How smart and tough are democracies? Reassessing theories of democratic victory in war

International Security

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 9-51

  Downes, Alexander B ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 70450195038     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2009.33.4.9     Document Type: Article

References (228)

1. David A. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War," American Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 1992), pp. 24-37.
2. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 28-33.
3. See also Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Randolph M. Siverson, "War and the Survival of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability," American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 4 (December 1995), p. 852.
4. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), chap. 6.
5. For the democratic power argument, see Lake, "Powerful Pacifists"
6. Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival, pp. 232-236, 257-258.
7. Bueno de Mesquita and colleagues also argue that democracies start wars only if they are "near certain of victory" (p. 240).
8. Michael C. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," International Security, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 5-47.
9. Michael C. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Fair Fights or Food Fights?" International Security, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer 2003), pp. 180-194.
10. Michael C. Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
11. Ajin Choi, "The Power of Democratic Cooperation," International Security, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer 2003), pp. 142-153.
12. Ajin Choi, "Democratic Synergy and Victory inWar, 1816-1992," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (September 2004), pp. 663-682.
13. Risa A. Brooks, "Making Military Might: Why Do States Fail and Succeed? A Review Essay," International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2003), pp. 149-191.
14. Stephen Biddle and Stephen Long, "Democracy and Military Effectiveness: A Deeper Look," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 48, No. 4 (August 2004), pp. 525-546.
15. Jasen J. Castillo, "The Will to Fight: National Cohesion and Military Staying Power," unpublished manuscript, Texas A & M University, July 2008.
16. The exceptions are Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters"
17. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Fair Fights or Food Fights?".
18. Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness. I discuss Desch's critique further below.
19. Reiter and Stam code the war as a draw; the Correlates of War data set codes it as a defeat for the United States.
20. See Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, p. 56
21. Correlates of War Interstate War Data, ver. 3.0, http://www.correlatesofwar.org.
22. On the use of case studies for this purpose, see Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 20-21, 111-115.
23. See, for example, the Correlates of War (COW) data set.
24. Elizabeth N. Saunders, "Wars of Choice: Leadership, Threat Perception, and Military Intervention," unpublished manuscript, George Washington University, October 2008, p. 1 n. 1.
25. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, p. 20.
26. Ibid., p. 23.
27. Ibid., pp. 23-24.
28. Militaries in authoritarian states, by contrast, sometimes represent the greatest threat to the survival of the regime and are thus kept weak and staffed by incompetent (but loyal) officers. This practice undermines both the quality of military advice and the army's ability to fight.
29. See, for example, Stephen Biddle and Robert Zirkle, "Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare in the Developing World," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 1996), pp. 174, 179-180.
30. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists".
31. Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival
32. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists".
33. Choi, "Democratic Synergy and Victory in War.
34. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, pp. 60-71.
35. Reiter and Stam also argue that because democracies do not abuse enemy prisoners of war, enemy soldiers are more willing to surrender to democratic armies rather than fight to the death. They do not test this argument, however.
36. Ibid., pp. 29, 45, 78-81.
37. Chaim Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War," International Security, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Summer 2004), pp. 5-48.
38. Jon Western, "The War over Iraq: Selling War to the American Public," Security Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (January 2005), pp. 106-139.
39. Jane Kellett Cramer, "Militarized Patriotism: Why the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas Failed before the Iraq War," Security Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3 (July 2007), pp. 489-524.
40. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," pp. 9-16.
41. See also H.E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). For an argument that leaders in certain types of autocracies are just as accountable domestically as leaders in democracies.
42. see Jessica L. Weeks, "Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve," International Organization, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Winter 2008), pp. 35-64.
43. Giacomo Chiozza and H.E. Goemans, "International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders: Is War Still Ex Post Inefficient?" American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48, No. 3 (July 2004), p. 613.
44. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Fair Fights or Food Fights?" pp. 189-192.
45. Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness, pp. 50-51, 72-76, 97-104.
46. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," pp. 9-16. Desch deemed 54 of the 75 wars in Reiter and Stam's data set to be unfair fights. Of the 21 remaining conflicts, he credited the more democratic side with 12 wins and 9 losses for a winning record of 57 percent. This move sparked a serious methodological dispute regarding the legitimacy of dropping cases versus using control variables.
47. See David A. Lake, "Fair Fights? Evaluating Theories of Democracy and Victory".
48. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, "Understanding Victory: Why Political Institutions Matter"
49. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Fair Fights or Food Fights?" all in International Security, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer 2003), pp. 154-167, 168-179, and 180-194, respectively.
50. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," pp. 39-40.
51. Brooks also notes that the initiative variable in HERO-which Reiter and Stam use as an indicator of individual battlefield initiative-actually codes which side attacked first.
52. Brooks, "Making Military Might," pp. 181-182.
53. Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness, pp. 171-173. Similarly, Biddle and Long find that after controlling for factors such as amicable civil-military relations and human capital, democracy actually reduces battlefield effectiveness.
54. Biddle and Long, "Democracy and Military Effectiveness." Several recent studies also find that democracy makes no difference or actually reduces the likelihood of victory in counterinsurgency wars.
55. See Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, "Rage against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars," International Organization, Vol. 63, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 67-106.
56. Jason Lyall, "Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents? Reassessing Democracy's Impact on War Outcomes and Duration," International Organization (forthcoming).
57. Jonathan D. Caverley, "Democracies Will Continue to Fight Small Wars... Poorly," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, New York, February 2009, p. 31.
58. Reiter and Stam report that adding draws did not much change the results. They also recoded as initiators states that joined wars later, reporting that this weakened the results. They do not appear to have tested these two changes simultaneously, however.
59. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, p. 213 n. 62, and p. 40.
60. Ibid., p. 39.
61. Reiter and Stam "coded war outcomes... based on whether a state achieved its immediate military aims." By contrast, wars that "end in what is essentially the prewar status quo" are considered draws.
62. Reiter and Stam, "Understanding Victory," p. 173.
63. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, p. 211 n. 41.
64. This is a rather narrow conception of war initiation, and it is unclear if it always captures the logic of the selection effects argument, which is about how wisely states choose war as a policy option. Using force first in a dispute is not always a good indicator of whether a government chose to go to war, or had war thrust upon it by the choice of another state.
65. Reiter and Stam also changed COW's coding of the initiator of the Russo-PolishWar (1919-20), Changkufeng (1938), and Vietnam (1965-73); did not code an initiator in the Vietnamese-CambodianWar (1975-79); divided the Yom KippurWar (1973) into two parts, crediting Israel with two victories. Reiter and Stam changed a few war outcome codings as well, but because restoring them to their original values does not affect the results, I defer discussion of these cases to an online appendix, http://www.duke.edu/~downes.
66. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, p. 45, table 2.2, model 4. Replication data are available at http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/stam.
67. The significance levels, however, differ slightly. The p-value for democratic targets, for example, is only 0.02, not <0.01 as stated in the text. Similarly, the p-value for war initiator is 0.008, rather than <0.001.
68. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Fair Fights or Food Fights?" p. 187.
69. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," p. 14. Desch also credits Israel with only one victory in the Yom Kippur War.
70. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," p. 16. Because Reiter and Stam exclude draws, Desch's three suggested outcome changes leave 192 cases in the analysis.
71. That said, I find some of Reiter and Stam's changes to the COW initiation and war outcome codings to be unconvincing. Clearly Britain and the United States did not initiate World War II in Europe in 1940, for example. I code Germany and Italy as initiators. Even if the two democracies had started the war, this would not support the selection effects argument because they could not have been optimistic in 1940 about the war's eventual outcome. Other changes made by Reiter and Stam that I return to their original values include the United States as the initiator of the Vietnam War; Vietnam as the initiator of the war with Cambodia in 1975; a single war between Israel and the Arab states in 1973; and a draw (rather than an Israeli win) in the War of Attrition. That said, I leave Reiter and Stam's coding of the VietnamWar as a draw unchanged. Coding the war as a loss for the United States and South Vietnam (as the COW data set does) further weakens the result reported below for democratic initiators.
72. An alternative way to code joiners would be to define them as states that enter a war after a certain amount of time has passed. I employ a purely temporal definition of belligerency status as a robustness check below.
73. In practice, states tend to enter wars within a few days or wait at least several months, meaning that the one-week cutoff is not sensitive to minor changes. I chose one week because states that wait longer than a few days to enter a conflict cannot reasonably be described as initiators or targets.
74. A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 142-145.
75. Taylor's account also indicates that the two powers attacked at the same time: "The two Great Powers then declared that they would act alone; on 1 February their forces crossed the frontier into Sleswick" (p. 146).
76. Jack S. Levy and Joseph R. Gochal, "Democracy and Preventive War: Israel and the 1956 Sinai Campaign," Security Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Winter 2001/02), p. 38.
