European Commission president Romano Prodi said the US-led war in Iraq has not made the world safer from terror attacks but that Europe and the United States must work together against terrorists.
"I don't think that in reality the situation in the fight against terrorists is better because of the war in Iraq, clearly it's not," Prodi told Fox News channel in an interview broadcast Sunday.
But Europe and the United States must overcome differences over the Iraq war, Prodi said on the one year anniversary of the Iraq war.
"We must fight against terrorists and be united against terrorism even if we think, interpret in a different way the effects of the Iraqi war," he said.
Terrorism and the Iraq war should not be confused, Prodi warned.
"And, you know, if you confuse the two things, (it) will be (a) disaster."
Transatlantic relations have begun to improve following sharp rifts that opened before the US-led war, the European Union leader said.
"If you mean that there is an increasing division between Europe and US, I don't agree, honestly," he said. "The situation is much better than one year ago."
Prodi said "the problem of the war remains," but that "our co-operation is becoming better and better."
There are two ways to combat terrorism, Prodi said in an interview taped in Bologna, Italy on Saturday.
"One is strong reaction, even, I say, violent reaction against any form of terrorism. Second is a work to find some political solution," he said, adding that terrorists should be isolated.
After the Madrid bombings that killed 202 people, Prodi said Europeans "consider ourselves under attack ... we are all under attack."
Influential Republican Senator John McCain, who also spoke with Fox, agreed the Madrid attacks
would bring the United States and Europe closer together into a common fight against terror.
"I think that the Europeans may be more inclined to work with us, because those attacks showed that no one's safe," McCain said.
Senator Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic presidential candidate, however, cautioned Europeans not to repeat the mistake of 1938, when British and French leaders signed the Munich Pact in a bid to appease Adolf Hitler.
"I think the question is, now, will we look back at Madrid and see it as Munich or as Pearl Harbor?" Lieberman told Fox, referring to Japan's bombing of the US naval base in Hawaii in 1941 that brought the United States into World War II.
"And Munich, of course, has some indication to people in Europe that they can somehow make a separate peace with al Qaeda. That's ridiculous," he said. "There is no peace with these people who want to kill us all - anyone who is not exactly like them."
"Pearl Harbor, in the sense that America woke up after that attack, and saw the common interest that we had with Europe in stopping fascism and Nazism. And today that's true of terrorism."