Jack Straw, Britain's Foreign Secretary, has urged European governments to increase their defense spending to take on the threat of global terrorism.
The CNN Europe article also has a chart showing defense expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) for 1980-1984, and again in 2000 for the members of NATO. Every nation except Turkey and Italy showed a decline, and shows that six nations currently spend 1.5 percent or less of their GDP on defense expenditures. (The US figure was 3 percent.)
Another point made in the article is a sharp increase in British support for the campaign against Iraq; it shot up 10 percent in one week, to 42 percent. The survey was conducted by the Wanker, so it is fairly safe to say that it was not designed to inflate the figure for support of the war.