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LONDON—
He is safe on the conservative side, too, which is so aggressive about the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign that the new Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, traveled to Washington to urge the Bush administration to expand the Afghanistan attack to include Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein.Any way the numbers are counted, British support for a military response to the terrorist attack remains almost as strong as it was in the first days after Sept. 11. In five national polls starting Sept. 14, almost three of every four people support the use of British troops in the war in Afghanistan.
Opposition has ranged from 20 percent to 28 percent.
Robert Worcester, the American founder and chairman of Market and Opinion Research International--one of England's most prominent polling companies--said that even though personal support for Bush and Blair have dipped a bit since September, support for military action remains strong.
"I guess at this stage, we're all Americans," he said.
The only substantial opposition comes from British Muslims included in a poll a week ago. Just 20 percent of British Muslims supported using British troops in the war, the research group reported. Some 64 percent opposed that move, and the rest had not made up their minds.
Americans embraced
Politics aside, there are other measures of British support for the United States that seem as convincing as the poll results.
Beth Hartnett, who moved to London in August from Portsmouth, N.H., to work in the telecom business with her husband, talked about one of them as she sipped a pint of stout and leaned in the doorway of a friendly pub about two blocks from St. James.
"As an American, all you have to do is let people hear your accent and they just immediately respond to you," she said. "I went to get my shoes fixed, and the minute the guy hears my accent, he says he is so sorry about what happened to all of my people."
Tribune news services contributed to this report.
