By Frank Davies
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The American public strongly supports the use of U.N.-authorized multinational force against terrorist threats and genocide, as opposed to unilateral U.S. action, according to a survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.
Since 2002, when the group last conducted a similar survey, the public sees international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and the prospect of enemies acquiring nuclear weapons as less of a "critical threat." Two years ago, 83 percent of the public saw the threat of unfriendly countries becoming nuclear powers as critical, compared with 64 percent this July.
"An explanation for these declines could be that Americans are discounting the gravity of these threats after three years without another direct terrorist attack on American soil, or may have become skeptical of alarms about them, including the now questionable imminent danger of Saddam Hussein's Iraq," the council concluded.
The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations is an independent forum, and its poll is regarded as one of the most comprehensive surveys of foreign-policy attitudes. The survey of 1,195 people, conducted by the marketing company Knowledge Networks, had a plus-or-minus margin of error of 3 percentage points.
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