NATO Urges Europe to Adapt to U.S. View on Terrorism

The head of NATO said today that there was a critical “perception gap” between Europe and the United States on the subject of global terror and that Europeans must move closer to the American view of the seriousness of the threat. “Your country focused very much on the fight against terror while in Europe we focused to a lesser extent on the consequences for the world,” Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s secretary general, said in an interview. “We looked at it from different angles, and that for me is one of the reasons you saw such frictions in the trans-Atlantic relationship.” As a result, he said, Europe was lagging behind the United States in merging external and internal security to combat terrorism, and Europe had to catch up. “If the gap is to be bridged, it has to be done from the European side and not from the United States,” he said, adding that the conflict in Iraq, the issue that helped divide the alliance, now provided an opportunity for uniting it. “Where allies very much agree and must agree is the fact that whatever ways they have looked at the war in Iraq and the run-up to it and the split we saw, we cannot afford to see Iraq go up in flames,” he said. “It is everyone’s obligation that we get Iraq right.”Full Story