An ocean, and a world apart

George Bush arrived Wednesday in Berlin at the start of a weeklong European tour, hoping to put the brakes on a continental drift that is pulling Washington apart from its closest allies over some of the administration's most highly prized goals.

Eight months after Europeans spilled onto the streets to express their sympathy and support for Americans in the wake of 9/11, they are once again adopting their earlier mood of skepticism about US actions in the world.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators voiced such doubts in Berlin on the eve of the president's arrival.

While the attacks on New York and Washington changed the world for many Americans, President Bush will find Europeans less traumatized, and more dubious about his war on terrorism.

Accustomed over the years to terrorism on their soil, both home-grown and imported, Europeans saw the destruction of the World Trade Center as "a larger and much nastier version of things we'd already known," says Guillaume Parmentier, head of the French Center on the US think tank.

When the dust settled and the emotion faded, "most Europeans felt that terrorism is a difficult problem, but they don't feel they are in a state of war against it," adds Bernhard May, an expert on US-European relations at the German Foreign Policy Society in Berlin.

That complicates Bush's task of rallying Europe behind his policy against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, especially if that policy turns out to include making war on Baghdad.

"Military action against Iraq is not justified as long as it is not certain that Saddam supports or shelters al Qaeda terrorists" said Peter Struck, parliamentary leader of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democratic party, on Wednesday.

Evidence of such support has not yet emerged, and neither European governments nor their publics, have amalgamated the threat of terrorism and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in the same way that Washington has.

"When we Europeans talk about the war on terrorism we look at Afghanistan and think things are going fairly well," says Dr. May. "But the Americans are looking at a different world," where the 'axis of evil' comprising North Korea, Iran, and Iraq combines terror threats with weapons of mass destruction, he adds.

"We are not talking to each other, we are just complaining about each other," May says of Europe and the US.

Europe's insistence on seeing evidence that Saddam Hussein possesses nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons before feeling threatened by Iraq has angered US leaders eager to take preemptive action.

The differing attitudes on either side of the Atlantic have something to do with Europe's traditional passiveness contrasted with a more activist American outlook, imbued with a sense of moral certainty.

But they also spring from different instincts. Europe's millennium-old history of warfare, and its efforts to keep the peace over the past 60 years through mutual cooperation, have taught European leaders the value of multilateralism.

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