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Polls

HNN Poll: Is President Bush Likely to Lose Public Support If Soldiers Continue to Die?

Guerrillas killed two US soldiers in the region west of Baghdad, and wounded 11 (yes, 11!) others on late Thursday through Friday. In addition, US soldiers mistook Iraqi auxiliary Facilities Protection Services personnel (our guys) in Falluja for guerrillas and killed 10 of them, along with a Jordanian guard. The situation in Falluja has been tense all summer, and the temperature just went up several notches.

At this rate we would have 2000 - 4000 wounded US troops a year, and several hundred dead. It seems to me a rate of casualties that is unsustainable and inexcusable.--Juan Cole, on his blog (Sept. 13, 2003)

Recently, Lawrence F. Kaplan argued in the New Republic that while the media elite have no stomach for high casualties in Iraq, the public does.

Do you agree?

From Mr. Kaplan's article,"Willpower" (New Republic, September 8 & 15, 2003):

[T]he casualties generated in Iraq's "shooting gallery" rile the likes of [Howard] Dean and {Bob] Herbert more than they do the public at large. Well before the first shot was fired, a mass of polling data suggested the country's willingness to tolerate battle deaths in Iraq exceeded even the figures predicted in worst-case scenarios. In 1999, a massive opinion survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates for the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (tiss) asked people to name the highest number of American military deaths they would accept in a war to "prevent Iraq from obtaining weapons of mass destruction." The mean response: 29,853. A CBS News/New York Times survey last October found that 54 percent of respondents favored military action even in the event of "substantial" American casualties. Despite the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction, the war's bloody aftermath hasn't elicited much of an outcry, either. In the face of mounting casualties, 58 percent of those questioned in a July Wall Street Journal/NBC poll said American troops should stay in Iraq "as long as necessary to complete the process, even if it takes as long as five years." Another poll in July, this one for The Washington Post and ABC, found three in four respondents expected significantly more American deaths, yet seven in ten still believed U.S. forces should remain in Iraq "until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties." The most recent Washington Post survey, taken during the second week in August, shows the number of Americans who support the U.S. presence in Iraq--seven in ten--remains unchanged. Even a Newsweek poll taken in the aftermath of last week's U.N. bombing found that 60 percent of respondents support maintaining current force levels in Iraq for more than a year, with twice as many favoring staying ten years or more as supporting immediate withdrawal.

There is a story behind these numbers. In recent years, the public's unwillingness to tolerate combat deaths has become an article of faith for America's leaders. The first President Bush justified the decision to halt the Gulf war short of Baghdad on the grounds that doing otherwise would have entailed further American losses. President Clinton imbibed the same lesson after the October 1993 slaughter of crack American troops in Somalia, subsequently offering assurances to the public that any military action would endanger as few lives as possible. Clinton-era Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton even devised a "Dover Test" for the use of force: "Is the American public prepared for the sight of our most precious resource coming home in flag-draped caskets into Dover Air Force Base?" According to the tiss data, the architects of U.S. foreign policy believe the answer is no. Seventy-eight percent of officers and a nearly identical percentage of their civilian counterparts agreed with the statement: "The American public will rarely tolerate large numbers of U.S. casualties in military operations." America's foes agree as well. Prior to the first Gulf war, Saddam Hussein insisted that Americans could never tolerate "ten thousand dead in one battle." For his part, Osama bin Laden boasted that the collapse of U.S. support for the operation in Somalia "convinced us that the Americans are a paper tiger." But those who insisted the American public has no stomach for casualties were wrong then, and they are wrong now. The real challenge for America's leaders will not be convincing the public to stay the course in Iraq. It will be convincing themselves.

he public has long been less fearful of casualties than America's political and military elites assume--and, for that matter, less fearful than the elites themselves. According to polls taken by the American Institute for Public Opinion (aipo), the level of support for World War II never slipped below 75 percent, even though more than 200,000 Americans had been killed by mid-1945. World War II, of course, was the "good war." But the absence of a correlation between casualties and public support holds true even in more controversial conflicts. Survey data dating back half a century consistently shows that what determines the public's willingness to tolerate casualties has little do with casualties themselves.

Specifically, polls demonstrate that Americans will sustain battle deaths if they think the United States will emerge from a conflict triumphant, if they believe the stakes justify casualties, and if the president makes a case for suffering them. Each of these measures has important implications for the operation in Iraq. "The public is defeat-phobic, not casualty-phobic," Christopher Gelpi and Peter Feaver conclude in their forthcoming book, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force, which culls a mountain of data to prove the point. In Korea, for example, an aipo survey found that public support for the war in August 1950 was a sturdy 66 percent--despite the death of 5,000 American soldiers in the two-month-old war. By December 1950, however, that number had plummeted to 39 percent. Because of battle deaths? Probably not. Between November 1950, when Chinese forces intervened in the conflict, and the time of that survey, the United States suffered a series of devastating battlefield defeats. A few months later, once U.S. forces halted the Chinese offensive and launched their own, public support climbed--even as the number of American deaths passed the 20,000 mark. A 1994 rand corporation study even concluded that the Korea toll "led not to cries to withdraw but to a desire to escalate."

Even Vietnam, where the myth of a risk-averse public was born, proves nothing of the kind. There, too, the public's sensitivity to casualties depended on its faith in the eventual success of the mission. And, prior to the Tet Offensive in 1968, that faith remained substantially intact. Despite the more than 10,000 Americans killed by then, numerous opinion polls taken on the eve of Tet found a clear majority favored either continuing or escalating the war. According to a Harris Poll, 31 percent of those surveyed in mid-1967 cited American casualties as the most disturbing feature of the war. But, in the aftermath of Tet, which the media portrayed as a major defeat, "the impact of casualties on support tripled in size," according to Gelpi and Feaver. Within a month, the percentage of those most troubled by American losses rose to 44 percent. Even so, those favoring a withdrawal from Vietnam never comprised a majority before the Nixon administration's decision to "Vietnamize" the war, when withdrawal became official policy.

Moreover, victory isn't the only source of public resolve in the face of battle losses--a fact that has become fairly obvious throughout the past decade. "[W]hen important interests and principles have been at stake, the public has been willing to tolerate rather high casualties," Eric Larson writes in his 1996 book, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations. "In short, when we take into account the importance of the perceived benefits, the evidence of a recent decline in the willingness of the public to tolerate casualties appears rather thin."

The paramount example of this tolerance was the 1991 Gulf war. As John Mueller's book Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War shows, American casualty estimates prior to Operation Desert Storm ranged into the tens of thousands. The public was well aware of these figures. A poll taken by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation on the eve of the ground war found that 67 percent knew about a Pentagon estimate forecasting 30,000 American deaths. Far from prompting a collapse in support, a Gallup Poll taken during the same period reported that a majority felt the Gulf crisis was worth going to war over, even if that meant up to 40,000 American deaths. Looking back at the polls, Larson details how the public's willingness to incur casualties derived from the promotion of a "number of foreign policy goals or principles in the Gulf that majorities of the public generally thought were very important"--among them, to deter further aggression by Iraq, to prevent Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction, and to reverse Iraq's occupation of Kuwait.