Victory has many friends: U.S. public opinion and the use of military force, 1981-2005

International Security

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2005, Pages

  Eichenberg, Richard C ^a  

^a TUFTS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 25644446714     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/0162288054894616     Document Type: Review

References (102)

1. The average includes surveys through February 14, 2005. I provide a more precise definition of support for the war in later sections of the article; briefly put, the average includes all public opinion survey questions that ask about support for the war or the subsequent occupation, including questions about this support in light of the human and financial costs. Figures for June 2005 are from http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.
2. Support for the war in Vietnam bottomed out at 28 percent in May 1971. See John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley, 1973), pp. 54-55.
3. Ibid., p. 61.
4. Another study that largely confirms Mueller's finding on casualties in Vietnam is Miroslav Nincic, "Casualties, Military Intervention, and the RMA: Hypotheses from the Lessons of Vietnam," paper presented to a conference on the revolution in military affairs, Monterey, California, August 1995.
5. For a discussion of the impact of casualties in Iraq and several previous conflicts, see John Mueller, "American Public Opinion and Military Ventures Abroad: Attention, Evaluation, Involvement, Politics, and the Wars of the Bushes," paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 28-31, 2003.
6. Bruce Russett and Miroslav Nincic, "American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force Abroad," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 91, No. 3 (Autumn 1976), pp. 411-423.
7. The unpopularity of U.S. intervention in civil wars has been a consistent finding in the quadrennial surveys conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. For a retrospective summary, see Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Worldviews, 2002: American Public Opinion & Foreign Policy, http://www.worldviews.org.
8. Bruce W. Jentleson, "The Pretty Prudent Public: Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (March 1992), pp. 49-74;
9. Bruce W. Jentleson and Rebecca L. Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent: Post-Cold War American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 42, No. 4 (August 1998), pp. 395-417.
10. Jentleson, "The Pretty Prudent Public," p. 50;
11. Jentleson and Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent," p. 400.
12. Jentleson and Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent," pp. 399-400.
13. Quoted in Jentleson, "The Pretty Prudent Public," pp. 53-54.
14. In a comprehensive study of U.S. Army education and training practices, Eric Giordano finds that the increasing importance of stability operations in army doctrine was not matched by a substantial increase in education and training for the mission. See Giordano, "The U.S. Army and Nontraditional Missions: Explaining Divergence in Doctrine and Practice in the Post-Cold War Era," Ph.D. dissertation, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, November 2003.
15. Interview by Adam Heyerson for Policy Review, summer 1993,
16. as cited in Richard Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy since Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 209.
17. Jentleson and Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent," pp. 408-414.
18. Ibid., p. 406.
19. The strongest argument for the importance of multilateral participation is Steven Kull and I.M. Destler, Misreading the Public: The Myth of the Isolationist Public (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1999).
20. For additional works that treat the issue for specific historical cases, see Richard Sobel, "To Intervene or Not to Intervene in Bosnia: That Was the Question for the United States and Europe," in Brigitte L. Nacos, Robert Y. Shapiro, and Pierangelo Isernia, eds., Decision-making in a Glass House: Mass Media, Public Opinion, and American and European Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 177-194;
21. Steven Kuli and Clay Ramsay, "U.S. Public Opinion on Intervention in Bosnia," in Richard Sobel and Eric Shiraev, eds., International Public Opinion and the Bosnia Crisis (New York: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 69-106.
22. For a thorough analysis of both polls and scholarship on multilateralism, see Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 258-288.
23. A listing of opinion surveys on the UN is provided on the web page of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, "America and the World," http://www.americans-world.org/digest/global_issues/un/un_summary.cfm.
24. For a digest of surveys concerning the need to gain UN endorsement of a war against Iraq, see http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq5.htm.
25. One recent survey did test the burden-sharing argument directly. Shortly after the U.S. presidential election in November 2004, the German Marshall Fund Transatlantic Trends survey asked respondents their reasons for having a favorable opinion of the UN. In the United States, 33 percent of those with a favorable opinion replied, "We can't afford to pay the whole cost of international actions; we need others to share the cost." The plurality response in the United States (and also France and Germany) read, "Many global problems can't be solved by any single country." See Post Electoral Study, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: German Marshall Fund of the United States, February 7, 2005).
26. Jentleson, "The Pretty Prudent Public," pp. 53-54;
27. Jentleson and Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent," p. 410.
28. Eric V. Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1996), p. 12;
29. Eric V. Larson, "Putting Theory to Work: Diagnosing Public Opinion on the U.S. Intervention in Bosnia," in Miroslav Nincic and Joseph Lepgold, eds., Being Useful: Policy Relevance and International Relations Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000);
30. Eric V. Larson and Bogdan Savych, American Public Support for U.S. Military Operations from Mogadishu to Baghdad, MG-231-A (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2005). For a precise analysis of support for the war in Vietnam as a cost-benefit calculation,
31. see Nincic, "Casualties, Military Intervention, and the RMA."
32. Essentially the same logic is articulated by Mueller, "American Public Opinion and Military Ventures Abroad."
33. Richard A. Brody and Richard Morin, "From Vietnam to Iraq: The Great American Syndrome Myth," Washington Post, March 31, 1991,
34. as cited in Louis Klarevas, "The 'Essential Domino' of Military Operations: American Public Opinion and the Use of Force," International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 3, No. 4 (November 2002), p. 428.
35. Richard C. Eichenberg, "Gender Differences in Public Attitudes toward the Use of Force by the United States, 1990-2003," International Security, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer 2003), pp. 134-135.
36. Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 63. This study also examines the gap in opinions between civilians and military personnel at both the elite and mass levels, but I focus here on the issue of casualty sensitivity among the mass public only.
37. Ibid., pp. 116-120.
38. Ibid., p. 97.
39. Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver, and Jason Reifler, "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," Duke University, n.d., http://www.duke.edu/~gelpi/iraq.casualties.pdf., p. 17.
40. Ibid., pp. 28-35.
41. Larson, Casualties and Consensus, chap. 4.
42. Larson builds on John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
43. his argument is broadly compatible with the theory of presidential approval articulated in Richard A. Brody, Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion, and Public Support (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991).
44. The importance of leadership consensus is confirmed statistically in Jentleson and Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent," pp. 408-409
45. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy;
46. Eugene R. Wittkopf, The Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990).
47. Larson, Casualties and Consensus, does examine individual survey items on casualty tolerance, but there is no comparison across all historical cases of the sort that I present here. For additional comparison of survey items that seek to establish a threshold of casualty tolerance,
48. see Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, pp. 116-120;
49. Mueller, "American Public Opinion and Military Ventures Abroad";
50. Larson and Savych, American Public Support for U.S. Military Operations from Mogadishu to Baghdad.
51. There are a number of additional studies that are largely compatible with those cited above. For a comprehensive review, see Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, pp. 95-105.
52. For a recent synthesis with comparisons to Iraq, see Mueller, "American Public Opinion and Military Ventures Abroad."
53. For additional analysis of the Lebanon, Persian Gulf, and Somali cases, see Steven Kuli and Clay Ramsay, "The Myth of the Reactive Public: American Public Attitudes on Military Fatalities in the Post-Cold War Period," in Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia, eds., Public Opinion and the International Use of Force (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 205-228;
54. James Burk, "Public Support for Peacekeeping in Lebanon and Somalia: Assessing the Casualties Hypothesis," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114, No. 1 (Summer 1999), pp. 53-78.
55. Two studies begin by arguing that the casualties hypothesis is "to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy; politicians use it as an alibi to avoid taking their responsibilities seriously." Both studies appear to conclude, however, that public opinion is in fact quite sensitive to casualties. See Philip Everts, "Public Opinion after the Cold War: A Paradigm Shift," in Nacos, Shapiro, and Isernia, Decision-making in a Glass House, pp. 177-194;
56. Philip Everts, "War without Bloodshed? Public Opinion and the Conflict over Kosovo," in Everts and Isernia, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force, pp. 229-259.
57. Nicholas Lemann, "The Next World Order," New Yorker, April 1, 2002, p. 3.
58. The full text of the survey question on toleration of casualties in a hypothetical war with Iraq is reprinted in Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), p. 485.
59. The results are discussed in Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, "How Many Deaths Are Acceptable? A Surprising Answer," Washington Post, November 7, 1999.
60. Janet Gross Stein, "Deterrence and Compellence in the Gulf, 1990-91: A Failed or Impossible Task?" International Security, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1992), p. 167. Stein does identify many other reasons for the failure to deter Hussein.
61. Barry R. Posen, "The War for Kosovo: Serbia's Political Military Strategy," International Security, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Spring 2000), p. 50.
62. Christensen refers to this as the "Somalia analogy" in Chinese thinking. See Thomas J. Christensen, "Posing Problems without Catching Up: China's Rise and Challenges for U.S. Security Policy," International Security, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Spring 2001), pp. 17-18.
63. For case summaries of the episodes studied here, see Jentleson, "The Pretty Prudent Public";
64. Jentleson and Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent";
65. the analytical histories provided in Barry M. Blechman and Tamara Cofman Wittes, "Defining Moment: The Threat and Use of Force in American Foreign Policy," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114, No. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 1-30;
66. Richard N. Haass, Intervention: The Use of Military Force in the Post-Cold War World, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1999).
67. The signal works are James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Mood, Cycles, and Swings (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999);
68. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
69. The same philosophy is also evident in Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
70. I include only nationally representative probability samples of the entire population (thus excluding surveys of likely or registered voters or segmented polls of particular population subgroups). The average sample size is 859. The largest number of surveys came from the iPOLL database available to members of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut (and also available via Lexis-Nexis). In addition, I retrieved surveys from archives at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at the University of North Carolina; the InterUniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research; the Pew Center for the People and the Press; the Program on International Policy Attitudes; and the yearly Transatlantic Trends surveys conducted by the German Marshall Fund since 2002. Gallup surveys on the Persian Gulf War are taken from John Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), supplemented by later retrospective questions retrieved from the archives listed above.
71. This includes questions that ask if respondents "favor" or "agree" with a specific action involving the military means of policy. As further described below, these military actions include general statements about the use of force or military actions; air and missile strikes; war; use of naval forces; deployment, maintenance, or increase of troops abroad; provision of advisers or training; and the sale or provision of military goods.
72. Approval of the president's handling of the situation in Iraq is analyzed in Richard C. Eichenberg and Richard J. Stoll, The Political Fortunes of War: Iraq and the Domestic Standing of President George W. Bush (London: Foreign Policy Centre, July 2004), http://fpc.org.uk/fsblob/271.pdf.
73. Jentleson, "The Pretty Prudent Public," pp. 54-55;
74. Jentleson and Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent," p. 400.
75. Survey by CBS/New York Times, December 13-17, 1998. A similar version of the question has been regularly administered by the ABC/Washington Post survey, the NEC/Wall Street Journal poll, and occasionally by others. A version employed by the Gallup Poll is not included here because it does not specifically mention costs and benefits in the question.
76. There is a fairly standard sequence in survey questionnaires on the potential or actual uses of military force. Generally, survey organizations ask about (1) attention to the matter; (2) approval of the president's "handling" of the situation; (3) approval of the action itself (e.g., "air strikes" or "send troops"); and (4) occasionally about approval if casualties would be suffered (including the "worth it" question discussed here). For an analysis that supports my argument that the "worth it" question is tied to military actions through questionnaire effects, see John Zaller and Stanley Feldman, "A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 36, No. 3 (August 1992), pp. 579-616.
77. For example, there were 82 survey questions during the war over Kosovo concerning approval of air strikes, deployment of ground troops, and deployment of peacekeepers. None of these questions inquired about the risk of casualties associated with these actions. Survey organizations did, however, ask the "worth it" question sixteen times during the war.
78. Michael Howard, "Reassurance and Deterrence," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Winter 1982/83), p. 309.
79. The high support level for "going to war" is only a partial contradiction of this inference. Almost all of the questions about support for "going to war" occurred before and during the two wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 (support for "war" in other episodes is much lower). Support for "war" against Iraq in 1991 was indeed high before, during, and after the war. In contrast, in the 2003 Iraq war, the high levels of support for "going to war" before and during the war declined sharply after the end of major hostilities on May 1, 2003. In a subsequent section, I argue that the combination of mounting casualties and the uncertain prospects for success produced the decline in the latter case.
80. Al Richman, "The American Public's 'Rules of Engagement' in the Post-Cold War Era," paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 1-4, 1994.
