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Poll numbers drop as toll rises

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published January 1, 2007

A four-figure number hovers 50 feet over a busy Philadelphia street, visible in an office window. It changes maybe once or twice a day like the cost of something.

A janitor once stopped, just to stare. "I see that number, and it makes me cry," he told Celeste Zappala, who keeps the running tally.

It is a number that moves American opinion: the U.S. military's death toll in Iraq. Zappala's son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, is one of the dead.

Other makeshift memorials rise up across the country as reminders of the war's human cost: flags planted in honor of the dead on the National Mall in Washington, symbolic tombstones at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, signs with fallen soldiers' names plastered to telephone polls outside Boston.

Americans may question this war for many reasons, but their doubts often find voice in the count of U.S. war deaths. An overwhelming majority - 84 percent - worry that the war is causing too many casualties, according to a September poll by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda.

The country largely kept the faith during World War II, even as about 400,000 U.S. forces died. Before turning against the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Americans tolerated thousands more deaths than in Iraq.

Has something changed? Do Americans somehow place higher value on the lives of their soldiers now? Do they expect success at lower cost? Or do most simply dismiss this particular war as the wrong one - hard to understand and harder to win - and not worth the losses?

The Associated Press recently posed these questions to scholars, veterans, activists and other Americans.

A death toll of 3,000 simply sounds higher to Americans in this war than it did in other prolonged conflicts of the past century, for a number of reasons, the interviews suggest.

John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, calls this casualty sensitivity "the Iraq syndrome." He described it in an influential journal article: "Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War."

In the weeks after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, public backing was powerful. But opinion began to shift once the Iraqi army was beaten, its leader was forced into hiding, and chemical, biological or nuclear weapons were not found.

By late 2003, public support for the occupation began to seesaw around 50 percent, according to Richard Eichenberg, a political scientist at Tufts University.

In October, 54 percent of registered voters believed the war wasn't worth the U.S. casualties or cost, a Hart-McInturff poll found. In November, voters reversed the congressional balance of power in an election viewed as a referendum on Iraq.

Polling analysts believe Americans are more sensitive to casualties than in the past because they neither see vital interests at stake nor feel the "halo effect" from a clear prospect of success.

"When is it going to stop? We're losing a lot of youngsters," said former tanker Ed Collins, 82, of Hicksville, N.Y., who survived the assault on Normandy's beaches in World War II. "I went in when I was 18; that was young, too. But we fought for something. Now we have no idea who we're fighting for and what we're fighting for."

That's partly because the mission's focus has shifted repeatedly, the experts argue: from finding weapons of mass destruction, to deposing Saddam Hussein, to fighting terrorists.

Building a stable democracy in Iraq has been given as a justification for the war's sacrifices, and yet close to two-thirds of Americans think a stable, democratic government is unlikely to take hold in Iraq, according to a Dec. 8 poll by AP-Ipsos. Many believe Iraq has fallen into the chaos of civil war.

At the same time, scholars suggest that America's instant technologies and its global power have conditioned its population to expect quick, painless results in almost any war.

[Last modified January 1, 2007, 00:27:07]