The perception held by most Americans - justifiably so - is that Europeans strongly disapprove of the United States' presence in Iraq and would like nothing more than for us to quickly withdraw from the country.

Well... not so fast. The Atlantic Community, an "open think-tank" based in Berlin, has surveyed more than a dozen of the continent's top foreign policy analysts on how America should structure its policy vis-à-vis Iraq. The results are surprising.

"There is apparent consensus among European policy analysts that American troops should remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future...

"Many consider the announcement of a timetable for withdrawal to be counter-productive and even outright dangerous, saying that lack of American involvement would drive Iraq into further chaos..."

Ironically, nearly 7 in 10 American foreign policy experts surveyed by the Center for American Progress were in favor of a drawdown and redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq.

So what could possibly bring Europe's foreign policy intelligencia closer to the Bush administration than its American counterpart? A number of things, actually. For starters, European politics is, for better or worse, moving gradually towards the right when it comes to handling the Islamic world. Mr. Sarkozy's election in France undoubtedly underscores said shift.

But the main explanation behind the Atlantic survey seems to be a simple and primal sense of endangerment. As one of the authors of the report, Will Nuland, told me: "Europeans on the street don't support the war on the same grounds or level that Americans support it. What we found, however, is that European policy makers and analysts see that a fall out of the chaos in Iraq would, in the end, come to affect Europe."

If, as some predict, Iraq degenerates further into a terrorist state or a state sponsor of terrorist (you get the point), London and Paris and Munich and so on will feel the aftershocks; perhaps sooner and more severely than Americans. Of course, few of these European countries have boots on the ground -- which might make it easier for the reigning sentiment among these foreign policy experts to be in favor of "continued military involvement to secure a still tenuous security situation, and against any rushed exit from Iraq for the sake of short-term political goals."

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