77. The COW initiator variable, which Reiter and Stam follow, is supposedly coded as the first state(s) to use force. Several cases in the COW data set and in Democracies at War, however, appear to be coded on the basis of joint declarations of war rather than first uses of force, including the allies in the Boxer Rebellion, the First Balkan War, the eastern and western theaters of World War I, the Hungarian War, and the Palestine War. My coding thus simply applies this rule consistently rather than haphazardly.
78. The details of the case largely support coding Britain as a joiner rather than as a target. Britain's Triple Entente membership did not include a commitment to go to war if France (or Russia) was attacked by Germany. The British Cabinet had rejected a more formal alliance in June 1914, similarly rejected a commitment to defend France in July, and engaged in a fierce debate over whether to enter the war when it broke out. Changing the coding of Britain to a joiner does not substantially change any of the results shown below.
79. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, pp. 164-192. This analysis, it should be noted, includes many of the same variables that Reiter and Stam earlier argued applied only to the likelihood of victory, such as regime type, war initiation, strategy, terrain, and the balance of material capabilities.
80. For a similar approach to dealing with draws, see Jessica L. Weeks, "Leaders, Accountability, and Foreign Policy in Non-Democracies," Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2008, pp. 17-26.
81. Lyall and Wilson, "Rage against the Machines." One might argue that leaders in these cases simply got it wrong: information available to them ex ante pointed toward an easy victory, but unforeseeable events that occurred later resulted in a reversal of fortune. This is not true, however, for Korea and Vietnam. Indeed, even Reiter and Stam conclude with regard to Vietnam that "the outlook for the conflict was not promising" in the early stages and that "the American leadership did not in 1965 foresee an imminent victory."
82. See Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, pp. 173, 174.
83. Methodologists have shown that it is imperative to include all constituent variables when using interaction terms. Thomas Brambor, William Roberts Clark, and Matt Golder, "Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses," Political Analysis, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 66-69.
84. Bear F. Braumoeller, "Hypothesis Testing and Multiplicative Interaction Terms," International Organization, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Fall 2004), p. 809.
85. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, pp. 52-57.
86. Many of the variables used in Reiter and Stam's analysis were originally coded for this earlier book. Allan C. Stam III, Win, Lose, or Draw: Domestic Politics and the Crucible of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). The data are available at http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/stam.
87. J. Scott Long, Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997), p. 114.
88. Interaction terms cannot be interpreted as marginal effects. Brambor, Clark, and Golder, "Understanding Interaction Models," pp. 71-73.
89. I calculate robust standard errors clustered on each war on the presumption that observations within a war are correlated with each other, but observations across different wars are not. Reiter and Stam also used robust standard errors but do not seem to have clustered them on each war.
90. For detailed descriptions of these variables, see Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, pp. 41-44.
91. Marginal effects were calculated using CLARIFY with continuous variables set to their means and binary variables set to their modes. Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King, CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results, ver. 2.1, http://gking.harvard.edu/stats.shtml.
92. It is worth noting that the marginal effects shown in figures 1-3 and table 2 represent the maximum possible effects that democracy can exert on war outcomes. More realistic changes in regime type-such as from an autocracy to a mixed regime, or a mixed regime to a democracy-result in smaller changes in the likelihood of victory and defeat.
93. Details on all robustness and specification checks, as well as the data used in the analysis, may be found on the author's website, http://www.duke.edu/~downes.
94. There are now 18 joiners instead of 25.
95. The increase in the probability of victory that results from moving from least to most democratic is 9 percent for targets and 17 percent for joiners. Neither is significant.
96. In this case only three variables are needed to estimate the joint effect of democracy and belligerent status: Polity score, initiator/joiner, and Polity × initiator/joiner. The Polity score term picks up the effect of democratic targets.
97. Changes in probability of victory that result from shifting from least to most democratic (with 90 percent confidence intervals) are as follows: initiators, 0.008 (-0.327, 0.344); targets, 0.124 (-0.209, 0.461); joiners 0.247 (-0.244, 0.703).
98. Each of these wars-with the possible exceptions of Iraq's conquest of Kuwait and the Kosovo War-exceeded the 1,000 battle-death threshold.
99. I cannot test this conjecture because I do not have data for all of Reiter and Stam's variables for recent wars.
100. See, for example, Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Marketplace of Ideas"
101. James Fallows, "Blind into Baghdad," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 293, No. 1 (January/February 2004), pp. 52-74.
102. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006).
103. Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), pp. 91-96.
