WorldView/Paul Gillespie: 'Overwhelming majorities in Jordan and Morocco believe suicide attacks against Americans and other westerners in Iraq are justifiable. As a point of comparison, slightly more people in those two countries say the same about Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis."
As for Osama bin Laden, 45 per cent of Moroccans, 55 per cent of Jordanians and 65 per cent of Pakistanis have somewhat or very favourable attitudes to him.
These are among the findings of the latest Pew Global Attitudes Project. It surveyed opinion one year on from the Iraq war in four Muslim countries (these three and Turkey), four European states (France, Germany, Russia and the UK) and in the US.
It is a reliable and well-
established poll conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, chaired by the former US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. Though carried out before the Madrid bombings its findings are highly relevant to the state of public opinion after them (see www.people-press.org).
As Ms Albright put it this week, "There is a huge chasm between the Muslim world and us". She went on to say: "To lessen the gap, we need the unity of the non-Muslim world, and we don't have that unity". Indeed, there is a gulf between European and US opinion.
The poll says baldly: "Perceptions of American unilateralism remain widespread in European and Muslim nations, and the war in Iraq has undermined America's credibility abroad".
As Charles Kapchun, one of the authors of a new report on transatlantic relations from the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, puts it: "In this country Iraq and terrorism are indelibly linked in the public mind. In Europe they are almost as indelibly separated."
Doubts about US motives in going to war abound, and a growing proportion of Europeans want foreign policy and security arrangements independent of the US, and for the EU to become as powerful as the US to check US power - although fewer believe that would make for a safer world.
Large majorities in Germany, France and Russia say their governments made the right decision in not going to war. There is broad agreement in all eight countries (but not in the US) that the war in Iraq hurt rather than helped the "war on terrorism"; a suggestion that made George Bush laugh aloud this week when it was put to him by a Dutch journalist.
In Britain and Russia large majorities support the US view, although support for the war has collapsed in Britain from 61 per cent last May to 43 per cent.
There are majorities or near ones in each state except the US and Britain for the suggestion that US motives are to control Middle East oil, to dominate the world, to target unfriendly Muslim governments; the view that it is to protect Israel is much more strongly held in the Muslim states. But after Madrid would 57 per cent in Germany and 49 per cent in France still back the dominant view in the Muslim states that the US is exaggerating the terrorism threat?
Which way European opinion will go now is a key factor in the political fallout from Madrid. Already the neo-conservative media in the US ring to the charge of Spanish appeasement, with Luis Rodriguez Zapatero playing Neville Chamberlain.
It seems unlikely that basic European attitudes as revealed in this poll will change as a result of the atrocities. Rather, the Spanish electorate made a judgment that Aznar's support for the war made their country more vulnerable to terrorist attack.The huge gulf in perspectives between Americans and others is not narrowing but widening in the Pew surveys; Britain's distinctive stance does not substantially alter that reality.
Romano Prodi's remark this week that the best way to tackle the problem is not by force but preventively takes on a more representative meaning in the light of the poll. "It is clear that the war on terrorism has not been resolved by force", he told Corriere della Sera. Talking to a Maltese paper he said: "Seeing what happened in Turkey, Russia and now in Spain shows me that this war did not decrease the threat of terror, it increased it".
One set of responses flowed from the meeting of justice ministers in Brussels yesterday, a tightening up of security measures and intelligence pooling in the EU, in which the Commission seeks a stronger role, arguing that majority voting should be used to pass such legislation.
Another set of responses must be pitched at a much more political and human level.
Despite the support shown for suicide bombers in Iraq and Israel and towards bin Laden, the great majority of Muslims in Europe and most citizens of north African states reject terrorism and are appalled at the Madrid bombings.
The new Spanish government is pledged to develop closer relations with Morocco, on which the outgoing one took a very hard line, preventing immigration and dealing harshly with illegal migrants. Provisions for intercultural and interreligious dialogue badly need to be strengthened, as do economic and social contacts between the EU and north Africa if the numbers supporting extremist movements are not to grow.
Otherwise the human intelligence necessary to isolate them will simply not be there. In the same way it is
necessary to recognise much more fully how dangerous are the simple civilisational assumptions about Muslim peoples and cultures built into much commentary on such terrorism. Islam is not a totalised unity of communities
facing an equally totalised west, whether Christian or secular.
That is to adopt bin Laden's approach.