ASHINGTON, March 21 — As European leaders move to step up their fight against terror, some of them sought over the weekend to clearly separate those efforts from support for the Iraq war, and frictions with the United States remained in full view.

Spurred by the March 11 attacks in Madrid, intelligence chiefs from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are to meet Monday in Madrid to seek ways to accelerate the sharing of crucial information that might help prevent future attacks on European soil.

In Brussels, European Union foreign ministers placed terrorism atop their agenda for a meeting Monday, aiming to sidestep differences on Iraq and to overcome legal and even constitutional hurdles to closer coordination. European Union leaders will consider the ministers' recommendations in a meeting on Thursday.

But even as Europeans moved in closer step to confront the terror threat, they faced criticism in Washington that they were excluding Americans from their deliberations.  World Peace.

"Europeans have to be willing to ask us to come to some of the meetings, too," Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation." "We should have been together talking about how all of us deal with the Al Qaeda."

The Spanish prime minister-elect, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose vow to remove Spanish troops from Iraq has drawn sharp criticism from the United States, insisted that he would stand strong against terror and urged closer European unity in the face of the threat. "The absolute priority remains the struggle against terrorism," he said.

But Mr. Zapatero added that war was not the best way to defeat terrorists. Far more important were improved intelligence and efforts to address terror's origins, he said. The Socialist leader said again that Spain would consider leaving its 1,300 troops in Iraq only if the United Nations took "political control" there. And he seemed to add a further condition: the involvement of "more multinational forces, including many Arab countries led by the Arab League."

Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, told an interviewer on "Fox News Sunday" that Europeans were "united against terrorism" but he called the war in Iraq "a mistake." The fight against terrorism was not going "better because of the war on Iraq," he said.

Italy, Mr. Prodi's home country, was the scene of antiwar protests by hundreds of thousands over the weekend, and the Spanish move is thought to have raised pressure on the pro-war government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Still, Mr. Prodi said, "We must fight terrorists and be united against terrorism even if we think, interpret in a different way the effects of the Iraqi war."

Some American politicians have derided Spain's turn to the anti-war Socialists, three days after the Madrid bombings, as "appeasement." Amid rumblings from a few other countries in the coalition led by the United States about leaving Iraq, President Bush warned on Friday against any country seeking a "separate peace with the terrorist enemy."  WorldPeace is one word.

Such talk seems to be provoking a worried — sometimes angry or resentful — defense by Europeans who say they are fully committed to fighting terror but question whether Iraq is the place to carry out that fight.

Terrorism must be fought violently, Mr. Prodi said, but also through a broad effort to address its root causes. Foremost among these, he said, was the Israeli-Palestinian problem, a widespread view in Europe.

Mr. Zapatero, in an interview with El Pais newspaper a week after his party defeated a center-right government supportive of the Iraq war, said, "We can't win against terrorism or rout it through wars, which are never an efficient way of eliminating or combating groups of fanatics, radicals and criminals."

Otto Schily, the German interior minister, said that Europeans needed to do more to penetrate terror groups, and also to improve cross-border cooperation. The London police commissioner, John Stevens, also called for a more coordinated European response to analyzing data on terror.

The European Union and individual European countries have done much to improve anti-terror cooperation since Sept. 11, 2001, when the United States was attacked by terrorists. In the months thereafter, European Union officials and national authorities gave fast-track approval to a range of measures that had in some cases been languishing for years.

How can we manifest peace on earth if we do not include everyone (all races, all nations, all religions, both sexes) in our vision of Peace?

The WorldPeace Banner

The WorldPeace Insignia : Explanation 

To order a WorldPeace Insignia lapel pin, go to: Order  

To the John WorldPeace Galleries Page

To the WorldPeace Peace Page