Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006

The Patriot
An Analysis of the interactions of Patriotism, Casualty Sensitivity and Public Opinion of Wartime Foreign Policy

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the world was forever changed, and the foreign policy of the United States of America was turned on its head. All of a sudden, the most powerful country in the world was under attack, and once the dust settled, neither the United States nor its citizens were ready to go down without a fight. There was a massive resurgence in national pride, with American flags appearing across the country in windows, on porches and any other visible surface within hours of the attacks. This unity in the face of an unknown enemy could be characterized as nothing other than patriotism. However, despite these intense individual sentiments, the public was at the will of the national government whose responsibility it was as a democratic hegemonic power to act on behalf of the people and in the interest of the nation in order to protect its citizens and maintain its powerful position in the world. While in this situation the American public was very strongly rallied behind the patriotic cause, the overarching question remains: how and why does the American public behave when faced with certain policy decisions that their leaders make? It is my hypothesis that the fluctuations in the levels of patriotism present within the American public over the course of a military conflict are not only reflected in the publics approval levels for various foreign policy actions, but also guide the casualty sensitivity 1

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 that individuals exhibit in their polling and voting patterns due to a devotion to the perceived good of the nation. In his article On the Eve of War: Authoritarianism, Social Dominance, and American Students Attitudes Toward Attacking Iraq, Sam G. McFarland investigates the ways in which the personality characteristics of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation present in both leaders and the general public lead to a blind patriotism causing a decrease in concern for the human costs of war, focusing specifically on the week before the United States attacked Iraq in 2003.1 Christopher M. Federico, Agnieszka Golec and Jessica L. Dial research a similar theme in The Relationship Between the Need for Closure and Support for Military Action Against Iraq: Moderating Effects of National Attachment, analyzing the ways in which a need for closure affects the perception and treatment of outgroups through the publics identification with the national ingroup.2 While these two works delve into the psychological and behavioral effects of national pride, focusing on its manifestation in opinions on foreign policy, their research was conducted only before the 2003 attack on Iraq, so although they lay a framework for the analysis of future public opinion data, the events of the past three years allow us to take their studies further. Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver and Jason Reifler in some sense inadvertently pick up where the other studies left off, focusing on the reality of public support during a war, which since the era of Vietnam has been commonly assumed to depend on the number of casualties incurred during a military operation. In their article Casualty Sensitivity and
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Sam G. McFarland, On the Eve of War: Authoritarianism, Social Dominance, and American Students Attitudes Toward Attacking Iraq, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31 No. 3, (March 2005): 360. 2 Christopher M. Federico, Agnieszka Golec and Jessica L. Dial, The Relationship between the Need for Closure and Support for Military Action Against Iraq: Moderating Effects of National Attachment, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31 No. 3, (March 2005): 621.

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 the War in Iraq, these three argue that the situational context within which the operation is entered determines the amount of public support, with citizens (already cognizant of the fatal repercussions of wartime) assessing the relative merits of the moral rightness or wrongness as well as the possibility of success, which they argue is more important in determining approval.

Defining Key Terms

For the purposes of this paper, the term patriotism will be defined as the love of ones country coupled with a passion for the defense of the interests of ones country.3 Patriotism must be distinguished from nationalism, a concept which incorporates the same idea of pride in ones country, but also denotes the exclusion and devaluation of other groups as expressed through hostility.4 While this is a clear distinction drawn between the two terms, aspects of each play into aspects of the other, so it is easy to see how patriotic sentiment can become competitive and dominant, acquiring the hostility that is technically characteristic of nationalism.5 Patriotism manifests itself as a method of forming an ingroup, protecting against threats from the outside world. Those with a more authoritarian or hawkish outlook

Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 400. 4 Christopher M. Federico, Agnieszka Golec and Jessica L. Dial, The Relationship between the Need for Closure and Support for Military Action Against Iraq: Moderating Effects of National Attachment, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31 No. 3, (March 2005): 623. 5 The blend of the two concepts is also the meaning most commonly associated with the term patriotism in everyday parlance.

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 convert other nations into outgroups, excluding and vilifying them somewhat.6 Federico et al argue that this antagonistic behavior and worldview is characteristic solely of nationalists, and patriots on the other hand simply love their own country. However love of a country must also include a devotion to its protection, a nuance which they chose to avoid during the course of their research based on previous claims. Ingroup and outgroup themselves require some sort of definition. For the purpose of the discussion of the following research, the former refers to a group which shares a commonality as well as a bond which is exclusionary to those on the outside, and the latter refers to the group created through the exclusionary practices of the ingroup, among whom the exclusion becomes their commonality. The separation into these groups can and frequently does lead to high friction and conflicts based on stereotyping and ingroup favoritism. 7 Casualty sensitivity, as defined by Feaver, Gelpi, and Reifler is a more modernized version of casualty phobia or casualty aversion that takes into account the current cynical and analytical worldview toward warfare. Rather than simply following a model indicating that as casualties increase support will decrease because the public does not want to cause the deaths of troops, casualty sensitivity is a more individualistic and economic-minded approach to assessing the publics reaction to wartime human costs through which one uses cost-benefit analysis to determine the threshold between worthwhile and excessive casualties.

