Casualties, Polls, and the Iraq War

In their article “Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler attempt to flush out the relationship between public opinion and the use of force as it pertains to the Iraq war.1 The authors promote the following proposition: “Our thesis is that expectations of future success are the key determinants of public casualty tolerance. That is, the U.S. public can accept that the war is not yet won and will involve continued and even mounting costs, provided that events thus far are not convincing it that eventual success is impossible” (p. 24). This statement actually contains two theses. First, public support for a military operation will not necessarily wane in the face of rising casualties.2 Second, the public’s tolerance for casualties is most affected by its expectation of victory (i.e., ultimate strategic success). These theses are consistent with Feaver and Gelpi’s argument in their earlier work: “Casualty phobia is not the dominant feature of the general public. On the contrary, policymakers can tap into a large reservoir of support for missions, even missions that entail a fairly high human price, provided those missions are successful. The public is defeat phobic, not casualty phobic.”3 Applying this argument to Iraq, Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler assert that, as long as Americans expect victory, they will tolerate mounting casualties and thus support the war. Put another way, they claim that opposition to the Iraq war is driven not by casualties per se, but by the expectation of failure: “When the public believes that the mission will succeed, it continues to support the mission, even as costs mount. When the public thinks victory is unlikely, even small costs will cause support to plummet” (pp. 15–16). To test their theses, Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler begin by trying to establish that rising casualties do not necessarily produce a corresponding drop in public support. To do this, they tracked presidential approval ratings against casualties over a twenty-month period (from March 2003 through October 2004) and divided this period into three phases of the war

Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq

In this article, we argue that the public will tolerate significant numbers of U.S. combat casualties under certain circumstances. To be sure, the public is not indifferent to the human costs of American foreign policy, but casualties have not by themselves driven public attitudes toward the Iraq war, and mounting casualties have not always produced a reduction in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost. Our core argument is that the U.S. public’s tolerance for the human costs of war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial attitudes: beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war, and beliefs about a war’s likely success. The impact of each attitude depends upon the other. Ultimately, however, we and that beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in determining the public’s willingness to tolerate U.S. military deaths in combat

Paying the Human Costs of War: American Public Opinion and Military Conflict

Streaming video requires Flash Player, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player to view.From the Korean War to the current conflict in Iraq, Paying the Human Costs of War examines the ways in which the American public decides whether to support the use of military force. Contrary to the conventional view, the authors demonstrate that the public does not respond reflexively and solely to the number of casualties in a conflict. Instead, the public makes reasoned and reasonable cost-benefit calculations for their continued support of a war based on the justifications for it and the likelihood it will succeed, along with the costs that have been suffered in casualties. Of these factors, the authors find that the most important consideration for the public is the expectation of success. If the public believes that a mission will succeed, the public will support it even if the costs are high. When the public does not expect the mission to succeed, even small costs will cause the withdrawal of support.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

Iraq the Vote: Retrospective and Prospective Foreign Policy Judgments on Candidate Choice and Casualty Tolerance

In this article, we model the effect of foreign policy attitudes on both vote choice and casualty tolerance, using survey data collected during the 2004 election. We show that prospective judgments of the likelihood of success in Iraq and retrospective judgments of whether the war in Iraq was right are significant determinants of both vote choice and casualty tolerance. The prospective judgment of success is key in predicting casualty tolerance, while retrospective judgment of whether the war was right takes precedence in determining vote choice. In addition, there is an important interaction between the two variables, so the effect of one is conditional on the value of the other. We believe this is compelling evidence that foreign policy matters, and that it matters in reasonable ways

Waging Peace

This event serves as an exploration of non-violent approaches to resolving international conflict. Panelists and guests will discuss the sources of military conflict and explore non-violent strategies designed to promote peace. The event will examine the impact of democracy, human rights, and trade on international peace-building, explore the impact of U.N. peacekeeping, and talk about grassroots peace and anti-intervention movements,  exploring the intersections of activism and peace. Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies.Event Web page, M4V video, event photo

Foreign Policy and the Electoral Connection

Public opinion is central to representation, democratic accountability, and decision making. Yet, the public was long believed to be relatively uninterested in foreign affairs, absent an immediate threat to safety and welfare. It had become conventional to say that voting ends at water\u27s edge. We start the examination of the scholarly understanding of the role of foreign affairs in public opinion and voting at that low point of view. Much subsequent development saw an increasing degree of holding and using of attitudes and beliefs about foreign affairs among the public. Moving in parallel with developments in political psychology, theoretical and methodological advances led to an increasingly widely shared view that the public holds reasonably sensible and nuanced views, that these help shape their political behaviors, and that these, in turn, help shape and constrain foreign policy making

