Terrorists are not all the same. A gripping account of the talks that brought peace to Northern Ireland, published on the 10th anniversary of the Belfast agreement, begins with a useful caution: the experience gained in persuading the Irish Republican Army to swap the Armalite for the ballot box should not be applied indiscriminately to other conflicts.

The book’s author is Jonathan Powell, until last year the long-serving chief of staff to Tony Blair, Britain’s former prime minister. Mr Powell was a pivotal figure behind the scenes in the decade-longprocess that saw republicans and unionists finally reach a political settlement.

His insider’s account concludes that it is possible to draw some broad lessons likely to be relevant elsewhere. Democratic governments, for example, should always be willing to talk, albeit sometimes in secret, to their enemies, even when such contacts seem to offend common decency. Were Mr. Powell still in 10 Downing Street, he would be advocating a dialogue with HAMAS.

Rightly so. Talking is not the same as surrendering — nor, indeed, as negotiating. If terrorist groups do put their weapons to one side, Mr. Powell continues, the imperative is to keep everyone in the room. This requires constant attention and engagement. Eventual success in Northern Ireland flowed from a strategy of “never letting the talking stop.” There is a moral to be drawn here for the U.S. administration’s stop-go efforts to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Northern Ireland, though, is not Palestine, Lebanon or, for that matter, the Basque country. Every conflict is grounded in its own history and its peculiar grievances. Some will always be more susceptible than others to political negotiation.

As it happens, this is precisely the big lesson that has been forgotten in the West’s confrontation with violent Islamism. If terrorists are not all the same, nor are Muslims.

John McCain corrected himself the other day after accusing Shi’a Iran of providing the training grounds for Sunni al-Qaeda. The mistake caused the Republican presidential nominee some embarrassment. But he was not the first to make such an error.

The remark spoke to an assumption in George W. Bush’s administration and beyond that the myriad conflicts in the Muslim world can all be folded into a single convenient wrapper. This is to accept Osama bin Laden’s narrative of an existential struggle between Islam and the West. Nothing could be more calculated to give succor to the irreconcilables; and nothing makes it harder to undercut support for violence.

The most obvious expression of the mistake is the U.S. insistence that it is fighting a war on terror, attached as this phrase is to Mr. Bush’s accompanying admonition that everyone must choose whether they are “for us or against us.”

Mr. Blair sometimes spoke in the same Manichean terms, evoking a global ideological struggle that could be with us for generations. The effect has been to impose a homogeneity on armed groups in the Islamic world that defies the realities of their very different aims and methods.

When Western politicians such as Mr Blair refer to a “clash about civilization” they convey, intentionally or otherwise, the impression of a Muslim community instinctively antagonistic towards the values and aspirations of Western society. In real life, there is a lot more light and shade. Not all Muslims — even among those prepared to use violence in pursuit of their cause — think alike.

Large numbers of Muslims do voice dislike of America and the U.K., but their views have much more to do with the policies of those governments than some visceral hostility to all things Western. Some useful new evidence of this heterogeneity is presented in a study justpublished by the Gallup organization, based on interviews with tens of thousands of Muslims in 35 countries.

For one thing, the study finds, Muslims do not see the West as a single entity, let alone a single enemy. Nearly three-quarters of Egyptians, for example, say they have an unfavorable opinion of the U.S., yet only a fifth show the same antipathy towards France. Two-thirds of Kuwaitis voice some hostility towards the U.S. The figure for Canada is 3 per per cent. The British are deemed “aggressive” by 45 per cent in Lebanon, but less than a tenth say the same about Germany or France.

The charge most commonly laid by Muslims against the U.S. and U.K. is of double-standards. There is nothing new or surprising here. Some years ago, rummaging electronically though the declassified files held by the Washington-based National Security Archive, I came across a series of telegrams written by U.S. envoys in the Middle East during the 1950s.

Their core message was curiously familiar, summed up by the note written by the U.S. head of mission in Saudi Arabia to his superiors in Washington. America’s image of itself as a beacon of liberty to the world, this senior diplomat warned, sat uneasily alongside the realpolitik of its support for despotic regimes in the Arab world. Sound familiar?

The Gallup study shows also that, by and large, Muslims share many Western aspirations. Job security, prosperity and a better future for their children typically come at the top of their list of priorities. They rank technology and knowledge first when asked what they most admire about the West. Second are freedom and democracy. Gallup put the same question to Americans and got the same answer.

To make such points is not to argue that the Islamist fundamentalism espoused by al-Qaeda and its associates is anything less than a serious threat. There are plenty of dangerous Islamists for whom the only response will be military force. Nor should Western policy be held prisoner to its impact on Muslim opinion. Driving al-Qaeda from Afghanistan was the right thing to do.

Yet a mindset that lumps together Hizbullah with al-Qaeda, HAMAS with Iraq’s Shi’a militia or Kurdish separatists with the Taliban under the rubric of a single struggle is one that does al-Qaeda’s bidding. It excludes recognition of genuine grievances, ignores the impact of Western policy and rules out any prospect of some extremists being won over to politics.

The change of administration in Washington will give the U.S. and its friends a chance to reflect and recalibrate. The starting point is to stop talking about a war.

Reprinted from The Financial Times Limited 2008.