Sam G. McFarland, On the Eve of War: Authoritarianism, Social Dominance, and American Students Attitudes Toward Attacking Iraq, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31 No. 3, (March 2005): 361. 7 Christopher M. Federico, Agnieszka Golec and Jessica L. Dial, The Relationship between the Need for Closure and Support for Military Action Against Iraq: Moderating Effects of National Attachment, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31 No. 3, (March 2005): 621.

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 Methods and Data

In order to gauge the extent and characteristics of the effect that patriotism has had on casualty sensitivity in the Post-9/11 Middle East military conflicts, I searched for opinion polls relating to national sentiment to assess the emotional and political state that the people were in, and to create a starting base point for comparisons. I compiled results of public opinion polls conducted over the past eight years by a variety of sources all asking the same question: How patriotic are you? Each offered the following answer choices: Would you say that you areextremely patriotic, very patriotic, somewhat patriotic, or not especially patriotic? (The limited response options made the trends in opinion easier to trace over time, and their upbeat predilection also made it less likely that respondents would be afraid to answer with a certain response for fear of offending the interviewers sensibilities, particularly directly after 9/11.) The question wording and answer choices were identical for each poll, providing for a consistent basis for response.8 They were all conducted over the telephone and had population samples of around 1000 random adult participants. For the purpose of investigating the ways in which the sentiment of patriotism evidences itself in the publics views toward military efforts, I also compiled tables containing polling data on the questions Do you approve or disapprove of the current US military action against terrorism in Afghanistan? taken from surveys conducted in the three months following the September 11th terrorist attacks,9 and Do you approve or
8

Due to the random spacing of the polls involving this particular question, certain conspicuous fluctuations in patriotism do not appear on Table 1 as they would with a regular format. The graph in Table 2 shows the patriotism levels acquired through other two different polls which used different response categories. These data were included to create an accurate reflection of important changes in public opinion which would have otherwise been omitted. 9 See Appendix.

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq? conducted over the three months leading up to the May 2006 data point on Table 1.10 I then compared the levels of approval for the two military operations with the patriotism levels reported by the national sentiment poll which spans from before the attacks up until May 2006. Finally, I applied these findings to the theories of Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler to see if in fact there was any relation between the three.

Obstacles

Unfortunately, due to the specificities of the wording of questions that were available for researching, it was impossible to find consistently spaced data from preconducted polls in order to create a specifically accurate representation of the actual levels of patriotism at each point over the course of the eight years represented in Table 1. As previously mentioned, the statistics on the extent to which the survey participants felt patriotic were relatively consistent over time, as reflected in other polls using different language and answer choices. However, as is evidenced by the vast difference between the data points in Tables 1 and 2, certain cultural outside forces can affect levels of patriotism along with current events. Question wording also restricted the data options available for evaluating the correlation between approval of foreign policy and patriotic sentiments. The question relating to Afghanistan mentions terrorism, a word that was caused an even more intense reaction directly post-9/11 than it does now, meaning that survey respondents could have simply been reacting to the perceived threat of terrorism, and not to the actual policy of
10

Both of these surveys were conducted according to the same parameters as the patriotism poll.

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 waging war with another nation. The other comparison question that refers to George W. Bush also threatens to contaminate the results with disapproval levels aimed toward the man himself, because it asks if the respondent approves of his handling of the situation. Clearly, the questions are not ideal and other variables may be at play, but the overall meaning remains, because as Americans, American patriotism would affect their views toward terrorism and toward their own president.

Results

[Insert Tables 1 and 2 Here] The patriotism levels reported in the randomly spaced poll displayed in Table 1 did not experience massive shifts, but have been declining over the past two years. They table is missing two important data points though, which are displayed in Table 2 on the same scale for easy comparison. These two results are an exception to the rule for two different reasons: the first set of data points are those which were obtained right after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and the second set are those obtained right before the 5 year anniversary of the attacks. Presumably, patriotism would spike on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks every year, and would also most likely spike around Independence Day, July 4th. Aside from those massive jumps in patriotic sentiments though, the general trend has been that strong patriotic feelings are decreasing. In order to determine whether or not there was a correlation between heightened patriotism and support for a military effort that guaranteed bloodshed, I compared the results of the public opinion survey on approval levels about the efforts in Afghanistan to

