The killing of thousands in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington last week has prompted great unity of purpose in the US, cemented by shared outrage. President Bush has called on the world to unite against barbarism.
But while Europeans have expressed enormous sympathy and solidarity, they have also been divided in their responses. A debate has begun over whether the inconsistencies of US foreign policy and the sheer weight of US dominance in the world, mean that resentment of the US -- even, in extreme cases, hatred -- is inevitable.
An abyss separates the criticism that has surfaced from the suicidal attacks. There was no rejoicing or support in Europe for the killing of so many Americans. Many Europeans wept and the continent fell silent for a moment last week in remembrance of the dead.
But it has also become clear that some Europeans -- not a majority, but not an insignificant number -- feel that ordinary Americans have largely floated on a tide of prosperity, triumphalism and indifference to the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their view is that the US has now been confronted with a sobering reality.
For those critics, Americans are now facing unsurprising retaliation from an important part of the Islamic world that considers America to have declared war on its faith.
The arguments are sometimes simple -- America should expect war in return for bombing Iraq regularly. Some Europeans also contend that many Americans have a blinding confidence in their own goodness and so do not see that the acts of the US are regarded in many quarters as driven by the domineering pursuit of national self-interest.
European writers and intellectuals have pointed to a catalog of actions that include the bombing -- in reprisal for the terrorist bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998 -- of one of Sudan's two pharmaceutical factories on the challenged grounds that it was linked to Osama bin Laden, aid to Israel to buy weapons used against Palestinians, or even the US' refusal to intervene to stop the mass killings in Rwanda.
Matthew Parris, a former member of the Conservative Party of the British Parliament, wrote in The Times of London, "The bigger they come, the harder they fall."
Disgusted by calls for quick revenge, Parris wrote: "Do they think a terrorist is like a pin in a bowling alley: one down, nine to go? Do they want to give Osama bin Laden his very own Bloody Sunday?
"Do they not know that when you kill one bin Laden you sow 20 more? Playing the world's policeman is not the answer to that catastrophe in New York. Playing the world's policeman is what led to it."
Violence is a `legitimate daughter'
Dario Fo, the Italian playwright and satirist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997, said bluntly in a widely circulated e-mail: "The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty -- so what is 20,000 dead in New York?
"Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation."
There have been other voices that pointed to bin Laden's various enemies: not just the US but also the autocratic Islamic governments that Washington supports, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait.
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