Current state of affairs?

I am pretty sure that at least the part about likelihood of success (i..e. public will tolerate high casualties if there is a 'light at the end of the tunnel) has been known for quite some time. I remember having a conversation about this 2-3 years ago at a conference.

The rightness/wrongness seems a new angle. I suspect w/o having read this paper, that wrightness/wrongness confounds with likelihood of success (i.e. 'good war' are easy ones) Maybe the authors controlled for this. I wonder even more, did they take media coverage into account in the publlic tolerance for casualties. The Bush administration has been very good at managing media -- e.g. not allowing pictures of the 'caskets' (there is some obscure military term for these) coming home. If people have to really search out info on casualties, if they are not bombarded by pictures of the dead coming home, then it seems to me they will be less intolerant of the cost of the war.

On the point of salience, however. Science -- even social science-- is supposed to be cummulative. When the next opportunity to have a war like this comes along (and it wont be too long in coming), some junior policy analyst during a literature review should be able to find these results and report them to his political bosses -- so they know (a) how to manage expectations of victory or (b) whether the (seeming) likelihood of success is great enough to support an effort long enough to achieve the desired result.

When I first saw the headline "How IR theory becomes OBE" I thought you referred to the "Order of the British Empire", but I guess it's unlikely to get knighted by the Queen as IR theorist...

ab -- I initially had the same thought.

But here is an IR academic who actually has the OBE . Nice guy, too, to underling graduate students.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/ws/staff/jsp.html

OBE = Out of body experience?
OBS = Outward Bound Singapore? (that's what Google tells me)

I give up.

Oh, sorry. OBE = overtaken by events... OBS = typo, perhaps.

Dan,

I disagree - there is no dichotomy between the two articles - Feaver's point is still salient.

The American people's support for a war depends on their perception of progress, and that is influenced as much by leadership as by events.

President Bush is a case study of Presidential leadership failure, and it is his failure that the public is reacting to.

He does not try to build domestic support for the war - in particular he does not do so personally. He continually cedes the initiative to his enemies and just reacts to them on as-needed and fitful basis. Why this is so doesn't matter.

What is important, and it is critically important, is that his complete failure to "use the bully pulpit" has resulted in a complete failure by a war President to establish a personal relationship with the American people.

And they've tuned him out. It no longer matters what he says because they're not listening anymore. He's said nothing for so long that the American people no longer believe he has anything to say.

One of the things he hasn't said is "victory". He doesn't believe in victory so neither do they.

It looks very much like the Bush administration is experiencing full-bore Vietnam syndrome in the war on terror overall. I.e., the Bush administration is "trying not to lose" as opposed to "trying to win".

The American people are turning against the war because they rightly perceive that President Bush is no longer trying to win.

"Our findings imply that the U.S. public makes reasoned and reasonable judgments about an issue"

Saddam/911 link = "reasoned"?

The reason the support for the war is flagging is that public preception is closing in on facts and departing the administrations pre-war sales pitch.

Hi Dan:

This, as you note, is a timely, policy-relevant topic, but it's premature to say that it's no longer politically salient. The Feaver/Gelpi thesis is good a priori and fairly robust historically. Yet, it's important to take a close look at what the opinion data say. Just looking at Richard Morin's analysis of the Post's recent data are indicative. Never discount the margin of error (+/-3%), which means support could be as high as 45 percent (or even higher if one considers that these results could be outside the 95 percent confidence interval). Also, take a look at the individual questions items in the survey: "Costs" could mean financial costs, as well as human. Other surveys (I think some NYT polls, for example) ask if battle casualties have been too high. This WP poll, furthermore, says that fully half the public believes Iraq has contributed to U.S. long-term security. Moreover, very few people are calling for an immediate withdrawal -- just 33 percent -- which is a key question to look at when assessing casualty sensitivity (it gets closer to assessing a Somalia syndrome). Since 2003, we've seen a steady decline in support, and that may or may not be due simply to casualties. Earlier comments above about the administration's failure to build the case for the war should be noted. Although be careful with the Vietnam analogy (e.g., John Mueller's "The Iraq Syndrome"). Iraq is not Vietnam, although we do need a better marketing campaign for the current deployment (see Melvin Laird, "Learning the Lessons of Vietnam," Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005). Finally, note the public support for the war in Iraq may rebound, especially if we see major successes (as Feaver/Gelpi predict) and with the further consolidation of Iraq's democratic regime generally.

Suppose Tom Holsinger is right, and Bush notices it, and he starts talking about victory.

That's likely to get him a strictly temporary boost. But what happens in 3 months when there's still no sign of victory?

The people who're talking about victory wind up talking about victory in ten years or twenty years -- that is, beyond the horizon. It does Bush no good to talk about victory in ten years. And it does him no good to talk about victory in three years when there's no hope of victory in 3 years outside an opium dream.

So Bush quite reasonably doesn't do either one. He'll start talking about victory just when he needs a temporary boost in public opinion. It would waste the effect to do it a day sooner.

J.Thomas,

My point is that it no longer matters what Bush says, because they ain't listenin' no more. He was silent too long.

I suspect that even deeds by the Bush administration won't change this. It may be that the public will give Bush credit for success, but IMO they won't pay attention to what he says even then.

But it may also be that the public will NOT give Bush credit for success at this point - that they'll blame him for what goes wrong without crediting him for what goes right. That has happened when a President sufficiently honks off the American people.

We shall find out whether President Bush's leadership failures have gotten him into that dreadful position.

The mystery pollster had a post about the Feaver-Gelpi work a while back. Seems that there is disagreement about their work in the academic community.

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/12/polling_the_str.html

Tom Holsinger, what you say makes sense, and I rather hope you're correct. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving politician.

If only we'd gotten this result 4 years ago, when it would have done more good....