Some good news out of Europe: Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s Secretary General, said this yesterday: "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. 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."

"If the gap is to be bridged, it has to be done from the European side and not from the United States.

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. It is everyone’s obligation that we get Iraq right."