A majority of Harvard students support the United States taking military action against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the nation, but a large minority are unwilling to participate in such actions themselves, a recent Crimson poll shows.

Support for military action drops significantly when respondents were asked whether military action should be taken if innocent people would be killed.

And despite strong support for military action in general, only 38 percent of undergraduates said they were willing to serve in the armed forces and take part in an attack against those responsible if called upon to serve.

Political party affiliation played a significant role in Harvard students’ opinions, with the majority of Republicans willing to serve in the military if called upon and the majority of Democrats saying they were unwilling to do so.

The Crimson surveyed 406 undergraduates over three days in a randomized telephone survey. The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus four percent, with a wider margin when responses are sorted by political affiliation.

While 69 percent of Harvard undergraduates said they support taking military action against whoever is responsible for the attacks that killed thousands in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania, that percentage drops to 28 percent if innocent people would be killed during any military strike.

Nationally, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted on Sept. 14 and 15, 85 percent of adults favor taking military action, with 75 percent still supporting action even if innocent people are killed.

And when asked whether they would support going to war against a nation harboring those responsible for the attack, Harvard students were split 49 percent in favor to 39 percent against.

Ganesh N. Sitaraman ’03, who is also a Crimson editor, said he supports targeting specific individuals rather than going to war.

“In this kind of situation, the people responsible...are these small, little groups of people from terrorist organizations,” he said. “It seems to me the right policy in this case would be to go undercover and infiltrate, and go and kill all of those people rather than, say, declaring war on an entire nation.”

The campus was divided on whether U.S. law should be changed to allow the government to seek out and assassinate people in foreign countries who commit terrorist attacks in the U.S. and elsewhere. Fifty percent of those polled were in favor of changing the law, while 39 percent were not.

And despite the recent broadening of federal surveillance powers, only a minority of students—18 percent—were willing to allow government agencies to monitor telephone calls and e-mails of ordinary Americans on a regular basis to reduce the threat of terrorism.

“We can’t let one attack by terrorists decrease our civil liberties,” said Gabriela Gonzalez ’03. “If we did, then we’d just be caving into what [the terrorists] want.”

But some students disagreed, saying that some sacrifices on civil liberties should be made in order to have greater safety.

“There’s a trade-off between the safety and the fear, and at this point I’d prefer the safety,” said Michal D. Wang ’05. “As a citizen of a major city that’s open to attack, I would much prefer not getting nuked than having privacy.”