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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (43533)	9/12/2002 3:24:18 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 281500

I am sorry, I saw an abstract of the poll last week, but I do not have it at my fingertips. I will see if I can find it......

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (43533)	9/12/2002 3:30:25 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 281500

This is the best I can do: washingtonpost.com In Public Opinion, U.S., Europe More United Than Apart By Glenn Frankel Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, September 4, 2002; Page A01 LONDON, Sept. 3 -- At a time when the Bush administration and many European leaders are at loggerheads over a variety of foreign policy and security issues, public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic is more united than the noisy debate indicates, an extensive opinion poll released today suggests. Substantial majorities in both the United States and Europe say they believe the United States should invade Iraq only with U.N. approval and the support of U.S. allies, according to the survey, which was conducted in June. It also found that large majorities of Americans and Europeans hold similar views about international terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and the use of military force to deal with such threats, actual and potential. Americans and Europeans also largely agree that it is desirable for both the United States and the European Union to exert leadership in world affairs, and sizable majorities -- 77 percent of Americans and 76 percent of Europeans -- support the statement that the United Nations "needs to be strengthened." "Despite all the talk about disagreements, there's an impressive amount of convergence on how Europeans and Americans view the world," said Craig Kennedy, president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which co-sponsored the poll with the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. "There's a lot of agreement about threats and how to deal with them and about the need for the United States and Europe to work together." The poll surveyed 3,262 Americans and 1,000 people in each of six European countries -- Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. The U.S. poll was conducted by Harris Interactive and the European poll by Marketing & Opinion Research International. Margin of error varies between 2 and 4 percent, according to the survey. The poll found that American perceptions of the world had undergone a profound shift since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, with terrorism vaulting to the top of the list of international concerns. Respondents expressed a higher degree of interest in world news than in surveys during the past 30 years. Ninety-one percent in the U.S. poll called terrorism a "critical" threat, and 61 percent agreed that Washington needs to work more closely with other countries to fight it. Although people on both sides of the Atlantic agreed generally about the use of military force, there were sharp differences about how to pay for it. Twenty-two percent of Europeans wanted to expand defense spending, but 33 percent would cut it. By contrast, 44 percent of Americans wanted to increase defense spending while 15 percent wanted a reduction. Americans were more positive about the Bush administration, with 53 percent ranking the White House's handling of foreign policy as excellent or good, while 56 percent of Europeans rated it fair to poor. The biggest gap was on the war in Afghanistan; 60 percent of Europeans rated the administration fair to poor while 55 percent of Americans rated it excellent to good. But on other specific issues, the two sides tended to converge. Seventy-four percent of Europeans and 61 percent of Americans rated the administration fair to poor on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and 71 percent in Europe and 62 percent in the United States gave the White House low marks for its handling of Iraq. Fifty-five percent of Europeans agreed that U.S. foreign policy contributed to the Sept. 11 attacks. There was no corresponding question for American respondents. "I don't read this as criticism of the U.S. so much as it reflects the European view that America really is the superpower and what it does affects everything," Kennedy said. In ranking the seriousness of such issues as political turmoil in Russia, economic competition, global warming and international terrorism, Americans and Europeans tended to agree. One exception was China's development as a superpower; 56 percent of Americans saw this as a critically important issue, while only 19 percent of Europeans did. There was widespread support for the use of military force in specified situations. For example, 92 percent of Americans and 76 percent of Europeans approved of using force to destroy a terrorist camp, 77 percent and 78 percent, respectively, would use it to liberate hostages, and 76 percent and 80 percent thought it should be used to uphold international law. washingtonpost.com