BERLIN — Germany’s interior minister said it was time to put aside differences with the United States over Iraq and look to the future as President Bush won a second term, but another senior official reiterated Wednesday that German troops will not join the coalition there.
Ties between the two countries were strained by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s vehement opposition to last year’s U.S.-led war in Iraq, although the two governments since have moved to repair relations.
“America is a very important partner, if not the most important one and that’s how it will continue to be,” Interior Minister Otto Schily said.
Schily said he had “excellent” cooperation in recent years with the Bush administration and noted that relations between Schroeder and Bush also have “clearly improved.”
“We had differences over Iraq, but we’re not looking back now we’re looking to the future,” he said.
His comments came in the hours before Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry called Bush to concede after a long, tense night of vote counting.
Germany has offered to help rebuild Iraq and is helping train the new Iraqi police and military. But “the German military will not be sent to Iraq, independently of who becomes president in the United States,” Karsten Voigt, the foreign ministry’s top official for relations with Washington, said on ARD television.
“I hope that a re-elected President Bush would use the chance offered by his re-election for a new beginning in European-American and German-American relations,” Voigt said, adding that the U.S. leader would do well to “approach the Europeans … and say, ‘Let us sit down and talk about where we have common interests.’
“That is necessary on the Middle East, it is necessary and possible in fighting terrorism and in the question of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, but it is also needed in the question of AIDS, climate protection and other issues.”
Schroeder refused immediate comment on the election.
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer also pledged close cooperation with the United States.
“I have said that we will continue to cooperate positively,” Fischer said. “In international politics, we face difficult challenges that cannot be mastered without close cooperation between Europe including our country and the United States.”
But a view held by many left-of-center European politicians surfaced in comments by a lawmaker in Schroeder’s governing party, who called Bush “a fundamentalist” and said he was “worsening polarization in the world.”
“America is counting on strength and power because it views itself as the chosen country,” Social Democrat Michael Mueller said.
Dialogue was needed with the United States to restore its “common sense,” he said.
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