The 8th Circle is featuring a thoughtful personal essay by Annika M. Hinze, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who shares her experiences with how Germany’s opinions of the United States have changed over the years – which of course is one of the major forces behind the EU country’s close relations with today’s Kremlin.

Robert A. Dahl, one of the most prominent American social scientists would call the actions of the Bush administration in the years and months leading up to the war in Iraq an example of manipulative persuasion (i.e. when an agreement of the people is obtained through manipulation, lies, and misleading information). In the end, this false information, and the actions that it resulted in could only be questioned at the expense of one’s own patriotism. Does this make it better what happened on the other side of the Atlantic? Hardly. The single-issue-based re-election of the German Chancellor Schroeder illustrates the polarization around the Iraq-debate.