Can we get along?

This BBC report is what I was looking for (though I found it on the Boston Globe and not the BBC).

A majority of people around the world do not believe the world is locked in a "clash of civilizations" that will lead to violent conflict between Islam and the West, according to findings of a poll published today.

The British Broadcasting Corp. World Service poll of more than 28,000 people found that 56 percent of respondents believed "common ground can be found" between Muslims and Westerners, while only 28 percent said violence was inevitable.

One of the countries polled was the UAE, where 47% said that conflict was not inevitable, which is lower than the US (64%).

And why can't the BBC pronounce simple American placenames properly? Maryland is not pronounced "Mare - ee - land", it is pronounced "Mare - uh - lind". This struck me last fall when they announced that Detroit was playing "Saint Louie" in the World Series.

Poll About America

So I have been thinking about the BBC poll that I posted about at the community blog so more. It seems like this poll perfectly captures so of the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" attitude that America faces.

Take the world total of these three questions:

Handling of   |  Approve    |    Disapprove
=================================================
Iraq          |     19      |        74
Iran          |     28      |        61
North Korea   |     29      |        54

Say what you will, the US has handled all three of these situations very differently. In Iraq, when the UN refused to grant a resolution authorizing force, the US attacked relatively unilaterally. In Iran, the US has worked with the UN and IAEA to impose sanctions and have inspections. In Korea, the US negotiated an agreement that the North Koreans broke, and since has refused North Korea's demands to negotiate one-on-one, insisting that the other regional powers participate as well.

I am certainly not smart enough to know what the right thing to do is in any of those situations. I'm also sure that there are people out there who don't mind North Korea and Iran developing nuclear weapons or Saddam and his sons remaining in power (operating under increasingly ineffective sanctions that were only hurting the Iraq people and scheming to have sanctions lifted). Those people are not going to be won over by anything that the US would have done in these three situations. But if you assume that all three of those situations are bad, then what exactly was the policy that the US could have chosen that would meet with your approval?