104. Jacob Weisberg, "Gulfballs: How the Experts Blew It, Big-Time," New Republic, March 25, 1991, p. 19.
105. See, for example, Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness.
106. Reiter and Stam, for example, cite the case of French leaders in 1911 declining to go to war against Germany when the general staff rated their chances of victory at less than 70 percent.
107. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, p. 13. Of course, this "70 percent rule" is undermined by both its reputed source-Napoleon Bonaparte, hardly a democrat-and Reiter and Stam's reference in the same paragraph to the belief of some U.S. government officials that U.S. chances of victory in Vietnam rose only to 70 percent by 1968 with the commitment of several hundred thousand troops. One would think that a 70 percent chance of winning would be the bare minimum for a leader to risk his political life; more likely he would require an 80 or a 90 percent likelihood of victory.
108. Bundy to Johnson, "The Situation in Vietnam," Memorandum, February 7, 1965, in Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1964-1968, Vol. 2, doc. 84. All FRUS documents cited in this article are available online at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus.
109. Eight Americans died in the attack on Pleiku; twenty-three were killed at Qui Nhon.
110. According to historian Mark Moyar, Vietnamese sources indicate that the "attack had been conceived and ordered by the local commander of the Viet Cong forces in Pleiku province, who... was simply trying to hurt his adversaries.".
111. Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 486 n. 14.
112. Ibid., p. 372. South Vietnamese and U.S. forces also began covert and naval incursions into the North under the aegis of OPLAN-34A at about the same time that Hanoi covertly began sending troops south.
113. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 270.
114. Bundy, quoted in Robert L. Gallucci, Neither Peace nor Honor: The Politics of American Military Policy in Viet-Nam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 46
115. Brian Van De Mark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 63
116. David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2000), p. 411.
117. William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Pt. 3: January-July 1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 68.
118. This is a central theme of Logevall, Choosing War.
119. One might expect leaders to cite a favorable military balance, superior military technology or strategy, or the outstanding fighting qualities of their troops. Interestingly, Reiter and Stam do not identify a particular factor that leaders examine when deciding whether a war is winnable. For example, they find no evidence that democracies won "because they were bigger or had more allies, better troops, or better strategy choices.
120. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, p. 37.
121. I do not address the role of the marketplace of ideas in the Vietnam decisions, except to note that Johnson adopted a "policy of minimum candor" in his dealings with the public, the media, and congressional leaders. He refused to announce major decisions publicly, concealed the level of escalation, and endeavored to squelch congressional debate on the wisdom of fighting in Vietnam. The case is thus not supportive of marketplace of ideas arguments.
122. See Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), p. 430
123. George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2d ed. (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1986), p. 133.
124. John Schuessler, "Doing Good by Stealth? Democracy, Deception, and the Use of Force," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2007, chap. 3.
125. For selected examples of this reporting, see Robert McNamara, "Vietnam Situation," Memorandum for the President, December 21, 1963, in Senator Mike Gravel, ed., The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Vol. 3 (Boston: Beacon, 1971), p. 494.
126. Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE), No. 50-64, "Short-Term Prospects in Southeast Asia," summarized in Carroll to McNamara, Memorandum, February 12, 1964, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 1, doc. 42.
127. McNamara to Johnson, "South Vietnam," Memorandum, March 16, 1964, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 1, doc. 84
128. William Bundy, "Next Courses of Action in Southeast Asia," Memorandum, August 13, 1964, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 1, doc. 313.
129. Memo to Ambassador Lodge, February 17, 1964, quoted in Logevall, Choosing War, p. 113.
130. Quoted in Logevall, Choosing War, p. 145.
131. John McNaughton, "Plan of Action for South Vietnam," 2d draft, September 3, 1964, in Gravel, The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3, p. 556.
132. McNaughton reiterated this judgment two months later: "Progress inside SVN is important, but it is unlikely despite our best ideas and efforts.".
133. John McNaughton, "Action for South Vietnam," 3d draft, November 7, 1964, in Gravel, The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3, p. 602.
134. See, for example, the memos by George Ball and William Bundy (October 5 and 19, respectively), discussed in Kaiser, American Tragedy, pp. 349-353. Two Pentagon war games on Vietnam conducted in April and September (Sigma I and II) suggested that bombing North Vietnam would do nothing to staunch the insurgency in the South and might actually increase the North's will to resist. "Sigma I-64: Final Report," D-6, and "Sigma II-64: Final Report," D-2, D-7, D-14, both in Declassified Document Reference Service.
135. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 235.
136. Memorandum of a Meeting, White House, September 9, 1964, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 1, doc. 343.
137. Quoted in Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 304.
138. The chiefs' proposal may be found in Joint Chiefs of Staff to McNamara, "Vietnam," Memorandum, March 2, 1964, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 1, doc. 66. In fact, during the presidential campaign against Republic Senator Barry Goldwater, an advocate of escalation in Vietnam, President Johnson repeatedly told voters that he would not "send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." Quoted in Van De Mark, Into the Quagmire, p. 19.
139. Quoted in Logevall, Choosing War, p. 108.
140. Johnson's desire to delay a decision until after the 1964 election might be construed as support for Kurt Taylor Gaubatz's argument that democratic executives are more likely to initiate wars early in their terms of office when the political risk is low rather than later on. This only applies, however, if the leader believes the war will be short, and thus he or she can reap the political benefits of victory come re-election time. As Gaubatz notes, his argument "would not explain behavior if a conflict was expected to be long and drawn out." This is exactly what Johnson believed about Vietnam.
141. See Gaubatz, Elections and War: The Electoral Incentive in the Democratic Politics of War and Peace (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 54.
142. "Courses of Action in Southeast Asia," November 21, 1964, in Gravel, The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3, pp. 656-666.
143. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 259.
144. See also National Security CouncilWorking Group on Vietnam, "Intelligence Assessment: The Situation in Vietnam," November 24, 1964, in Gravel, The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3, pp. 651-652.
145. Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 363.
146. "Courses of Action in Southeast Asia," p. 665.
147. Taylor, "The Current Situation in South Viet-Nam-November 1964," in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 1, doc. 426.
148. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 269.
149. On January 27, 1965, South Vietnamese strongman Gen. Nguyen Khanh launched a bloodless coup that ousted the civilian premier, Tran Van Huong.
150. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 127.
151. Quoted in Logevall, Choosing War, p. 318 (emphasis in original).
152. For Bundy and McNamara's prompting, see the famous "fork in the road" memo, January 27, 1965, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 2, doc. 42.
153. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 271.
154. Ibid., p. 271.
155. John McNaughton, "Aims and Options in Southeast Asia," 1st draft, in Gravel, The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3, p. 582.
156. Bundy to Johnson, "The Situation in Vietnam," February 7, 1965. Nor were the service chiefs confident that Operation Rolling Thunder would produce results.
157. See Gravel, The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3, p. 320.
158. Bundy to Johnson, Memorandum, March 6, 1965, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 2, doc. 183.
159. Quoted in Van De Mark, Into the Quagmire, p. 96.
160. Quoted in Herring, America's Longest War, p. 137. Desertion from South Vietnam's army grew to 11,000 per month, and morale failed to improve in the South.
161. See Logevall, Choosing War, p. 367.
162. Van DeMark, Into the Quagmire, p. 105.
163. Wheeler to McNamara, Memorandum, April 6, 1965, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 2, doc. 241, quoted in Karnow, Vietnam, p. 430.
164. State Department, Division of Intelligence and Research, "The Effects of the Bombings of North Vietnam," June 29, 1965.
165. quoted in George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1987), p. 337. Bombing also cemented closer ties between Hanoi and its more powerful communist allies.
166. Quoted in VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire, p. 109.
167. Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, p. 368.
168. Kahin, Intervention, p. 319.
169. Westmoreland to JCS, telegram, June 7, 1965, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 2, doc. 337.
170. Westmoreland to Wheeler, telegram, June 24, 1965, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 3, doc. 17. As Wheeler would later recall, "In the summer of 1965, it became amply clear that it wasn't a matter of whether the North Vietnamese were going to win the war; it was a question of when they were going to win it."
171. Quoted in Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), pp. 69-70.
172. Saigon Embassy to State, telegram, June 3, 1965, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 2, doc. 328.
173. Quoted in Logevall, Choosing War, p. 368.
174. In an oral history ten years later, McNamara said he thought that the United States was "on a certain course of defeat," and moreover that "it wasn't clear to me that we could avoid defeat by any action in our power."
175. Quoted in Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 222.
176. Quoted in Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, p. 334.
177. Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 448.
178. McGeorge Bundy, "Personal Notes of a Meeting with President Johnson," June 10, 1965, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 2, doc. 343.
179. VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire, pp. 160, 162.
180. Johnson had in fact already decided to approve Westmoreland's request before these discussions took place, but the July 21-22 deliberations are still highly revealing of various officials' estimates of victory.
181. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, pp. 380-382.
