MEDIA ATTENTION today is focused on the death of the 2,000th American soldier in Iraq. But that grim event alone probably won't prove a tipping point in public opposition to the war.
After 30 months of fighting, most Americans have already turned against the war. Polls find that 54% believe the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, up from 24% in March 2003, at the start of the war.
It's not the specific number of casualties so much as the steady drumbeat of carnage that causes people to lose their stomach for war. The truth is that even dramatic events do not necessarily greatly affect support for the cause.
Compare Iraq to Vietnam. Although the 1968 Tet offensive, in which the U.S. military took heavy losses, did cause people to worry that the war was not going well, support did not plummet. It simply continued to drift downward. In Iraq, support bumped up a bit when Saddam Hussein was captured and when elections were held, and it slumped at the time of the Abu Ghraib disclosures. But in each of these cases, it soon returned to its previous course.
What's unprecedented about this war is how fast support is eroding. Casualty tolerance in Iraq is clearly much lower than it was in Vietnam.
Using comparable poll questions, support levels for this war when 2,000 American soldiers have been killed are about the same as they were in the Vietnam War when well over 20,000 had perished. This strongly suggests that the public places a much lower value on the stakes in Iraq than it did in Vietnam, a conflict that was at least initially accepted to be important in the contest with international communism.
The erosion of support for the Iraq war has continued throughout 2005, with some fluctuations. Support for the war rose briefly at the time of the London bombings in the summer, perhaps because of fears of terrorism on U.S. soil. But the attacks also tended to undercut the Bush administration's argument that the terrorists were so busy in Iraq that they couldn't operate elsewhere.
The Bush administration hopes to reverse the downward trend with upbeat speechmaking that claims progress in Iraq. The same approach was used in the Vietnam War but with little success. The problem is that people who always believed the war wasn't "worth it" won't be converted, and those who have become disenchanted are not easily won back. If you find you have bought a car for twice its value, you are likely to continue to regard the deal as a bad one even if you come to like the car.
