HOW HE SEES IT Islamic, Western worlds growing apart

By JOHN HALL
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- After last week's brutal killing of two American soldiers in Iraq, repairing the breach between Islam and the Western civilizations won't be easier or accomplished sooner.
Each offense to decency, whether it is this sort of barbarity or the killing of innocents by American troops, strengthens the fence between these two worlds.
Hatred accumulates. My e-mail reeks each day with new and more venomous ways of expressing contempt. A new survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project says misunderstanding in both the Islamic and Western worlds is multiplying. But it suggests that Muslims, particularly in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, have now hardened in their attitudes toward Western civilization.
"Strong emotions get in the way of rationality," said Andrew Kohut, director of the study. "People refuse to believe things."
He was attempting to explain the unexplainable in Islam: growing support for suicide bombing in the Muslim world including 46 percent in Nigeria; and a persistent disbelief that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attack on America. Majorities in Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan hold that view.
The Pew project blames the worsening of attitudes on a particularly harsh year for relations between Muslims and Westerners that saw riots which followed the cartoon portrayals of the Prophet Muhammad, the terrorist attack in London and the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On this side of the divide, the survey found that Germans and Spanish express much more negative views of Muslims and Arabs than do French, British or Americans.
The survey did not measure attitudes in Iraq or Muslim attitudes about the presence of 132,000 U.S. troops and other Western coalition forces on Iraqi soil for more than three years. Kohut said he had no opinion about what Muslim attitudes were on that subject.
How long the new Iraqi government wants the troops to remain there is becoming a central issue in the debate over whether to continue the U.S. commitment to Iraq.
Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., in last week's debate over the Iraq war, came to the Senate floor mourning the loss of Thomas Tucker, the 25-year-old private from Madras, Ore.
'New caliphate'
Al-Qaida, said Smith, was "a serpent with many heads." He agreed with President Bush that it sought nothing less than "a new caliphate in the Middle East" that would destroy Israel and work for the "extermination of Western civilization."
He said Tom Tucker died in that cause and, while he prays daily "for our kids to come home," the problem is that "al-Qaida is counting on us to go home. I want us to see the ugly face of al-Qaeda, and how antithetical they are to the values we have as a nation."
This argument and others like it carried the day in Congress.
By next December, Democrats protested, the United States will have been in Iraq longer than its GIs were overseas in World War II.
Sen. Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential contender, criticized those who "blindly follow the president." She wanted Congress to lay down a roadmap for withdrawal of U.S. forces that the Iraqis themselves have suggested -- a purely advisory amendment to begin withdrawing troops by the end of this year. But that was showered with stern criticism.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., warned that once American forces were out of Iraq, "we will have no leverage to manage things."
He said it was "a long, hard and tough" road ahead and Iraq remained "a central battleground" in the war against the Islamic jihad.
McCain spoke as if the troops will be in Iraq for a very long time, perhaps well into a McCain presidency. McCain has even spoken at other times of sending additional troops.
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad seems to have a shorter-term view of the American presence. He said he gives the new prime minister in Baghdad until the end of the year to pull things together.
"The next six months will be critical in terms of reining in the danger of civil war," he told the German magazine Der Spiegel. "If the government fails to have achieved this, it will have lost its opportunity."
X John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.