ONE-WAY BRIDGE:

Europe Must Adapt to U.S. View on Terror, NATO Chief Says (WARREN HOGE, Nov. 11, 2004, NY Times)

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.

The Europeans thinking only of themselves? Imagine that?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 11, 2004 4:23 PM