Germany Led by Merkel Would Have Participated in Iraq War - 9/11 Books Author

If Germany had been led by the current government of Angela Merkel in the early 2000th, the country would have been directly involved in the Iraq War, which was a part of the War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks on the US, Mathias Broeckers, a prominent German journalist and the author of two books on September 11, 2001 events, told Sputnik.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — While the US operation in Afghanistan in 2001 was widely supported by the international community and authorized by the UN Security Council, the invasion of Iraq split not only the EU elite, including that of Germany.

"It was only by chance — that a social democrat like [Gerhard] Schroeder was chancellor — that Germany did not take direct part in the Iraq War. With Merkel in the seat, German military would have gone, she even went to Washington to apologize for Schroeder's decision," Broeckers said.

In August 2002, Germany's Social Democratic-Green Party government announced that Berlin would not provide troops or money for the invasion of Iraq and would stay out of it, even if the UN gave its approval. Merkel, heading at that time the opposition Christian Democratic Union, said Schroeder's decision contradicted "German state interests." According to 2003 media reports, in private discussions with representatives of the US delegation Merkel admitted that a CDU-led government would have signed the declaration of the eight European states giving full support to the United States.

Apart from mixed reaction to the US-led Iraqi campaign, Germans treat the mainstream account of the September 11 events with most skepticism in Europe. A poll conducted by the Emnid Institute on the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center showed that as much as 89 percent of the German respondents did not believe the official story behind the 9/11 events.

"Like in the US large parts of the German people don't trust the official story of 9/11, which is sold to them by their governments and mainstream media. On the other hand, there is a large 'cognitive dissonance' in realizing that our own democratic states and services could be actively involved in horrible crimes like that. So it's psychologically more easy and convenient to push the blame on an evil towel-head in an Afghan cave, even if you know that this can't be really true," Broeckers said.

A poll conducted in 2008 by WorldPublicOpinion.org found that the majority in nine out of 17 countries, besides the United States, believed al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks. Many others still believe in a number of 9/11 conspiracy theories with some suggesting that Israel was somehow involved in the attacks and that members of the US government may have deliberately covered up and falsified events in order to hide negligence or even complicity in the attacks with the idea that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition.

Broeckers authored two books titled "Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories and the Secrets of 9/11" and "Facts, Forgeries and the Suppressed Evidence of 9/11," in which he is casting doubt on the official version of the events that shocked the world 15 years ago.