The number of American troops killed in Iraq has hit the 1,000 mark, a grim milestone that analysts say is likely to raise new questions about the U.S. involvement there during the presidential campaign.
While Sen. John Kerry stepped up his criticism of the Iraq war on the campaign trail Tuesday and President Bush continued to defend the conflict, analysts who have studied the effect of casualties on public opinion said the death toll’s political significance is uncertain.
Kerry said in a statement that the 1,000th death “marks a tragic milestone in the war in Iraq.” Bush, campaigning in Missouri, promised to complete the mission so families will know “their child or their husband or wife has not died in vain.”
Most of the deaths have come since Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1, 2003. At that point, 138 Americans had died in the conflict. But since then, U.S. forces have suffered small but steady losses on an almost daily basis.
A senior Republican adviser said the Bush campaign had been warily watching the casualty count, fearful that it might hit the 1,000 mark during the Republican convention last week and interrupt the heavily scripted event dedicated to praising the president’s Iraq policy and the war on terrorism.
Four states eyed by Republicans and Democrats as potentially pivotal to the election have endured more than their share of war deaths on a per capita basis, a Tribune analysis shows. The number of deaths per million residents is among the highest in Arizona, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In Texas last week, officials at Ft. Hood in Killeen unveiled a memorial to the 80 soldiers and a civilian contractor killed while serving with the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq. After the ceremony, families filed past in silence, carrying video cameras and small children.
“You don’t ever think there’s going to be a memorial with your husband’s name on it,” said Ursula Pirtle, carrying the sleeping 10-month-old daughter of her late husband, Spec. James Heath Pirtle, killed Oct. 4, 2003. “I thought we would grow old together.”
Gary Segura, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, said the fact that nearly one-fifth of the war deaths have come from National Guard and reserve units could mean that the death toll will have a stronger political effect.
“There can be a far bigger local effect in casualties,” he said. “If a kid dies from your home town, that’s a much bigger deal, because you don’t have to make a very big leap from that kid to your own kid.”
Yet the time when the deaths of U.S. forces led the evening news has long passed. Republicans and Democrats alike say that casualties no longer are at the top of voters’ minds in focus groups conducted in a handful of political swing states.
“It [the 1,000th death] is newsworthy, and it is arbitrary, but it seems to be something of a landmark,” said John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University. “I don’t think the number by itself makes all that much of a difference,” other than to draw attention to an erosion of support for the U.S. involvement, he said.
Mueller, who has done studies on the effect of casualties on public opinion, said the number likely will cause Americans to make a new cost-benefit analysis of whether the conflict is worth losing so many troops. But he added that it may require another leap in casualties, perhaps to 2,000, for public opinion to turn dramatically against the conflict. That’s what happened in Vietnam, he said.
Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor who also has studied the effect of casualties on public opinion, said the 1,000 number will cause the news media to focus on the death toll, and that in turn “will cause the public to make a reassessment, sort of a gut check.”
2 critical questions
Americans will ask two questions in this reassessment, he said. One is whether going to war was the right thing to do. “And, secondly, are we going to win? The interplay of those two questions will drive their willingness to keep on slogging it out,” he said.
Mueller noted that Americans tolerated many more casualties in Korea and Vietnam. But those conflicts were different, he said. The population was generally behind the idea of going to war to prevent the spread of communism until it became clear–especially in the case of Vietnam–that there was no domino effect, Mueller said.
The death toll in Vietnam surpassed 58,000 and in Korea, 54,000. And it wasn’t until long after the toll in Vietnam passed the 1,000th mark that public support for the war waned.
Wayne Bledsoe, political science professor at Wayne State University, said he didn’t know how the 1,000th death would play with the public. “They [the White House] have done a very good job of limiting the media coverage of caskets coming home,” he said.
An opponent of the war, Bledsoe said, “I think that President Johnson had a stronger case for fighting the war in Vietnam than the Bush administration does in justifying the war in Iraq.”
Bush linkage working
Bledsoe said that Bush seems to have largely succeeded in connecting the Iraqi conflict with the war on terrorism. The polls indicate that this message has resonated with the public, he said, and the average American appears to agree with Bush “that we are safer without Saddam Hussein in power.”
At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference to express sympathy for the rising number of U.S. military deaths. At the same time, he said that U.S. enemies “should not underestimate the willingness of the American people and its coalition allies to suffer casualties in Iraq and elsewhere” to win the war on terrorism.
The White House said the U.S. death toll in both Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds 1,200. Kerry began to criticize the Iraq war more sharply after the Republican convention, calling it the “wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Bush countered that Kerry was changing his position on the conflict once again. In 2002, the Democratic nominee voted for authorizing the president to order an invasion of Iraq.
