Transcripts For CSPAN Washington This Week 20140831

Conflict that we are in now and we are in ahead, that we remain confident in ourselves. [applause] thank you. Please give final applause to these two wonderful debaters. [applause] thank you. Thank you. Well done. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] night, bill nye the onence guy and ken ham evolution versus creationism. Heres a portion of that debate. Isinherent in this worldview that somehow know what and his family were able to build a wooden ship that would house 14,000 individuals. And a boy7000 kinds, and a girl for each of those. And these people were unskilled. They had never built a wooden ship before. They had to get all of these animals on their, and they had to feed them. I understand he has some explanations for that that i find extraordinary. This is the premise of the bid. We can then run a test, a scientific test. 1900s builte early a large wooden ship. It was the largest one ever felt. Built. At had great difficulty. It was not as big as the titanic but was very long. Sea. Ould twist in the in all that twisting, it leaked like crazy. The crew could not keep the ship andand it eventually sank loss all 14 hands. 14 crewmen built by skilled shipwrights and new england. These guys were the best in the world. They could not build a boat as big as the ark claimed to have been. Evidence concerning one race. When we look at the human population, we see a lot of differences, but based on darwins ideas of Human Evolution has presented in the descent of man, darwin teach to did teach the descent of man. At the present time, there exists upon earth five races or friday of man. The highest type of all the caucasians represented by the white inhabitants of europe and america. It was based on darwins ideas that are wrong. You have a wrong foundation. You can watch the full debate tomorrow night at 8 00 eastern on cspan. Now a look at how the war is viewed on public. Past and current conflicts, politics, casualties, and the success factor into Public Opinion. Hosted by the cato institute, this is one hour and a half. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the cato institute. Logan, is justin director of Foreign Policy studies here at cato. It is my pleasure to welcome you here to our event on Public Opinion and war. In addition to the people who are here with us physically, we would like to welcome those watching online on our website as well as cspan. We always worry planning these events that topics seem important and pressing a few months ahead of schedule and then sometimes will not deliver. Unfortunately, the question of public support for war is quite salient given present news. Here today to discuss a lot of the Academic Research on when and why the American Public supports were. Lot of literature and a lot of disagreement on literature on this subject. To be totally honest, we were able to piggyback on the american clinical Science Association annual meeting, since many of the scholars who are in townsubject already. We really have the most impressive scholarship represented on this panel. What it comes to the question of public support for war. I will introduce the panelists in the order in which they will speak and then turn over the podium to the first speaker, fellow ater, senior cato as well as a member of the Political Science department. For anybody who has read pretty much anything on the question of Public Opinion on work, he needs very little introduction. Work,ition to his seminal he more recently made himself into an expert on both terrorism, and nuclear weapons, offering most recently terror security and money, balancing the risks, benefits, and costs of homeland security, coauthored with mark stuart, as well as overblown, how politicians in the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and why we believe them. And the atomic up session, nuclear alarmism. He has published in an impressive array of journals. As well as popular journals like the american interest, and National Interest and National Interest in a foreign affairs. We are very pleased john is here. He has and a. D. From the university of chicago. His phd is from the university of ucla. Our second panelist is a senior lecturer and politics and studies Political Behavior and Public Opinion about Foreign Policy, correcting factual misperceptions held by citizens, how it is done and when it works, as well as voting behavior. He is coauthor of the human costs of war. A ba from Colby College and his phd is from duke university. Our third speaker today is adam, professor of political of and he from m. I. T. , received his phd from the university of michigan in 2000 and for our purposes today, war d in time of understanding american Public Opinion from world war ii to iraq. He has similarly published in an array of journals. He has received grants from the National Science foundation and was a fellow for the center of advanced studies in behavioral sciences. , perhaps speaker today catos newest minted adjunct scholar, trevor thrall. He works at george mason and is graduatese. Of the he is the coeditor of american volumeand another edited , why did the United States invade iraq . He was associate professor at the university of michigan dearborn, where he directed master of Public Policy and master of Public Administration programs. He received his phd from m. I. T. Normally, we have a lot of university of chicago, m. I. T. , conspiracy. Today, it seems like we have a michigan, m. I. T. Overlap, with john being up the chicago deal to some extent. With the introduction of the speakers, i will turn things over to john mueller. Much. Nk you very it is nice to be here. I will change the order of things im talking about. I did not realize i was going to be going first. Like to put i would on the table, essentially, that fit into this. Sortirst one, basically, of sets the overall image. States has fought four worse come along, ground wars, since world war ii. It is possible to well compare the degree to which the wars have been supported. The same poll question, you think it was involved in get this conflict, was asked in each of the four worse. The pass for the four wars are there at the very top, afghanistan, and it will not be too easy to see, but the other three wars, iraq, vietnam, and korea, are down below. The main thing that basically happens on this is there has obviously been a decline overall and part of the decline happens earlier rather than later. In other words, it is a steep drop off early on, typically, and then sort of gradually rose in or even a stabling reach of stability. I should say there are a couple of things that should be kept in mind. These are years since the war has again. Is frequentlythat brought up is a question of cost. The argument is, as casualties accrue, support for the war dwindles. Soon as they see body guys coming back, they stop seeing the war. This has led to the militarys idea that if they cannot see the bags, they will not stop supporting the work. We have a thing about not letting body guys get off of delaware, and so forth, taking the metaphor and making it into something that approaches reality, for some people at least. Hasny rate, my position mostly been, as the world wears on, casualties accrue and people make something resembling a cost and a fit analysis. But how much is it costing . Other speakers do not necessarily great agree with that way of explaining it. One issue i want to say before moving on, since this is by time, it is not by casualties. A good question would be, how fast does it go relative to a casualty increase, and comparing the war in vietnam and the war in iraq, in the case of these two wars, there is a considerable difference. See, both lines eventually go below 50 approval. Below 50 went approval for afghanistan, there were about 2000 americans who 2000 americans that had died, and it went below 50 approval for vietnam, more like 20,000 or 18,000 americans had died. My interpretation is that people are simply not willing to pay as much for iraq as they were for the cold wars. Casualties. Ut everyone basically agrees, people do not really know what the casualties are. If you ask how many people have been killed in iraq, you get all sorts of weird answers and so forth. But the casualties, obviously, is a fairly good measure of the cumulative cash is of the work, in terms of human losses and economically. There is some indication from one question, which was asked if for the recent work, before the iraq war in 2002. The question is, the basic idea was, george bush might decide to centuries to iraq, but as you can see, 54 , when they are asked, say they would favor going to work. Was, supposetion some americans are killed. Suddenly, the percentage favoring were dropped down to 49 . Asked, what of 100 were killed, it dropped again, but only by three Percentage Points and farther down as it went along. It does seem to be, even though i have been saying from the beginning people who do not understand numbers very well, when you put it this way, maybe they do. Particularly interesting is the question, would you still favor a war if 5000 are killed . As it happens, that question was asked when 5000 or 4000 were killed. Section, 5000 killed, about 32 said they would still favor the work. One 4000 or so american fatalities took place, it was 33. Maybe these numbers hold up a little bit better than i previously thought. