(Page 3 of 33) - Echoes of Vietnam?: Body Counts and Public Perceptions of Success and Failure in the War in Iraq authored by Boettcher III, William. and Cobb, Michael.

The Spring of 2004 was a difficult time for U.S. military forces and civilian

contractors in Iraq. At the end of March, four U.S. contractors were killed in Falluja and
their burned and dismembered corpses were dragged through the streets and hung from a
bridge over the Euphrates River (evoking memories of the failed American intervention
in Somalia over a decade earlier). By early April, U.S. military operations were under
way in Falluja, Najaf, Kufa, and Sadr City (in Baghdad). As U.S. casualties reached a
post-war monthly record (135

), the American media broke the story of prisoner abuse at

the Abu Ghraib prison. With the Bush administration’s poll numbers slipping, the
Pentagon’s public affairs office went into damage control mode. Secretary Rumsfeld
accepted personal responsibility for the prison scandal, traveled to Abu Ghraib to show
the depth of his concern, and chastised the media for its negative coverage of news from
Iraq (Shanker, 2004). As sporadic U.S. casualties continued through early May, in-theater
media briefings (by military officers and civilians in the Coalition Provisional Authority)
began to include references to specific estimates of “insurgents killed” in particular U.S.
operations (Fisher, 2004; Fisher and Wong, 2004; Shanker, 2004; Wong, 2004, May 18
and May 24). This focus on “body counts” and “casualty-ratio” reports reversed a post-
Vietnam pentagon policy that sought to avoid the “five-o’clock follies” briefings that
tended to significantly overestimate enemy casualties and overstate the relationship
between enemy body counts and mission success (see Dao, 2004; Gartner and Myers,
1995).

In this paper we examine the impact of body-count and casualty-ratio frames on

public support for the ongoing U.S. military intervention in Iraq. Building on recent
research into American casualty sensitivity, we argue that a number of contextual factors
mitigate or exaggerate the effect of casualty reports. Elite framing and counter framing,
hypothetical estimates of acceptable/unacceptable casualties, understanding of the
objectives of the war, previous perceptions of success/failure, partisan and ideological
differences, and demographic factors all appear to affect the public response to this
information. In order to test the direct impact of a subset of these variables, we conducted
an experiment embedded in a survey of public attitudes regarding the war in Iraq. The
results demonstrate the inadequacy of univariate, cumulative, and monotonic
expectations regarding the relationship between growing casualties and public opposition
to U.S. military operations.

Relevance of Casualty Tolerance

The study of casualty tolerance is relevant for a number of reasons. First, as Burk

(1999, p. 56) notes, the American public generally views potential casualties as the most
important factor to consider before engaging in a military intervention. Knowing the
public’s casualty-tolerance level is thus crucial for policy makers hoping to generate
public support for a military deployment. Second, once an intervention has begun,
casualty sensitivity has often resulted in declining support for military intervention as
actual casualties mounted over time. As in the current occupation of Iraq, information
about casualties tends to be highly salient to the American public and media. Finally, the
general assumption of casualty sensitivity in democratic publics is a fundamental element
of the literature on the “democratic peace”. As Reiter and Stam argue, “democratic

The only month to eclipse this total was November, 2004 with 137 deaths.