Success matters - Casualty sensitivity and the war in Iraq

International Security

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 7-46

  Gelpi, Christopher ^a   Feaver, Peter D ^a,b   Reifler, Jason ^c  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b National Security Council Staff

^c LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645737727     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/016228805775969573     Document Type: Review

References (127)

1. Unless otherwise noted, we use the term "casualties" to refer to "deaths." We recognize that in military parlance, casualties means dead and wounded, a much higher number in any conflict. In popular usage, however, the word "casualties" has generally meant those who died while performing their mission. In our own polling, except where noted, we used "deaths" in all relevant question wordings so our claims are not contaminated by any public confusion about the terms. In this article we look only at one aspect of the cost equation - "U.S. military deaths in combat," or "our casualties."
2. The Kay report is not officially published in any single document. David Kay submitted an interim report from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Defense, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on October 2, 2003, but he resigned prior to submitting a final report. His most influential public statement on the ISG's findings was his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28,2004, following his decision to resign from the ISG. For a transcript of Kay's October 2, 2003, testimony, see http://cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2003/ david_kay_10022003.html. For a transcript of Kay's January 28, 2004, testimony,
3. see http://www.ceip.org/files/projects/npp/pdf/Iraq/kaytestimony.pdf. For a complete review of the controversy over Iraqi WMD programs leading up to the Iraq war,
4. see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/index.html.
5. See The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).
6. For the Tyndall Report summary of 2004 campaign coverage, see http://www.tyndallreport.com.
7. The 2003 and 2004 data are from a national sample of adults as sampled by Gallup; 2005 data are from a comparable survey by CBS News. As reported on http://www.pollingreport.com.
8. 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).
9. See Sidney Verba, Richard A. Brody, Edwin B. Parker, Norman H. Nie, Nelson W. Polsby, Paul Ekman, and Gordon S. Black, "Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam," American Political Science Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (June 1967), pp. 317-333;
10. and Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).
11. Jeffrey S. Milstein and William C. Mitchell, "Dynamics of the Vietnam Conflict: A Quantitative Analysis and Computer Simulation," Peace Research Society (International) Papers, No. 10 (1968);
12. Jeffrey S. Milstein, "Changes in Domestic Support and Alternative Military Actions in the Vietnam War, 1965-1968," paper delivered at the Twenty-third Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, April 3, 1969;
13. Jeffrey S. Milstein, "The Vietnam War from the 1968 Tet Offensive to the 1970 Cambodian Invasion," in H.R. Alker, K.W. Deutsch, and A.H. Stoetzel, Mathematical Approaches to Politics (New York: Elsevier, 1973);
14. and Jeffrey S. Milstein, Dynamics of the Vietnam War: A Quantitative Analysis and Predictive Computer Simulation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974).
15. For the central thesis, see John Mueller, "Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam," American Political Science Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June 1971), pp. 358-375.
16. For the full compilation of polls, see John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1973).
17. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, p. 62.
18. John Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
19. Scott Gartner and Gary Segura revised this argument somewhat, noting that support for the Korean and Vietnam Wars declined with logged casualties during periods when the casualty rates were low; but in periods of high casualty rates, public support dropped with marginal casualties, not logged cumulative casualties. See Gartner and Segura, "War Casualties and Public Opinion," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 42, No. 3 (September 1998), pp. 278-320.
20. Mark Lorell and Charles Kelley, Casualties, Public Opinion, and Presidential Policy during the Vietnam War, R-3060-AF (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1985).
21. Ole Holsti and James Rosenau, American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1984);
22. Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990);
23. Eugene Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism: Public. Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990);
24. Ronald Hinckley, People, Polls, and Policy Makers (New York: Lexington, 1992);
25. Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
26. Paul Sniderman, "The New Look in Public Opinion Research," in Ada Finifter, ed., The State of the Discipline II (Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1993);
27. John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Public Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
28. Alvin Richman, "When Should We Be Prepared to Fight?" Public Perspective, Vol. 6, No. 3 (April/May 1995), p. 44;
29. and Ole Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
30. For a more skeptical view, but not one that dismisses polling altogether, see Scott Althaus, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
31. Richman, "When Should We Be Prepared to Fight?"
32. Eric Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1996).
33. In fact, the positions of the various participants in this first wave of debate are not as sharply distinct as the literature implies. For example, John Mueller's findings about the erosion of support for the Korean and Vietnam Wars could be consistent with a cost-benefit calculation by members of the public. Viewed in this way, the mounting casualty tolls in those wars meant that the costs for securing the goals at stake were rising. If the value of the goals remains constant, then one would expect rising costs to turn the net cost-benefit calculation against supporting the mission.
34. Karl P. Mueller, "Politics, Death, and Morality in U.S. Foreign Policy," Aerospace Power Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer 2000), pp. 12-16.
35. This term derives from the precipitous drop in public support for the U.S. intervention in Somalia after the killing of U.S. Rangers there in 1993. For slightly differing views of the "Somalia syndrome," compare 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), pp. 417-437,
36. with Louis Klarevas, "Trends: The United States Peace Operation in Somalia," Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Winter 2000), pp. 523-540.
37. This is the conclusion of the following poll-based analyses: Bruce 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;
38. Richman, "When Should We Be Prepared to Fight?";
39. Steven Kuli, "What the Public Knows That Washington Doesn't," Foreign Policy, No. 102 (Winter 1995/96), pp. 102-116;
40. Larson, Casualties and Consensus;
41. Warren Strobel, Late-Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media's Influence on Peace Operations (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1997);
42. Rebecca L. Britton and Bruce Jentleson, "Still Pretty Prudent," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 42, No. 4 (August 1998), pp. 395-418;
43. James Burk, "Public Support for Peacekeeping in Lebanon and Somalia: Assessing the Casualties Hypothesis," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114, No. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 53-78;
44. Steven Kuli and I.M. Destler, Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1999);
45. Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, "How Many Deaths Are Acceptable? A Surprising Answer," Washington Post, November 7, 1999;
46. Philip Everts, "When the Going Gets Rough: Does the Public Support the Use of Force?" World Affairs, Vol. 162, No. 3 (Winter 2000), pp. 91-107;
47. Philip Everts, "War without Bloodshed? Public Opinion and the Conflict over Kosovo," in Everts and Pierangelo Isernia, eds., Public Opinion and the International Use of Force (New York: Routledge, 2001);
48. Andrew Erdmann, "The U.S. Presumption of Quick, Costless Wars," Orbis, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Summer 1999), pp. 363-382;
49. Philip Everts, Democracy and Military Force (New York: Palgrave, 2002);
50. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles;
51. and Richard C. Eichenberg, "Victory Has Many Friends: U.S. Public Opinion and the Use of Military Force, 1981-2005," International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Summer 2005), pp. 140-177.
52. Eric 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), pp. 174-236;
53. and Klarevas, "The 'Essential Domino' of Military Operations."
54. Here we list only the factors that might vary from case to case in the current era. A number of other arguments emphasize different factors that would explain changes in the underlying casualty tolerance from what it might have been in previous generations. Thus, Edward Luttwak argues that the U.S. public is more casualty sensitive now than in the time of World Wars I and II because of the lower birth rate. See Edward Luttwak, "Towards Post-heroic Warfare," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 3 (May-June 1995), pp. 109-122;
55. and Edward Luttwak, "A Post-heroic Military Policy," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 4 (July-August 1996), pp. 33-44.
56. Charles Moskos argues that the public is more casualty sensitive now because they see that children of the elite are not at risk in most military missions. See Moskos, "Grave Decision: When Americans Accept Casualties," Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1995.
57. Harvey Sapolsky and Jeremy Shapiro argue that casualty phobia has driven changes in technology, which have, in turn, reinforced casualty phobia by fostering unrealistic expectations of the likely low human toll of war. See Sapolsky and Shapiro, "Casualties, Technology, and America's Future Wars," Parameters, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 119-127.
58. Numerous observers have argued that the advent of near-real-time television coverage of military operations has heightened public casualty sensitivity by giving the deaths a vividness and immediacy that make them more shocking. See, for example, Frank Stech, "Winning CNN Wars," Parameters, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 1994), pp. 37-56;
59. Johanna Neuman, Lights, Camera, War: Is Media Technology Driving International Politics? (New York: St. Martin's, 1996);
60. and Steven Livingston, "Clarifying the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention," research paper R-18 (Cambridge, Mass.: Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1997).
61. Logically, these works belong in the first or second wave because they claim that the public is, in fact, highly casualty sensitive and blame a factor that is largely unavoidable and so should apply with equal force to every military mission the United States might consider. These issues are explored in greater detail in Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler, "Paying the Human Costs of War," Duke University, 2005.
62. Jentleson "The Pretty Prudent Public";
63. and Jentleson and Britton "Still Pretty Prudent."
64. Larson, Casualties and Consensus, applies John Zaller's model of how elites cue public opinion.
65. See Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Public Opinion.
66. Larson, "Putting Theory to Work," offers a model for weighing multiple factors simultaneously, including various indices that attempt to measure the public's perceived utility in a given military mission, expectations of success, and leadership cuing. He gives pride of place, however, to leadership cuing.
67. Steven Kuli, I.M. Destler, and Clay Ramsay, The Foreign Policy Gap: How Policymakers Misread the Public (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1997);
68. Kull and Destler Misreading the Public;
69. Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay, "A Rejoinder from Kull and Ramsay," International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 2 (August 2000), pp. 202-205;
70. and Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, Stefan Subias, Phillip Warf, and Monica Wolford, "Americans on the Conflict with Iraq," PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll, October 2, 2002.
71. Joseph Grieco hypothesizes this as the critical factor behind a public preference for multilateralism in Grieco, "Let's Get a Second Opinion: Allies, the U.N., and U.S. Public Support for War," Duke University, 2003.
72. Feaver and Gelpi, "How Many Deaths Are Acceptable?";
73. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles;
74. and Peter Feaver, "To Maintain That Support, Show Us What Success Means," Washington Post, October 7, 2001.
75. Kull and Ramsay reach a similar conclusion: "Americans do not and are not likely to respond reflexively to losses by wanting to withdraw from a military operation... provided that the public has support for the operation in the first place and believes that it is likely to succeed." See Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay, "The Myth of the Reactive Public: American Attitudes on Military Fatalities in the Post-Cold War Period," in Everts and Isernia, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force, pp. 205-228.
76. In their analysis of Dutch public opinion surrounding the Bosnian operation, Jan van der Meulen and Marijke de Konink concluded that expectations of success were the best predictor of Dutch casualty tolerance. See van der Meulen and de Konink, "Risky Missions: Dutch Public Opinion on Peacekeeping in the Balkans," in Everts and Isernia, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force, pp. 116-138.
77. See also Steven Kull "Review of Eric Larson's Casualties and Consensus," Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 1997), pp. 672-674.
78. In this way, the category "expectations of success" differs from the variable highlighted by Gartner and Segura - marginal casualty rates. In their words, "Recent casualties send a signal that the war is not going well - a signal that dominates other cost measures when the marginal casualty level is increasing." Gartner and Segura, "War Casualties and Public Opinion," p. 295.
79. Eichenberg, "Victory Has Many Friends," p. 147.
80. The proprietary polls include a telephone survey of a random digit dial (RDD) national sample of 1,203 adults conducted by the Parker Group from September 22 to October 12, 2003, and seven additional surveys of national representative samples (using a different and shorter instrument) administered via the internet by Knowledge Networks: Wave 1 (February 6-20, 2004, 891 respondents), Wave 2 (February 25-March 4, 870 respondents), Wave 3 (March 5-18, 930 respondents), Wave 4 (March 19-April 2, 889 respondents), Wave 5 (April 2-16, 881 respondents), Wave 6 (April 17-29, 899 respondents), and Wave 7 (June 18-28, 900 respondents). Finally, we conducted a more extensive survey through Knowledge Networks in the weeks leading up to the 2004 presidential election: Wave 8 (October 15-November 1, 1,125 respondents). The Knowledge Networks data are equivalent to the national RDD sample because they draw samples from a large panel of respondents that is a national probability sample. For more information on the Knowledge Networks methodology,
81. see http://www.knowledgenetworks.com. The full survey instruments are available from the authors.
82. The data were drawn from the following official military news sources: the Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times, and Marine Times, All are available at http://www.militarycity.com/valor/honor.html.
83. For these data, see http://www.pollingreport.com. We included only polls with identical wording of the presidential approval question: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?" Thus polls such as the Zogby poll that introduce the category of "mixed feelings" toward the president were not included in our measure of presidential approval. For weeks in which there were multiple national polls, we took the average of these presidential approval ratings. We interpolated the one missing data point to obtain a continuous ninety-seven-observation, weekly time-series.
84. The correlation between overall presidential approval and approval of the president's handling of Iraq was 0.95. The correlation of both of those variables with aggregate opinion of whether the war in Iraq has been "worth it" is 0.90.
85. Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
86. Media reports for this coding were drawn from the Tyndall Report, which records the amount of time that network news broadcasts spend on various issues each week. Based on the Tyndall Report, we identified the "occupation" period as beginning in late May 2003. The "Iraq sovereign period" began with the transfer of sovereignty in June 2004. For these data, see http://www.tyndallreport.com.
87. Because our dependent variable is overall presidential approval, we control for the public perceptions of the overall performance of the U.S. economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) represents an excellent summary measure of public perceptions of the economy for two central reasons. First, fluctuations in prices across a broad index such as the DJIA reflect changes across a number of economic indicators; traders incorporate a wide range of information about economic performance into the trades that generate shifts in the DJIA. The DJIA thus serves as something of a composite index of economic factors of political interest. Second, although the members of the public are probably not aware of much of the information that goes into these trades, many of them will be aware of changes in the DJIA because these are so widely published in newspapers and reported on daily radio and television news broadcasts. Finally, our time-series of presidential approval is composed of weekly aggregations, while most aggregate economic indicators are available only on a monthly or quarterly basis. The DJIA, however, is easily aggregated on a weekly basis and is often reported to the public as weekly changes. Growth was measured as the weekly opening price of the DJIA subtracted from the weekly closing price and divided by the opening price.
88. This measure records only the volume of coverage. It makes no attempt to capture any positive or negative content of the stories. Minutes were aggregated on a weekly basis, and data were drawn from the Tyndall Report.
89. These dummy variables set a new intercept value for the presidential approval time-series after each event occurs. The dummy variables are coded 0 prior to the occurrence of the event and 1 afterward. Controlling for the initiation of the war as a "rally event" had no impact on the coefficients in Table 1, and the variable was not statistically significant. This is probably because the casualties suffered during the major combat phase capture the rally effect.
90. A Phillips-Perron unit root test indicated that the presidential approval time-series is trend stationary (p < 0.05). The coefficients in Table 1 use the Orais-Winsten correction for serial correlation in a time-series. The estimated rho for models 1 and 2 were 0.82 and 0.27, respectively. The initial Durbin-Watson statistics were 1.18 and 1.61, indicating a statistically significant autocorrelation problem for both models. The transformed Durbin-Watson statistics were 2.35 and 2.03, indicating that the Prais-Winsten correction addressed the problem.
91. 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).
92. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, pp. 132-144.
93. Time/CNN/Harris poll, March 27, 2003.
94. Time/CNN/Harris poll, July 16, 2003.
95. Time/CNN/Harris poll, November 18, 2003.
96. CBS News poll, May 23, 2004. October data are from October 15 through November 1, 2004. Our question labels the second category "fairly well" instead of "somewhat well."
97. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion;
98. Jentleson, The Pretty Prudent Public;
99. Britton and Jentleson, "Still Pretty Prudent," p. 395;
100. Larson, Casualties and Consensus;
101. and Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles.
102. Jentleson, "The Pretty Prudent Public";
103. Larson, Casualties and Consensus;
104. and Larson, "Putting Theory to Work."
105. We asked respondents, "I would like to know whether you think President Bush did the right thing by using military force against Iraq. Would you say that you strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove, or strongly disapprove of his decision?"
106. We asked the question, "Which of the following best describes your beliefs about the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism?" Respondents were given four possible response categories: (1) Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terror; (2) the war in Iraq is "an important part of the war on terrorism, but it is not the central battle"; (3) Iraq is "not a part of the war on terrorism"; and (4) the war in Iraq is "a distraction from the war on terrorism."
107. The question was posed as follows: "Do you think America's political leaders - both Republican and Democrat - agree that the U.S. troops should remain in Iraq until the new Iraqi government is stable and secure?" Respondents could answer yes or no.
108. We asked, "Before deciding to take military action, the president often seeks the approval of international organizations like the United Nations. What should the president do if he is not able to gain that approval? The response options were (1) "he should not take military action period, regardless of whether he can get international approval"; (2) "he should delay military action until he receives international approval"; (3) "he should take military action even without international approval if he thinks it is necessary"; and (4) "he should not seek international approval before deciding to take military action."
