Correspondence casualties, polls, and the Iraq war [1]

International Security

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 186-193

  Klarevas, Louis J ^a   Gelpi, Christopher ^b   Reifler, Jason ^c  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750718461     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2006.31.2.186     Document Type: Letter

References (29)

1. Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver, and Jason Reifler, "Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," International Security, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Winter 2005/06), pp. 7-46. Further references to this article appear parenthetically in the text.
2. As in Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler's article, all references to "casualties" in this correspondence are references to U.S. troop fatalities. Moreover, all references to the "public" are to the mass American public.
3. 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. 97.
4. Statistical testing of the data and trends provided further support for this reported relationship. Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler, "Success Matters," pp. 19-24.
5. See, for example, Louis J. Klarevas, "American Public Opinion on Peace Operations: The Cases of Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti," Ph.D. dissertation, American University, 1999, pp. 298-299;
6. and John Mueller, "The Cost of War," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 1 (January/February 2006), p. 139.
7. See, for example, John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973);
8. John Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
9. Eric V. Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic. Support for U.S. Military Operations (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1996);
10. and Scott Gartner, Gary Segura, and Michael Wilkening, "All Politics Are Local: Local Losses and Individual Attitudes toward the Vietnam War," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 41, No. 5 (October 1997), pp. 669-694.
11. One could raise an additional concern: by assessing public support as opposed to public opposition, scholars are employing the wrong numbers. Presidents, after all, are primarily concerned not with maintaining support for their deployments, but with avoiding political sanction for such military endeavors. See Louis J. 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. 433-435. Therefore, a strong case can be made that scholars would better serve policymakers by using disapproval/opposition scores (as opposed to approval/support scores) in our public opinion studies. Toward this end, disapproval ratings are used instead of approval ratings to support my arguments below, as these are better indicators of public opposition and intolerance.
12. The authors distinguished these long-term benchmarks as "understandings of success." They also identified several measures that the public uses "to track and estimate future success." Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler, "Success Matters," pp. 41-43. The former seem to be realistic goals that would reflect ultimate success. The latter seem instead to be measures of current trends, which, if continued, could result in ultimate success. Moreover, the benchmarks are frequently polled, whereas the measures do not often get probed by mainstream surveys. Thus, the former are a more helpful set of indicators by which to measure the expectation of victory.
13. Some readers might wonder if this criticism is misplaced. More to the point, the headlines out of Iraq in the early spring of 2006 left the impression that events there were deteriorating in a manner inconsistent with U.S. interests. Some commentators even speculated that Iraq was on the brink of a civil war. This might explain why an April CBS News poll found that 58 percent of those surveyed felt that efforts to bring stability to Iraq were going badly. Moreover, 61 percent of the same survey pool expressed opposition to President Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq. Still, the dose correlation between those who perceive events as unfolding negatively and those who oppose the war should not be read as sustaining the thesis advanced by Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler. The problem with making such a jump is that Gelpi and his colleagues argue that it is the expectation of victory that is the real driver of support. Even if, at present, things are going badly, the public might still expect ultimate success. Operational successes and failures - the daily ups and downs being reported out of Iraq - can tick opinion up or down for brief periods of time. These operational outcomes should not, however, be conflated with the "expectations of success" variable, which clearly speaks to long-term strategic accomplishments that, in turn, reflect victory. The two are distinctly different. As Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler write, "Note that the critical belief specified here is the expectation of eventual future success, not necessarily assessments of how the war is going right now or most recently." Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler, "Success Matters," p. 16. In short, even before the violence escalated in late February 2006, there were consistent indicators that long-term strategic expectations were favorable and, despite this, opposition was clear.
14. The two exceptions were in September 2004 and February 2005, when opposition was at 49 percent and 48 percent respectively. In both cases, given the survey margins of error, these measures were within the statistical range of majority opposition to the handling of the war.
15. Again, this should not be confused with the correlation that exists with operational successes and rises in public support. As I have shown elsewhere, operational successes can correlate with public support if they are heavily reported in the news media. See Klarevas, "The 'Essential Domino,'" pp. 432-433. In the Iraq war, as Figure 1 shows, the capture of Saddam Hussein in mid-December 2003 not only arrested a rise in opposition, but also gave the president a 10-15 percent bump in the polls. The holding of the first democratic election in Iraq in more than forty years in late January 2005 similarly gave the president a 7-10 percent boost. The killing of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in early June 2006 also produced a 7-10 percent lift in the president's handling ratings. Such rally effects, however, are short-lived. In the first two cases, the boosts lasted approximately six weeks. Reactions to the death of al-Zarqawi are still being measured as this correspondence goes to press. Early indications are, however, that this rally effect is over - after a mere two weeks. (The quick reversal of the rally effect associated with al-Zarqawi's death might be because, within days, news of the terrorist leader's death was overtaken by news that the United States had surpassed the 2,500-casualty mark in Iraq.)
16. Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, "How Many Deaths Are Acceptable? A Surprising Answer," Washington Post, November 7, 1999.
17. Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, "How Many Deaths Are Acceptable? A Surprising Answer," Washington Post, 1999. Ibid.
18. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, p. 116.
19. Feaver and Gelpi, "How Many Deaths Are Acceptable?"
20. Peter Feaver, in particular, has promoted his colleagues' views that the public will stomach large numbers of casualties, as long as victory is likely. See, for instance, Feaver, "To Maintain That Support, Show Us What Success Means," Washington Post, October 7, 2001;
21. Scott Shane, "Bush's Speech on Iraq Echoes Analyst's Voice," New York Times, December 4, 2005;
22. and Peter Grier, "In 'Victory,' Both Power and Peril," Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 2005.
23. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, p. 120.
24. Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, p. 120. Ibid.
25. In "Success Matters," Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler write, "Our data indicate that public casualty tolerance actually rose between June and October 2004. ... Specifically, in October, 50 percent of the respondents stated that they would be willing to tolerate 1,500 U.S. military deaths, whereas only 44 percent expressed that view in June" (p. 30). This raises two problems. First, unlike every other survey they report in their study, the June 2004 survey was the only one that did not probe respondents' attitudes toward accepting casualties to the next 500-increment threshold (i.e., if current casualties are at 750 - that is, between 500 and 1,000 - the next increment to be probed would be to ask if the respondent would accept 1,000 casualties). With around 800 casualties at the time, the June survey probed whether respondents would accept 1,500 casualties. This break in pattern from the other eight surveys reported in their study raises questions about the comparability. Second, the results reported from the October 2004 survey add up to 104 percent, calling into question the reported data from that particular survey and raising the issue that perhaps their finding of greater casualty tolerance from that time period is mistakenly inflated. The results referenced in this note are in Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, ibid., p. 31.
26. Writing in November 2003, I predicted that hitting the 500 casualties mark would have a significant impact in transforming public opinion on the Iraq war from support to opposition. See Louis J. Klarevas, "How Many War Deaths Can We Take?" Newsday, November 7, 2003.
27. For another study that reaches similar conclusions about the importance of casualties in undermining public support for the Iraq war, see John Mueller, "The Iraq Syndrome," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 6 (November/December 2005), pp. 44-54.
28. Louis Klarevas and Daniel B. O'Connor, "At What Cost? American Public Opinion toward the Use of Force," paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, 1994.
29. See also Klarevas, "The 'Essential Domino,'" p. 433.