Photos of military caskets might not increase war opposition

In lifting a decades-old ban on photographic coverage of the casket ceremony at Dover Air Force Base on Thursday, President Obama walked a difficult tightrope that balanced public opinion against the costs of war.

Anti-war activists have long lobbied to lift the ban, believing presidents have blocked photographs as a way of hiding the human costs of war from the American public. If only the public could actually see the images of the dead returning, the reasoning goes, perhaps they would internalize the tragic costs and turn on the wars in Iraq and elsewhere.

On the other side, now that Obama is responsible for waging America's wars, he does not want the public to turn against them — especially in Afghanistan. And he is probably concerned about shoring up that support, since he has ordered the deployment of an additional 17,000 U.S. combat troops to Afghanistan.

The Dover and Afghan policies appear to conflict with each other, but only because there is a lot of mythology in the conventional wisdom about how casualties affect public support for war.

Our research has found the public does not respond reflexively to news or images about casualties. Nor does the public blindly accept casualties in "good wars" such as Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists really originated, while being averse to casualties in "bad wars" such as Iraq.

On the contrary, casualties affect support for war through a relatively straightforward cost-benefit calculation. The public holds retrospective views of whether the war was the right thing in the first place and prospective views of whether the war is winnable. Both affect public willingness to continue the war, but the prospective attitude has a bigger impact.

Therefore, a member of the public will have a high tolerance for casualties if he believes the war was the right decision and we will win. Another individual will have a low tolerance for casualties if he believes the converse to be true.

However, some may believe the war was the wrong decision but we can still prevail, while others may believe war was the right decision but we are destined to lose. Call the former a "Pottery Barn" attitude (we broke it, we bought it) and the latter a "Noble Failure" attitude. It turns out the Pottery Barn crowd has much greater resolve to continue the war, even with a mounting human toll, than the Noble Failure crowd. Success in the future trumps the rightness of the cause in the past.

Unfortunately for Obama, this is not necessarily good news for his war policies. He clearly wants to shift the emphasis from a war on which the public has firmly negative retrospective views (roughly 60 percent say going to war in Iraq was the wrong thing to do) to a war on which the public still has fairly positive retrospective views (roughly 60 percent say sending military forces to Afghanistan in October 2001 was not a mistake).

We suspect the public is likely to continue to believe the war in Afghanistan was the "right thing" to do, but the public is trending negative on prospects for success in Afghanistan. In one recent poll, the public is now evenly split between optimism and pessimism. A majority of the public says the war right now is worth fighting, but an even larger majority has said the United States is not winning.

This means Obama is living on borrowed time in Afghanistan. Sending the additional troops that the military has requested may be a prudent move, but it has to be accompanied by a viable strategy that looks likely to lead to eventual success.

For now, Obama should concentrate his team on devising a strategy for victory in Afghanistan and not worry about the public-relations optics of Dover. The Afghan issue will be decided not by these types of issues, but by developing strategies that will lead to success.

Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi are professors at Duke University. Jason Reifler is a professor at Georgia State University. They are co-authors of the newly published Paying the Human Costs of War (Princeton Press 2009).