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 counteract terrorism with the patriotic levels reported at that time. The results for the poll on approval of the United States military action in Afghanistan are graphed in Table 3, and show that over the course of the beginning of the United States retaliation efforts against terrorism, support for the military activity was very high, hovering just around 90%, an impressively high approval rate. Looking at the pro-warfare statistics graphed in Table 3, these unusually high approval ratings coincide exactly with an uncharacteristically high level of patriotism, one which is does not even come close to being replicated anywhere in the data graphed in Table 1 which charts the recent patriotism levels over the past eight years.11 However, in order to make sure that this was not simply a reaction to the unusual

circumstances of fear, unrest, social turmoil and instability that the American public faced at that point in time, I subjected the approval ratings of the current situation of United States military operations in the Middle East, which are centered in Iraq to the same analysis. [Insert Table 3 Here] As is clearly evidenced in the graph in Table 4, the disapproval level of the way that President George W. Bush surpassed 60% in the Spring of 2006, as a result of his dwindling popular support during a war effort that is frequently likened to the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Public support for the War in Iraq in fact began to dwindle back in the Spring of 2003, eventually dropping below 50% in June of 2005,12 but this levels of disapproval are considerably higher than they had ever been before. The low approval level reflected in this data coincides quite perfectly with the fall in patriotism that is evident in the data in Table 1, and even in the comparison between the patriotic
11 12

The statistics compiled in the poll span the dates of June 27, 1999 to May 23, 2006. Richard C. Eichenberg, Victory Has Many Friends: U.S. Public Opinion and the Use of Military Force, 1981-2005, International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 2005: 140.

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 upsurge and patriotic nostalgia that are side by side in Table 2 which indicates that even all of the media build-up to the 5 year anniversary of one of if not the most important political events in recent American history could not raise the same amount of unity and pride in what this nation stands for as was seen as the country recovered from tragedy. Disappointment with governmental foreign policies and a loss of pride in ones nation are clearly related, but how these two psychological factors manifest themselves in public opinion of foreign relations must be examined further. [Insert Table 4 Here]

Discussion

Within the United States there is a societal focus on achieving the most beneficial end result through whatever means necessary, placing an unwieldy amount of weight on the outcome of an event. Through the course of their research, Gelpi et al found that When the public appears to be confident in an American victory, then casualties have little effect on popular support. But if the publics confidence in victory is shaken, then casualties erode support.13 A patriot, in tune with the ideals of his country, would therefore exercise judgment based on this trend. It would logically follow that those who identify with a higher level of patriotism would support an effort through which their team would win, despite losses, because of the potential gains in power, security, and the economic sector, not to mention ever increasing pride in the home country. In the face of such a tremendous windfall, the loss of human lives does not seem as catastrophic, because not only did those fellow13

Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver and Jason Reifler. Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq, International Security Winter 2005/2006, 17-18.

Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 countrymen die heroically fighting for the betterment of their country, but they achieved it. While approving in any way of the death of a fellow American would be in some way traitorous to a true patriot who would see him as a brother, the honor in the mode of dying would override or at least muffle such a sentiment. However, if the person were to die unnecessarily in vain, that would be an affront not only to his honor, but to that of the entire country that did not care enough to take care of one of their own. The group mentality of ingroup versus outgroup that is created by such exultation of one way of being inevitably brings up the concept that if one way is so right, the others must be in some way faulty, thereby creating judgments as a byproduct of what was meant to be such an innocent appreciation: in fact, intergroups hostility may depend on the nature of an individuals identification with his or her ingroup.14 Federico et al found that nationalism and patriotism (which have been combined for the purpose of this paper) are both positively attached with hawkish attitudes toward Iraq.15 Therefore, despite the fact that patriots so fully celebrate the lifestyle and people that surround them, their allegiances lie more deeply with the country than with its members. Thus, they would prefer whatever is best for the country itself, not the individual members, which would support Gelpi et als belief that the promise of success, of winning, is more powerful than the threat of increased numbers of casualties, and that while the patriotic ideals of justice and morality also come into play during wartime opinion formation, they are omnipresent are not as valuable as they were before the world changed with 9/11.

14

Christopher M. Federico, Agnieszka Golec and Jessica L. Dial, The Relationship between the Need for Closure and Support for Military Action Against Iraq: Moderating Effects of National Attachment, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31 No. 3, (March 2005): 630 15 Christopher M. Federico, Agnieszka Golec and Jessica L. Dial, The Relationship between the Need for Closure and Support for Military Action Against Iraq: Moderating Effects of National Attachment, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31 No. 3, (March 2005): 627.

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Alex Maia Hamilton Herman Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion December 8, 2006 Conclusion

The strength of group mentality is apparent in the patriotism that flourishes during threatening times and decreases when confidence in the homelands government is dwindling. Patriotic sentiment itself is not enough to guarantee approval of all national governmental policies, particularly when they do not have the ultimate best interests of the nation at hand. Approval of foreign policies declines when the government acts in a way that allows their patriotic population to lose confidence, and vice versa. However, this patriotic behavioral pattern is unique due to the events of September 11th, 2001, and while those attacks forever changed the ways of America, it is possible that the resurgence of devotion to American ideals will continue to alter the ways in which the public perceives foreign policies, particularly now that the reality of a terrorist attack has instilled in them a realistic fear, as well as causing many to re-evaluate their priorities with regard to ideals, morals, success, and human life.

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