81. Such an experiment was included by the German Marshall Fund in its Transatlantic Trends survey in June 2003. Respondents were asked about using military force if Iran or North Korea "acquired weapons of mass destruction," but different subsamples of respondents were told that the decision to use force had been taken by "the United States," "by NATO," or "by the United Nations Security Council." Support for using force among both U.S. and European citizens was approximately 10 percentage points higher in the version of the question that mentioned either NATO or the UN. See Transatlantic Trends, 2003 (Washington, D.C.: German Marshall Fund of the United States, released September 4, 2003).
82. In the Somalia case, the shift in mission from humanitarian purposes to active pursuit of the warlords is already captured by clear differences in question wording, so the two can be analyzed separately.
83. To accomplish this, I classified only two types of action as true "peacekeeping operations." The first is mention of sending peacekeepers when there is no suggestion that these forces would participate, or assist, one side in an internal conflict. The second involves questions about military actions to protect peacekeepers or facilitate their evacuation, but again only if there is no suggestion that the forces would participate in the conflict or assist any of its parties.
84. This is the same approach taken in Jentleson, "Pretty Prudent Public," pp. 59-64. Jentleson finds that support levels for the "mixed" cases fall between those for foreign policy restraint and internal political change.
85. Although a thorough analysis is beyond the scope of this article, it is interesting to note that U.S. support for peacekeeping operations is substantially lower than support in European and other countries for the same missions. For example, the support of European citizens for peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo averaged 57 percent in almost 100 surveys - compared with 47 percent in the United States. For further data and analysis, see Richard C. Eichenberg, "Global Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force from the First Gulf War to the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," Tufts University, May 30, 2005, http://ase.tufts.edu/polsci/faculty/eichenberg/web.asp.
86. As noted earlier, many surveys do include follow-ups that mention the acceptable number of deaths. These follow-ups, however (which do tend to reveal the sensitivity to casualties), seem to get lost in the reporting of the "main" questions on using force.
87. Casualty figures, updated through February 14, 2005, are taken from the following sources. For episodes prior to 2001, U.S. Department of Defense, Worldwide U.S. Active Duty Military Deaths, http://web1.whs.mil/mmid/casualty/table13.htm;
88. U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Military Operations: Casualty Breakdown, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/casualties.htm.
89. Figures for the "war against terror" (Operation Enduring Freedom) and the war in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) are from the U.S. Central Command, as summarized at http://www.icasualties.org. Casualties include hostile and nonhostile fatalities in theater.
90. I define the hostilities phase in Somalia to have begun on June 6, 1993, when the UN Security Council called for the apprehension of those responsible for the deaths of twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers the previous day. The first attack by U.S. and UN forces against those of the rebel leader Mohammed Farah Aidid took place on June 12, 1993.
91. This no doubt results from the avoidance of hostilities in Haiti. Nonetheless the increase in support for sending troops in an instance of internal political conflict is significant, and it suggests that the public viewed the negotiation of the occupation (under threat of invasion) as a "success."
92. Larson, Casualties and Consensus, p. 12.
93. The regression includes the groups of variables that showed a plausible relationship with public support in previous sections of this article (Tables 3-7). I also analyzed a number of additional variables in the survey database, but none proved statistically significant. For example, mentioning "ground" troops is negatively correlated with support when taken alone, but it is not significant in this regression, presumably because the variable "send troops" already taps into sensitivities about sending "ground" troops. The same is true of questions that mention the actual number of troops or the existence of an international mandate for military action ("send troops" and multilateralism already capture these effects). In sum, I am confident that I have included the variables that are prominent both in the theoretical literature and in the empirical results of prior sections of this article. The regression also included a control for the unusually low support scores for North Korea.
94. The phrase "remove Saddam Hussein from power" has been used in 112 survey questions since 1992.
95. Eichenberg and Stoll, The Political Fortunes of War;
96. David Karol and Edward Miguel, "Iraq War Casualties and the 2004 Presidential Election," University of California, Berkeley, November 30, 2004.
97. Space precludes an extended presentation of data. For analysis of these points, see Eichenberg and Stoll, The Political Fortunes of War;
98. Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler, "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq." The best compendium of polls on Iraq is http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.
99. This confirms the importance of presidential leadership. On this point, see Jentleson, "Pretty Prudent Public";
100. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles.
101. For polling results, see http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm
102. The text of the president's address is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050628-7.html.