Public opinion and war

George Packer in a recent interview commented on the Bush administration's failure to plan for the post-conventional war "stabilization" phase in the Iraq War: An author's confession - he got the war wrong: George Packer supported Iraq invasion, but now fears spiraling civil conflict Interview by Steven Winn San Francisco Chronicle 12/04/05.  Packer says:

It was magical thinking on their part. In the weeks following the fall of the statue in Baghdad, every step they took was geared toward a quick departure with all but about 30,000 troops left behind. That shows they had no strategic idea whatsoever of what was going on. That is the belligerence that I hold them most accountable for, and that history, I think, will as well.

They took the domestic political battle over the war more seriously than they took the war itself - pinning the Democrats in a defensive position, bringing the American public over to their side, making sure that at every turn they polarized the debate rather than uniting the country, discrediting their critics such as Joseph Wilson and trying to win the propaganda war over what was happening in Iraq and whether it was going well or badly. They thought if they could win that, Iraq would take care of itself. Over and over again, while their backs were turned and they were focused on these things, Iraq was slipping out of their control. It's really staggering to say it, but Bush rolled the dice in the biggest war of any president in my lifetime and he didn't take it seriously. (my emphasis)

Packer's comment brought to mind this article: Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst by Scott Shane New York Times 12/04/05. It discusses how Bush's Iraq War speech this past week and the accompanying Victory in Iraq pamphlet was influenced by a political scientist and his view of public opinion toward war:

Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the ["Victory in Iraq"] document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.

Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polls, Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.

That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory is Clear."

I think Feaver is half-right.  A reasonable prospect of success has been recognized at least since the days of St. Augustine and his theory of the just war as being a vital consideration in whether to support a war or not.

Feaver also has a point in another argument on this topic, which he presents (with some justification) as being in defiance of conventional wisdom:

Based on their study of poll results from the first two years of the war, Dr. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver and Jason Reifler, then a Duke graduate student, took issue with what they described as the conventional wisdom since the Vietnam War - that Americans will support military operations only if American casualties are few.

They found that public tolerance for the human cost of combat depended on two factors: a belief that the war was a worthy cause, and even more important, a belief that the war was likely to be successful.

In their paper, "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," which is to be published soon in the journal International Security, Dr. Feaver and his colleagues wrote: "Mounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."

John Mueller, a leading authority on public opinion and war in the US, makes the argument that casualties drive public opinion: The Iraq Syndrome by John Mueller Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2005.

Looking at the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the current Iraq War, Mueller argues that as the casualties rose in each war, public support for the war waned.  All wars are popular in the first 30 days or so.  It's a primeval instinct: us against them, our side against the outsiders.

But it's one thing to say that rising casualties are correlated with rising public discontent with a war.  It's another thing to determine the causes of that discontent.  And still another to derive a general lesson about whether the American public is particularly "casualty-averse".

First of all, anyone in their right mind doesn't need a statistical analysis to know that casualties in a war will concern most of the public.  The propagandists and Big Pundits may get all philosophical about the relative size of the sacrifice.  But most people know that soldiers get killed in war.

But Mueller also suggests that the public opinion of the goals of the war are also a critical factor:

The most striking thing about the comparison among the three wars is how much more quickly support has eroded in the case of Iraq. By early 2005, when combat deaths were around 1,500, the percentage of respondents who considered the Iraq war a mistake - over half - was about the same as the percentage who considered the war in Vietnam a mistake at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive, when nearly 20,000 soldiers had already died.

This lower tolerance for casualties is largely due to the fact that the American public places far less value on the stakes in Iraq than it did on those in Korea and Vietnam. The main threats Iraq was thought to present to the United States when troops went in - weapons of mass destruction and support for international terrorism - have been, to say the least, discounted. With those justifications gone, the Iraq war is left as something of a humanitarian venture, and, as Francis Fukuyama has put it, a request to spend "several hundred billiondollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to ... Iraq" would "have been laughed out of court." Given the evaporation of the main reasons for going to war and the unexpectedly high level of American casualties, support for the war in Iraq is, if anything, higher than one might expect - a reflection of the fact that many people still connect the effort there to the "war" on terrorism, an enterprise that continues to enjoy huge support. In addition, the toppling of Saddam Hussein remains a singular accomplishment - something the American people had wanted since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. (my emphasis)

He argues against the conventional wisdom on several points:

Many analysts have tried to link declining support to factors other than accumulating combat deaths. For example, the notion that public opinion sours as casualties increase has somehow turned into "support drops when they start seeing the body bags" - a vivid expression that some in the Bush administration have apparently taken literally. As a result, the military has worked enterprisingly to keep Americans from seeing pictures of body bags or flag-draped coffins in the hope that this will somehow arrest the decline in enthusiasm for the war effort. But such pictures are not necessary to drive home the basic reality of mounting casualties.

Growing opposition to the war effort also has little to do with whether or not there is an active antiwar movement at home. There has not been much of one in the case of the Iraq war, nor was there one during the war in Korea. Nonetheless, support for those ventures eroded as it did during the Vietnam War, when antiwar protest was frequent and visible. In fact, since the Vietnam protest movement became so strongly associated with anti-American values and activities, it may ultimately have been somewhat counterproductive. (my emphasis)

I would argue that his statement that there has "not been much of" an antiwar movement must be based on a very narrow concept of what an antiwar movement looks like.  Presumably, he means here massive street protests over a long period of time.  He continues:

Moreover, support for the war declines whether or not war opponents are able to come up with specific policy alternatives. Dwight Eisenhower never seemed to have much of a plan for getting out of the Korean War - although he did say that, if elected, he would visit the place - but discontent with the war still worked well for him in the 1952 election; Richard Nixon's proposals for fixing the Vietnam mess were distinctly unspecific, although he did from time to time mutter that he had a "secret plan." Wars hurt the war-initiating political party not because the opposition comes up with a coherent clashing vision - George McGovern tried that, with little success, against Nixon in 1972 - but because discontent over the war translates into vague distrust of the capacities of the people running the country. (my emphasis)

Mueller also does not find that the prospects of success as such are likely to be decisive in turning around opinion on a war. For one thing, he argues that the Korean and Vietnam Wars don't really provide any clear periods of "success" to allow for a real measure of its effect.  And:

Moreover, it is difficult to see what a spate of good news would look like at this point. A clear-cut victory, like the one scored by George H.W. Bush in the Gulf in 1991, is hugely unlikely - and the glow even of that one faded quickly as Saddam continued to hold forth in Iraq. From the start of the current Iraq war, the invading forces were too small to establish order, and some of the early administrative policies proved fatally misguided. In effect, the United States created an instant failed state, and clambering out of that condition would be difficult in the best of circumstances. If the worst violence diminishes, and Iraq thereby ceases to be quite so much of a bloody mess, the war will attract less attention. But there is still likely to be plenty of official and unofficial corruption, sporadic vigilantism, police misconduct, militia feuding, political backstabbing, economic travail, regional separatism, government incompetence, rampant criminality, religious conflict, and posturing by political entrepreneurs spouting anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric. Under such conditions, the American venture in Iraq is unlikely to be seen as a great victory by those now in opposition, over half of whom profess to be not merely dissatisfied with the war, but angry over it. (my emphasis)

He predicts, not implausibly, that an "Iraq syndrome" is likely to take hold of a majority of Americans as a result of the disaster known as the Iraq War.  His prediction sounds mostly optimistic to me, because there is so much about the Bush Doctrine and current policies that need to be critically examined and revised. But no one can really say at this point exactly what forms the reaction to the Iraq War will take:

Among the casualties of the Iraq syndrome could be the Bush doctrine, unilateralism, preemption, preventive war, and indispensable-nationhood. Indeed, these once-fashionable (and sometimes self-infatuated) concepts are already picking up a patina of quaintness. Specifically, there will likely be growing skepticism about various key notions: that the United States should take unilateral military action to correct situations or overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible but that present no immediate threat to it, that it can and should forcibly bring democracy to other nations not now so blessed, that it has the duty to rid the world of evil, that having by far the largest defense budget in the world is necessary and broadly beneficial, that international cooperation is of only very limited value, and that Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners are naive and decadent wimps. The United States may also become more inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes even showing signs of humility.

There is no one overriding factor in determining public support for a war.  A short, low-casualty conflict for relatively small stakes could be expected to be reasonably popular.  A long, high-casualty war for high stakes would likely be more controversial.  But, as the example of the Second World War shows, public support can be sustained.  Although it is worth noting in this regard that Franklin Roosevelt was only narrowly re-elected in 1944 during the war.

One of the most important things about democracy - in the long run, perhaps the most important thing - is that the decision-makers who start wars and prosecute them have to be judged by the voters.  And, despite the undeniable effects of war fever, patriotism and jingoism, ordinary people just don't much like war.  So democratic leades are always forced to make a positive and convincing case for wars.  And that's the way it should be.