WASHINGTON, 12 November 2003 — Imagine this scenario: You have a leaderless country about to become a breeding ground for terrorism. American armed forces engage in an intense manhunt, hoping to capture the mastermind behind mounting guerrilla attacks.
Things seem to be progressing (or so we are told) when tragedy strikes. A US military helicopter is shot down by a shoulder-launched rocket. More than a dozen Americans lose their lives. The locals celebrate. And the mission takes a turn for the worse.
Sound familiar? It is eerie how much Sunday’s downing of a Chinook helicopter in Fallujah, Iraq, parallels the 1993 firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia, captured in the film ``Black Hawk Down.’’
Following the Mogadishu fiasco, Americans vociferously opposed continued US military activity in Somalia. With the public turning against him, President Clinton felt that he had no choice but to exit.
As the attacks in Iraq yield a growing harvest of death almost every day, the key question now is: Will American public opinion on Iraq mirror trends in public opinion on Somalia?
So far, the Iraq operation has enjoyed majority support. But for how much longer can the Bush administration expect it to last? The answer to this question will depend on the public’s killed-in-action, or KIA, threshold.
According to new research by political scientists, Americans have different thresholds for how many lives they are willing to sacrifice in military operations, and those fatality levels depend on the interests at stake, the justifications provided and the objectives accomplished.
For example, the public tolerated tens of thousands of deaths before majority opinion turned against the Vietnam War. Evidence indicates that although there were 148 battle deaths in the 1991 Gulf War, Americans might have tolerated 500-1,000 KIAs before demanding a withdrawal. But in engagements where interests are not clear-cut, such as in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo peace operations, even a few dozen casualties were intolerable.
So how many more deaths in Iraq will Americans stomach?
The bad news for the Bush administration is that the current campaign is less a war and more a peace operation. With the primary threat that justified the war removed, the remaining objectives are largely nation-building and force protection. As such, the stakes are lower than in the spring when the weapons of mass destruction menace seemed more imminent — and invasion was the solution.
As America is now trying to win the peace after winning the war, the level of what is tolerable is shrinking. As a result, the public’s KIA threshold could be as low as 500 deaths.
Indeed, to the extent that previous campaigns offer guidance, we can be fairly certain that the media will make a news story out of such a casualty milestone. In large-scale campaigns like Korea and Vietnam, 1,000 and 10,000 deaths became major opinion-shifting moments after being brought to the public’s attention. In small-scale campaigns like Lebanon, 100 deaths were more than enough.
The present campaign falls somewhere in-between on the spectrum of military operations, so 500 fatalities seems to be a natural choice for reflection and re-evaluation of the mission.