109. We inserted the appropriate death toll at the beginning of each wave.
110. Any potential bias from changes in question wording would tend to exaggerate the apparent casualty sensitivity in the new surveys. As we are arguing that the public is more casualty tolerant than commonly believed, this poses no problems for our analysis.
111. We believe that this measure of casualty tolerance can better gauge the policy-relevant issue of continued support of an ongoing military operation than other more commonly used measures of casualty sensitivity. For example, analysts often evaluate responses to questions about whether the war in Iraq has been "worth it" as measures of casualty tolerance. But after asking whether the Iraq war has been "worth it," we probed respondents about why the war was or was not "worth it." Approximately 45 percent of respondents who felt that the Iraq war was not "worth it" indicated that they felt this way because "the U.S. should not have gone to war over this issue in the first place." Fewer than one-third of those who responded that the war was not "worth it" stated that the most important reason for their response was the number of U.S. soldiers killed. Moreover, in October 2004 more than 25 percent of the respondents who stated that the Iraq war had not been "worth it" still stated that they would support the war if there were as many as 1,500 U.S. combat deaths. Thus "worth it" questions appear to tap some mixture of respondents' views about casualty tolerance, their evaluation of the reasons for fighting, and their assessment of the prospects of success, making those data less useful for examining relationships among those various attitudes. Our measure more effectively isolates attitudes about the willingness to bear the costs in lives lost and frames the question in a way most relevant to policymakers: Will the respondent be willing to continue to support an ongoing military operation in the face of rising costs? This distinction may explain why public opposition to the war - measured in terms of electoral consequences for the president or the extent of public demonstration and outcry - has not grown as swiftly as the number of respondents saying the war has not been "worth it."
112. For an account of question wording effects and the use of hypothetical scenarios to measure casualty tolerance, see Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles.
113. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is sunk-costs thinking on the part of the respondents. That is, as the United States pays higher costs in Iraq, the public may become more determined to ensure that those losses are not in vain.
114. There is no simple "goodness of fit" measure for ordinal logit models. Pseudo r-squared measures vary widely and other intuitive measures such as the percentage of correct predictions are also arbitrary. See Scott Demarchi, Christopher Gelpi, and Jeffrey Grynaviski, "Untangling Neural Nets," American Political Science Review, Vol. 98, No. 2 (June 2004), pp. 371-378. The best available measure of fit for dichotomous logit or probit models is the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, but this measure is not appropriate for polytomous dependent variables. If one uses the model in Table 3 to make dichotomous predictions about whether respondents will fall in the "window of opportunity" category (i.e., tolerate at least 1,500 U.S. deaths), the area under the ROC curve in this model is a respectable 0.78 (95 percent confidence interval 0.76 to 0.81).
115. For an examination of this issue, see Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler, "Paying the Human Costs of War."
116. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles.
117. Our measure divides respondents into four age categories: 18-29, 30-44, 45-59, and over 59.
118. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles. We can only speculate about what may have caused a change in the impact of age on casualty tolerance. One thought is that the possibility of reinstating the draft arose as an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. Although both candidates rejected the need for a draft, many young voters appeared fearful regarding the possibility.
119. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles. Ibid.
120. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles. Ibid.
121. Education level is coded into four categories: less than a high school diploma, completed high school, some college, and bachelor's or higher degree.
122. We code party identification as a seven-category variable with the following labels: strong Republican, not strong Republican, leans Republican, undecided/independent, leans Democrat, not strong Democrat, strong Democrat.
123. This result suggests that support for the war and for President Bush may be related, but distinct, attitudes. See Christopher Gelpi, Jason Reifler, and Peter Feaver, "Iraq the Vote: Retrospective and Prospective Foreign Policy Judgments, Candidate Choice, and Casualty Tolerance," Duke University, 2005.
124. Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, "U.S. Shifts Rhetoric on Its Goals in Iraq," Washington Post, August 1, 2003.
125. Richard Sisk, "Iraqis Now Fight Alongside U.S.," New York Daily News, May 15, 2004.
126. Public attitudes and elite rhetoric are clearly correlated in this case, but we cannot determine the direction of causal influence.
127. The expectation of success is the most important source of casualty tolerance, but our analyses, presented elsewhere, find that beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the conflict matters more for other factors such as presidential vote choice. See Gelpi, Reifler, and Feaver, "Iraq the Vote," http://www.duke.edu/~gelpi/IraqtheVote.pdf.