Prion-like α-synuclein pathology in the brain of infants with Krabbe disease

Krabbe disease is an infantile neurodegenerative disorder resulting from pathogenic variants in the GALC gene that causes accumulation of the toxic sphingolipid psychosine. GALC variants are also associated with Lewy body diseases, an umbrella term for age-associated neurodegenerative diseases in which the protein α-synuclein aggregates into Lewy bodies. To explore whether α-synuclein in Krabbe disease has pathological similarities to that in Lewy body disease, we performed an observational post-mortem study of Krabbe disease brain tissue (n = 4) compared to infant controls (n = 4) and identified widespread accumulations of α-synuclein. To determine whether α-synuclein in Krabbe disease brain displayed disease-associated pathogenic properties we evaluated its seeding capacity using the real-time quaking-induced conversion assay in two cases for which frozen tissue was available and strikingly identified aggregation into fibrils similar to those observed in Lewy body disease, confirming the prion-like capacity of Krabbe disease-derived α-synuclein. These observations constitute the first report of prion-like α-synuclein in the brain tissue of infants and challenge the putative view that α-synuclein pathology is merely an age-associated phenomenon, instead suggesting it results from alterations to biological pathways, such as sphingolipid metabolism. Our findings have important implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying Lewy body formation in Lewy body disease

Rising Powers and Order Contestation: Disaggregating the Normative from the Representational

One of the central themes of the current literature on rising powers is that new aspirants to great power status pose a challenge to the underlying principles and norms that underpin the existing, Western-led order. However, in much of the literature, the nature and significance of rising powers for international order is imprecisely debated, in particular the concept and practice of ‘contestation’. In this article we aim to establish a distinction between normative contestation and what can be thought of as ‘contestation over representation’: that is, contestation over who is setting and overseeing the rules of the game rather than the content of the rules themselves and the kind of order that they underpin. This distinction is important for providing a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the current power transition and therefore for guiding attempts at accommodation on the part of the established powers. Theoretically, the paper engages with debates on international order and international society. Its empirical basis is provided by a thorough analysis of the discourse of rising power summitry, in particular at meetings of the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization groupings

Synaptic phosphorylated a-synuclein in dementia with Lewy bodies

Dementia with Lewy bodies is characterized by the accumulation of Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites in the CNS, both of which are composed mainly of aggregated a-synuclein phosphorylated at Ser129. Although phosphorylated a-synuclein is believed to exert toxic effects at the synapse in dementia with Lewy bodies and other a-synucleinopathies, direct evidence for the precise synaptic localization has been difficult to achieve due to the lack of adequate optical microscopic resolution to study human synapses. In the present study we applied array tomography, a microscopy technique that combines ultrathin sectioning of tissue with immunofluorescence allowing precise identification of small structures, to quantitatively investigate the synaptic phosphorylated a-synuclein pathology in dementia with Lewy bodies. We performed array tomography on human brain samples from five patients with dementia with Lewy bodies, five patients with Alzheimer’s disease and five healthy control subjects to analyse the presence of phosphorylated a-synuclein immunoreactivity at the synapse and their relationship with synapse size. Main analyses were performed in blocks from cingulate cortex and confirmed in blocks from the striatum of cases with dementia with Lewy bodies. A total of 1 318 700 single pre- or post-synaptic terminals were analysed. We found that phosphorylated a-synuclein is present exclusively in dementia with Lewy bodies cases, where it can be identified in the form of Lewy bodies, Lewy neurites and small aggregates (50.16 mm3). Between 19% and 25% of phosphorylated a-synuclein deposits were found in presynaptic terminals mainly in the form of small aggregates. Synaptic terminals that co-localized with small aggregates of phosphorylated a-synuclein were significantly larger than those that did not. Finally, a gradient of phosphorylated a-synuclein aggregation in synapses (pre4pre + post4post-synaptic) was observed. These results indicate that phosphorylated a-synuclein is found at the presynaptic terminals of dementia with Lewy bodies cases mainly in the form of small phosphorylated a-synuclein aggregates that are associated with changes in synaptic morphology. Overall, our data support the notion that pathological phosphorylated a-synuclein may disrupt the structure and function of the synapse in dementia with Lewy bodies.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft