One respondent did not even back the U.S. war in Afghanistan. "Totally? No, I don't support it," said Rosalynn Boyd, 42, a hairstylist and owner of Buck's & Aja's hair salon in St. Louis. "They haven't presented any proof to me. I'm seeing things on another side. I've got a different view of it. I have to look at it as a black point of view."

Asked what that means, Boyd, who is African-American, said it comes down to mistrusting the government. She said she is not even convinced that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network are responsible for the Sept. 11 terror attacks. "We don't know that," she said. "We've only been told that."

Boyd also echoed Roby's sentiments about taking care of America's domestic problems first. "I think we should be right here in the United States and stopping some of the murdering here. We've got the same thing, it's just in a lower key. I don't think [overseas conflicts are] our business, I just don't. Take care of our own first, then maybe we can help others."

But others were equally adamant about America's global responsibilities. "The U.S. should always be involved," said Clint Hickel, a San Francisco collections agent. "We've got the most stuff, we make the biggest contribution to the U.N. We need to use them."

Hickel was one of several respondents who asserted that America's global responsibility was not just military, but economic and diplomatic. "If we're going to claim the title 'leader of the world,' we have some responsibilities to fulfill, and it's not just a matter of the military," said Dick Castile, 70, a Korean War veteran and retired schoolteacher in Mill Valley, Calif. "A lot of the time, we wait too long to get involved. We should be more engaged in building countries, not just fixing problems after the fighting has started."

"I'd rather we find a way in [global crises] to help with the humanitarian stuff, but keep the military and the government itself away, at least further back," said Laurel Palmer, 28, a Web designer in Minneapolis, adding that she thinks the aid should be distributed through nongovernmental organizations such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. "Too many people in the world see [U.S. intervention] as politically motivated, and it just seems to cause more trouble than it's worth."

Manhattan resident Suzanne Wasserman, 44, an associate director of the Gotham Center for New York History who describes herself as a liberal Jewish-American, struggles not only with the question of whether the U.S. should intervene in a given situation, but when it should. "It's a big question," she said. "Should we have intervened in Bosnia? In Nazi Germany? And when do we do that? Did we do it too late? Six million Jews were killed, hundreds of thousands of people in Bosnia died [before the West intervened]. So it's like we're damned if we do and damned if we don't."

Turning away from the subject of using military force, we asked about nation-building. With Afghanistan lying in ruins, and the government of interim leader Hamid Karzai ruling only over Kabul, we asked -- just prior to Karzai's visit to the White House -- what the U.S. role should be in rebuilding Afghanistan, most of which is still under the control of various warlords. We found, again, a diversity of opinion, but a lot of reluctance to engage in nation-building, surprising only in that no one mentioned the disastrous U.S. attempt to establish order in Somalia that ended in 1994.

"No," said Benjamin Lofton, a 42-year-old security guard and janitor in San Francisco, when asked whether the U.S. should help rebuild Afghanistan. "We need to only help other countries when they can help us."

"No, sir," agreed Cross, the retired welding inspector in Alabama. "They let bin Laden or whoever that idiot is come in there and they supported him, and then he attacked America. He was in Afghanistan when all this was going on, so we went in there and cleaned their clock."

Reminded that the average Afghan didn't support bin Laden, Cross replied, "They didn't do nothing against him either."

"I'm the kind of fellow," he added, "that thinks that if you get somebody down -- kick 'em. That'll give them an incentive to get up."

Pamela Carrasco, a 37-year-old martial arts teacher from Walnut Creek, Calif., who said she was a Clinton supporter, took a less harsh line. "It's so weird," she said. "We go blow [Afghanistan] up and then we go fix it. I don't think we should spend a lot of money on [rebuilding Afghanistan], but we should do something -- some kind of gesture of support."

"Our record at helping countries rebuild has been pretty abysmal," said New Yorker Wasserman. "Our record in Iran and Guatemala and El Salvador has been to put in someone who will comply with our view of the world -- that's led to why people around the world resent us. It comes back to bite us in the ass. I don't see the Bush administration doing nation-building the way it might be done, but on the other hand, I don't think we should bomb the hell out of [Afghanistan] and then leave."

Lilavois, the corporate trainer in Florida, said it's up to business, not government, to rebuild the devastated country. "The government should oversee corporate investment in Afghanistan. That way we have a win-win situation -- minimal tax dollars used, companies get cheap labor and a new marketplace, and Afghanistan becomes part of the global economy."

Deck, the Kansas City retiree, said his feelings about helping postwar Afghanistan were influenced by his TV watching, making him more sympathetic to the idea of nation-building than he normally would be. "I guess I've just seen the devastation on television, and what has happened to these people over the years. And I've never to my knowledge known an Afghan, but I just, I guess I've seen it on television, seen how the people have suffered. And let's face it, that's why they put it on television."

Palmer, the Minneapolis Web designer, said that we have an obligation in Afghanistan because of our military actions there. "I think that it would be a good idea for us to help out. I mean, we helped destroy it," she said. "We've finally got a government in there that the United States seems to like, so I guess maybe doing something to help with that would be a good idea."

Recent Stories