This project conducts 6 waves of polls (through Knowledge Networks) over February-April to explore public support for military operations in Iraq in the face of mounting U.S. casualties. The conventional wisdom holds that casualties are highly corrosive of public support and that unless the Iraq conflict is ended quickly, the Bush administration may find itself lacking the public support needed to maintain its commitment to Iraq.
Previous scholarly analysis has suggested a different conclusion: that public support is a function of public estimates of how successful the operation is likely to be. If correct, however, this insight begs an obvious question: how does the public assess the likelihood of success and how does that assessment change with changing events on the ground in the actual military operation? There is very little existing public opinion data on this question, and none that is conducted in a controlled, time-series, that would allow for testing the kind of dynamic relationships between events and attitudes that the question, and the theory, posits. Senior military leaders have identified the February-April time frame as the crucial window for military operations in Iraq; polling, therefore, must begin immediately and continue through this window of expected increased military operations and expected casualties. The product will contribute to a major debate within the academic community and also be high-impact policy-relevant findings that speak directly to a foreign policy challenge of utmost importance: what are the limits to American public support for the use of military force?
Intellectual Merit: This project builds on a steadily growing scholarly literature that has exposed significant gaps in the conventional wisdom and generated new questions that have received only scant attention in the past. Previous research has been hampered by the need to rely on hypothetical scenarios that may only uncertainly approximate actual public attitudes during real-life military operations. The ongoing military operation in Iraq provides a window for collecting precisely the sorts of data that longer-lead academic studies are unlikely to generate.
Broader Impact: Policymakers have identified doubts about the public's "stomach" for military operations as one of the central uncertainties in American foreign policy today. The ongoing operation in Iraq underscores that this is a matter for immediate, as well as for longer-term interest at the highest levels of the U.S. government, and indeed capitols around the world.
