New York, NY —

Anchor: A new poll by the Siena Research Institute finds that just 49 percent of New Yorkers support an invasion of Iraq, compared to 63 percent nationwide in the latest Gallup Poll. WNYC's Brian Lehrer has some thoughts on why that might be.

Brian: For most of America, the talk about war is kind of abstract. Good versus evil. Moral versus immoral. Relatively few Americans have friends or family on the front lines to bring the war home.

And talk of Iraqi life is so unreal as to be like Monopoly money. The most cited projection of a likely Iraqi death toll is 50-thousand to 250-thousand dead. You have to be pretty far removed from those people as individuals to think of that as a cohesive range.

But in New York, it's different. Since 9/11, we always feel like we're living in the bull's eye. We share that only with Washington DC. If there is a war, we New Yorkers - and especially we who live or work in Manhattan - will worry more than any other Americans about whether we will be attacked. It would be the first war since The Civil War in which American civilians feel at risk.

I suspect that's a big reason New Yorkers are more opposed to war than most Americans. We take it personally.

And I suspect the New York anti-war rally was so much bigger than expected last weekend not just because many people here think war would be wrong, but also because the government's handling of the war on terrorism is scaring us more than Saddam Hussein.


Look what happened in the days leading up to the rally: the government's duct tape debacle: a badly-explained Orange Alert that degenerated into ridicule over what appeared to be futile recommendations, based partly on tips that the government later admitted were bogus.

If you experienced this bungling mostly through cable news channels in Miami, or Seattle or Dallas, you could shrug it off as a Keystone Kops moment. But the tension was so great in New York, the city seemed ready to explode without a bomb.

Among people I know, committed Manhattan families were revisiting the idea of moving out of town for the sake of their children. People were talking about terrorism jitters with their therapists when they would rather have been talking about their mothers. And one New York radio reporter was having a hard time convincing her LA producer to do a story about terrorism preparedness tips, because in LA they thought it was alarmist. It really IS different here.

No wonder I've been getting e-mail from New York listeners who question if the Orange Alert was staged, to make the country nervous just in time for the UN war debate. It sure made us nervous here. But sorry, Mr. President: it probably made us more dubious about the wisdom of war.

Among the victims of all these jitters: all those people who attended the East Side rally, and the cops who had to patrol it. The Mayor claimed he couldn't allow a march because Code Orange made it too risky. But penning in hundreds of thousands of people on three narrow avenues created a pressure cooker that actual marching would likely have relieved, not exacerbated. Thousands of protesters, hundreds of cops, and at least one horse were the worse for it.

Bottom line: The Siena poll finds that, like other Americans, a large majority of New Yorkers believe Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction. But other Americans think the government is dealing with them well. Most New Yorkers don't.

So maybe, like at earlier times, New York finds itself halfway between America and Europe. Our people are from everywhere, and it shows in our politics. The vulnerability shows in our faces. For us, the war debate is not just a matter of good and evil. It's a matter of life and death.

Anchor: WNYC's Brian Lehrer. You can hear his call-in show weekday mornings at 10 on 93.9 and am820 WNYC.