From the Chicago Tribune:
Despite promises that the war in Iraq will make the United States
safer from terrorism, residents of the city most affected by terrorism
are far less enthusiastic for the war than other Americans. And the
more personally a New Yorker was affected, the weaker the impulse seems
to be for avenging the more than 2,800 lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
New York’s antiwar chorus includes many lower Manhattan residents,
Sept. 11 survivors and others like the immigrant dishwashers, busboys
and cooks who lost their jobs at the Windows on the World restaurant.
A poll released this week showed that just after the conflict began,
New Yorkers became more supportive of the war and President Bush’s
handling of the conflict. Still, even as about 70 percent of all
Americans back the war, just 47 percent of New Yorkers support it,
while 49 percent oppose it….
“`Rally `round the flag’ is the resounding cry heard throughout the
nation. In New York City, that cry is muted,” said Maurice Carroll,
director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Many New Yorkers with direct ties to the Sept. 11 attacks say their
painful experiences helped form antiwar opinions….
Maria Weisbin, a book editor who has lived six blocks north of the
trade center site since 1979 recalled her husband screaming for revenge
from the rooftop of their apartment building as they watched the towers
burn and collapse.
She supported the war to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan. “I could
throttle bin Laden myself,” said Weisbin, 53.
But she and her husband oppose the war in Iraq, she said, because they
believe there is no connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Sept. 11 attacks.
[emphasis mine]
“We have come the closest of anyone in America to seeing war in our own
neighborhood,” Weisbin said. “We don’t want our grief to be used.”