182. John McNaughton, "Analysis and Options for South Vietnam," July 13, 1965, cited in Kahin, Intervention, p. 357.
183. Incongruously, though, McNamara concluded that his recommended course of action stood "a good chance of achieving an acceptable outcome within a reasonable time in Vietnam." McNamara to Johnson, Memorandum, July 20, 1965, in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 3, doc. 67.
184. Quoted in Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, p. 373.
185. The notes of these meetings are reprinted in Kahin, Intervention, pp. 368-386. Quotes are from pp. 376, 374, 377.
186. Greene's estimate is on p. 384.
187. Some argue, for example, that fear of the domino effect in Asia prompted Johnson to hold the line in Vietnam. Moyar, Triumph Forsaken, pp. 290, 375-376.
188. Closely related is the view that Johnson fought in Vietnam to deter China. Kaiser, American Tragedy, p. 362. Others minimize the impor tance of credibility concerns and domino beliefs, arguing instead that the United States intervened because of its preponderance of power over the communist bloc. Porter, Perils of Dominance. A third view emphasizes the causal power of analogies in explaining the decision for war, and a fourth stresses Johnson's fear of humiliation and loss of personal credibility.
189. See, respectively, Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies atWar: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).
190. Logevall, Choosing War, pp. 389-393.
191. Quoted in Logevall, Choosing War, p. 272.
192. See also H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), pp. 184-185.
193. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, p. 332.
194. Kahin, Intervention, p. 320.
195. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 391 (emphasis in original).
196. Bundy, quoted in Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, p. 426
197. Johnson, quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 281-282.
198. See also VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire, pp. 54, 71, 109-110, 131, 162, 213, 217.
199. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, pp. 194, 263, 308-309, 326.
200. McMaster goes so far as to argue that Johnson's oft-expressed fear of Chinese or Soviet intervention was a ploy to protect his domestic political agenda (pp. 314, 317).
201. Francis M. Bator, "No Good Choices: LBJ and the Vietnam/Great Society Connection," Diplomatic History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (June 2008), pp. 309, 321-322 (emphasis in original).
202. Quoted in Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, pp. 94-95. Humphrey argued that Johnson should exploit his unique position to cut his losses and extricate himself from Vietnam.
203. Quoted in Logevall, Choosing War, p. 391.
204. See also Fredrik Logevall, "Comment on Francis M. Bator's 'No Good Choices: LBJ and the Vietnam/Great Society Connection,'" Diplomatic History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (June 2008), p. 357.
205. Larry Berman, "Comment on Francis M. Bator's 'No Good Choices: LBJ and the Vietnam/ Great Society Connection,'" Diplomatic History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (June 2008), p. 362.
206. This is also Berman's conclusion in Planning a Tragedy, p. 146.
207. Quoted in VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire, p. 162.
208. Quoted in Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, pp. 251-252.
209. Quoted in VanDeMark, Into the Quagmire, p. 166.
210. For another argument about how domestic politics can lead to democratic defeat in war, with an application to Vietnam, see Caverley, "Democracies Will Continue to Fight Small Wars... Poorly."
211. Quoted in Zygmunt J. Gàsiorowski, "Joseph Pilsudski in the Light of British Reports," Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 50, No. 121 (October 1972), p. 559.
212. See also Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness, p. 73.
213. Quoted in Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Presidio, 2002), p. 89.
214. Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 248, 243, 286.
215. At the time of the Kargil incursion, Pakistan scored +7 on the Polity index, and Georgia scored +6 in 2008 (down slightly from +7 the previous year). The Polity Project considers states that score +6 or higher to be democracies. See Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2007, http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm. Although technically not an interstate war, the Israeli war against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 is another recent example of a dubious democratic war choice.
216. Evidence also indicates that Pakistan breached the Line of Control in Kashmir because it was growing ever more pessimistic about the prospects for prying the Muslim-majority province away from India
217. Sumit Ganguly and Devin T. Hagerty, Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), p. 158.
218. For more on Kargil, see S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 117-131.
219. Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness, pp. 100-101.
220. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
221. On civil-military relations, see Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).
222. Weeks, "Leaders, Accountability, and Foreign Policy in Non-Democracies"
223. Biddle and Long, "Democracy and Military Effectiveness"
224. Biddle and Zirkle, "Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare in the Developing World."
225. On identity, see Castillo, "The Will to Fight"
226. Jason M. Lyall, "Paths of Ruin: Why Revisionist States Arise and Die in World Politics," unpublished manuscript, Princeton University, 2006.