen.

As reported today by the NY Times:

Germany has made it official: it is prepared to move out of its postwar pacifist mode and undertake a greater role in global security. Good. There has been no good reason for some time why Germany should not do its share of global peacekeeping and peacemaking. Defending Germany’s borders, to which its army was restricted after World War II, is hardly a consuming mission in today’s Europe.

Berlin’s new position paper on international security, issued last week, points to a welcome expansion of Germany’s role in conflict prevention, peacekeeping and antiterrorist actions. That is especially important now, when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and multiple peacekeeping missions in Africa have strained the military resources of America and its leading NATO allies.

Military ties to the United States will remain at the heart of Berlin’s defense policy. But larger and more robust troop contributions from the most populous European NATO country can help restore a measure of political balance to an alliance increasingly distorted by Washington’s military role.

This news will of course be treated with mixed reviews both in the domestic and international markets because Germany has worked hard since the end of WWII to shed the reputation of an international bully – a mantle the Bu$hies have striven to assume.

The taboos against deploying German troops overseas have been steadily falling away at least since 1992, when a few German medics were dispatched to Cambodia. Today, Germany has about 10,000 soldiers serving on missions in Afghanistan, the Balkans and Congo, and German warships are patrolling the Lebanese coast. But the Germans have usually avoided roles that could involve combat. Those in Afghanistan, for example, are involved in reconstruction. Under the new policy, Germany would presumably engage in all aspects of peacekeeping operations.

Since 1992? A sensible man would speculate that the Clinton Administration certainly had something to do with all this outward looking German foreign policy. That was the year when Germany officially first sent uniformed troops outside its borders when some medical personnel were ordered to Cambodia. (“Officially” because use of GSG 9 units outside German borders has never been acknowledged.) In 1999, in response to a Clinton Administration bid to ease the ethnic strife in Kosovo, German troops were committed to Kosovo as part of the NATO peacekeeping contingent.

And of course Japanese troops were part of the multi-national force sent to Afghanistan and to Iraq after the American conquest, but were withdrawn from Iraq after Prime Minister Maliki’s government assumed responsibility for security in the province where they were supplying reconstruction help and humanitarian aid.

Spiegel Online describes these actions as the result of

[A] 2006 White Paper [which] is aimed at upgrading the national security policy for an era of "assymmetrical [sic] threats" like terrorism and providing peacekeeping or security-building forces in Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere. In the wake of 9/11 Germany is also part of that assymetrical [sic] threat. In one of the more controversial points, the paper cites "the need to expand the constitutional framework for the deployment of the armed forces," including on home soil in exceptional cases where police authorities alone cannot overcome a threat. The new White Paper also affirms Germany's international commitment in particular to NATO and the European Union, and mentions the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a potential threat, and defines keeping sea channels clear for international free trade and "secure access to energy resources" as primary national interests.

Response in Germany has been mixed, in part due to the unfortunate instance of some photos taken in Afghanistan of Landsers playing with a human skull.

[T]he mass-circulation Bild newspaper indirectly expresses its own doubts about Germany's role in international missions. The Wednesday edition of the paper shows pictures taken in 2003 of German soldiers in Afghanistan amusing themselves in obscene ways with a human skull. Alongside that report, a commentary strongly condemns the soldiers' "repulsive activities," and says that these revelations raise new questions: "Are soldiers of the Bundeswehr sufficiently trained and prepared for foreign assignments? Are their superiors always aware of their great responsibility? Does the selection process for these missions need to be reviewed and revised where necessary?" The military leadership "owes the answers to these questions to the German soldiers risking life and limb in Afghanistan and other parts of the world," the paper concludes.

In one of the pictures, a soldier mounts the skull on the cablecutter at the front of a patrol vehicle, which bears both the German flag and the acronym for the international force, ISAF.

In another, a soldier in camouflage uniform and a bullet-proof vest poses with the skull next to his exposed penis.

Bild said the photographs were taken in spring 2003.

Soldiers do strange and sometimes repulsive things in wartime. They can be understood, yet never condoned. During WWII, many soldiers of all countries are supposed to have harvested gold teeth fillings from corpses. Legends of US troops collecting ears from dead NVA are not legends.