29
ratified by the U.S. Senate; it was opposed by President Bush and many Republican
officials. (See Table 5.6.)
(INSERT TABLE 5.6 ABOUT HERE)
Similarly, a substantial majority of the public (75% to 19%) favored the U.S.
participating in “the treaty that bans the use of all land mines.” Millions of cheap land
mines, planted during conflicts in Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and elsewhere, have
killed or maimed tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, sparking an anti-
land-mine campaign led by Nobel-prize-winner Jody Williams and the Vietnam Veterans
of America Foundation. They mobilized government support and prodded some _____
governments to ratify the treaty.
45
This agreement, too, was signed under President
Clinton but rejected by other U.S. policy makers, chiefly because of the Pentagon’s
desires to keep using U.S. land mines on the 38
th
parallel border of South Korea, while
arguing that sophisticated U.S. landmines could be deactivated after they were no longer
needed.
The U.S. public did not give very high marks to President Bush’s abrogation of
the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union (part of his policy to field a
National Missile Defense as soon as possible.) Only 41% said the Bush administration’s
handling of the ABM treaty was “excellent” or “good,” while 43% said “fair” or “poor.”
Supporters of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the U.S. public were
especially numerous among ideological middle- of-the-road Americans and “active part”
internationalists, as well as Catholics and the college-educated. (Catholics’ support for
various international treaties, presumably related to the Church’s humanitarian and
communitarian traditions, stands out in the CCFR data.) But the strongest predictor of
Convention