Iraq: Disaster By Popular Demand By Bryan Caplan

Here’s my April, 2007 op-ed on voter irrationality that never found a home.

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“Power

to the people” – war protestors have been saying it for decades. The more you study public opinion, though,

the more peculiar this slogan seems. When

fighting started in Iraq,

the American public backed the war by three-to-one. So in all honesty, isn’t it “the

people” who got us where we are today?

True,

some support stemmed from our leaders’ deceptive advertising. But we can still fault the public for being gullible;

this is hardly the first time our leaders have bent the truth to enter a

war. In any case, leaders don’t have to

lie to get the public behind them. Almost

every war begins with strong public

support. Public opinion researchers call

this the “rally-round-the-flag” effect. Strange as it sounds, simply entering a war makes the war popular – for a while.

Who

am I to second-guess public opinion?

Fortunately, I don’t have to.

Another well-established pattern is that, given time, the public

second-guesses itself. The rally-round-the-flag effect doesn’t last

forever. As political scientist John

Mueller documents, after a year or so of foreseeable troubles, public support

for wars steadily drops. The remarkable

fact about the Iraq

war is that it already unpopular, even though, by the standards of Korea or Vietnam, casualties

remain low.

Now

think about the incentives that the public gives its leaders. The rally-round-the-flag effect means that,

for any semi-plausible war, decision-makers can count on a burst of popular

support. It also means that Doubting

Thomases who express reservations at the outset of a conflict are risking their

careers. In short, public opinion gives

leaders an incentive to start wars, cross their fingers, and hope things work

out – and skeptics an incentive to keep their criticism to themselves until it

is too late to do much good.

It

gets worse. If you give the public a year,

some casualties, and some scandals – all of which are practically inevitable –

public support drops off. But this hardly

compensates for earlier bad incentives.

Before the majority grows disillusioned, the politicians who planned the

war have frequently been reelected. Yes,

the swing in public opinion gives opponents – and even friends – of the current

regime incentives to reverse course. But

public opinion gives them these incentives whether or not continued support for

the war has become the lesser evil. Would-be

critics who were cowed by public opinion during the early phase of the war now

have an incentive to pander – to paint withdrawal as a virtual free lunch.

Considering

the incentives that politicians face, we should be grateful that fiascos like

the Iraq

war are so rare. Leaders could be a lot less

responsible without forfeiting public support.

If the public greeted plans for war with hard questions instead of flag-waving,

politicians would be a lot more cautious – and we would be a lot less likely to

get in over our heads.

In

the eyes of some observers, admittedly, the main thing to be cautious of is

caution itself. Dangerous times call for

decisive action. As Kennedy advisor Dean

Acheson once told a skeptical professor: “You think the President should

be warned. You’re wrong. The President

should be given confidence.”

If the

rally-round-the-flag effect lasted forever, the Achesons of the world might be

right. I’m skeptical, but it’s

possible. Given the way that public

opinion works, though, intelligent hawks ought to think again. Last year, Rumsfeld warned against “the dangers of

giving the enemy the false impression that Americans cannot stomach a tough

fight.” The study of public opinion

suggests that this is exactly the impression the Iraq War is likely to

leave.

Next time around, intelligent hawks need to ask

themselves: “Does it really serve the national interest to take

advantage of the rally-round-the-flag effect to start a war, if public opinion

will reverse long before the war can be won?” It’s a democracy, after all; once public

opinion reverses, policy will not be far behind.

During the 2008

election, candidates are sure to tell us a great deal about “what the

American people want.” Every

candidate proudly claims to have a hand on the pulse of the nation. But in truth, it is pretty easy to find out

what Americans want. A vast quantity of

high-quality public opinion data on virtually every political topic is only a

mouse click away. If the candidates

cared about good policy half as much as they care about getting elected, they

would ask a different – and harder – question:

“Do the policies that the American people want actually make sense?“

Bryan Caplan is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason

University, and the

author of The

Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton

University Press).