Thomas P.M. Barnett

ïìPolls Suggest War Isn't Hurting Bush: Mounting Deaths in Iraq Have Not Resulted in Major Backlash in Public Opinion,î by John F. Harris and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 10 September, p. A10.

Old notion that has haunted Pentagon since Vietnam: U.S. public is severely averse to casualties (body bag syndrome). Most in military felt this phenom was given huge push by first Iraq war (the war with almost no casualties, they said, would mean Americans would expect all such wars to be like that). Then the so-called CNN Effect was demonstrated with "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia, and the sense of the unbreakable connection was all the more concrete in most leaders' minds. I don't know how many Pentagon briefs I've sat through where I've seen the bullet about "casualty-averse public."

So how come Bush is doing so well in the polls? When "these results challenge what some public opinion analysts had for years assumed was a reliable link--which some scholars argued operated with an almost mathematical precision--between combat deaths and erosion of support for military operations."

Good quote from always reliable Andrew Kohut of Pew Research Center: public support "does not so much track with number of casualties per se, but with the public's sense of whether things are degrading." Or, as I argued in my book (p. 204), what the public needs to see are: "(1) the goals are well defined; and (2) the cost seems worth the potential gain." In other words, does the op make sense to the pubic, and do they think we're succeeding, or at least not screwing it up too badly?

So you have to ask the question again: why is Bush doing so well? I don't think the Swift Boat Veterans' bullshit is doing this to Kerry. I think it reflects some bias too many voters may have against a Dem candidate. I mean, my God, the man is a decorated combat veteran who's killed the enemy and been wounded by live fire, and he's still trailing Bush 53 to 37 on who would handle Iraq better in the future! Right after the 1000th casualty is announced and following a week where Bush intimated that we could not win the GWOT and the Pentagon admitted we don't control a big chunk of Iraq (the toughest Sunni part).

So you really do have to wonder, Michael Moore's successful movie notwithstanding, whether or not a major chunk (now just half, but only down 20 percentage points from May 2003--when I would have expected a much bigger decline) of the population really do buy the man's attempts at explaining the bigger picture and goals of transforming the Middle East to end the scourge of transnational terrorism coming out of there.