Analysis: U.S. public war opinions stable By Steve Sailer UPI National Correspondent
Part of a continuing series on public opinion about the Iraq war.
LOS ANGELES, March 27 (UPI) -- Will the press' plummeting mood affect the American public's will to fight?
There isn't much survey evidence of that yet, and experts on the history of public opinion don't expect major changes.
According to the latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll, support for the war slipped from 72 percent over the weekend to 71 percent on Monday and Tuesday. (That insignificant change was within the poll's 3-point margin of error). Similarly, the Pew Research Center reported that support on Monday was 74 percent, which was up slightly over the two previous days.
While those of us in the media have to look for something new to talk about every day, the public tends to be more unswerving. Karlyn H. Bowman, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, told United Press International: "Once Americans arrive at strong conclusions, it's very hard to shake them. Opinion stays remarkably stable. The public didn't waver on Iraq from last fall through March 17."
Bowman argued: "The public has been watching Saddam a long time. They think he's a thug. They had strong feelings in 1991 that we should have overthrown him then."
She pointed out that the U.S. public tends to rally around the president as soon as the shooting starts, a pattern going back at least to Pearl Harbor. Resolve tends to remain solid as long as the public thinks the war will succeed.
Humphrey Taylor, chairman of Harris Interactive (which conducts The Harris Poll), summed it up by saying: "Nothing succeeds like success, nothing fails like failure."
While the Korean and Vietnam wars eventually became unpopular, the public initially supported both through tens of thousands of American casualties, only abandoning them when victory ceased to be an option.
As Gen. George S. Patton observed in 1944, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser."
Once the shooting started, popular backing for the 1991 Desert Storm operation was steady all the way through, recalled Taylor.
Several weeks into the Afghanistan conflict of 2001, much of the press suddenly went into a funk and began calling the attack on the Taliban a "quagmire" and "another Vietnam." Within two weeks, however, the Afghan capital of Kabul fell to America's allies.
Yet, polls indicate that this media mood swing had only the tiniest impact on the public's bottom-line stance on the war. For example, in the PSRA/Newsweek poll, public support for Afghan action stood at 89 percent during Oct. 11-12, 2001, just after American bombing started. It dropped to 86 percent by Nov. 1-2, only to rebound to 89 percent by Nov. 29-30.
Through late Wednesday, there were 47 confirmed American and British deaths, the majority victims of accidents, friendly fire, or murder, rather than actual combat with Iraqi forces.
Rather than prompting demands for withdrawal, as many in the foreign policy elite assume, fatalities often increase the bellicosity of the American people. According to a study by Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay of the University of Maryland: "In fact, polls show little evidence that the majority of Americans are prone to respond to fatalities by wanting to withdraw U.S. troops.
"If anything, the public is more likely to want to respond assertively. The critical determinant of the public's response is not whether U.S. vital interests are involved, but whether the operation is perceived as likely to succeed."
Taylor offered a British analogy. When an Argentinean Exocet missile sank Britain's destroyer HMS Sheffield during the 1982 Falklands War, "This did not trigger a backlash in the polls against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's war; it simply hardened resolve."
Even the two most notorious setbacks for American forces in the past two decades -- the 1983 truck bombing that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon and the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" firefight in Somalia that killed 18 elite Army fighting men -- did not lead to widespread demands for getting out. According to Kull and Ramsay, the public had been highly skeptical of both actions before the deaths, but the losses made many Americans want to hit back harder.
Harris did suggest, though that "My impression is support for this second Iraq war is softening this week."
Bowman's prediction was, "I think public backing for the war will hold up."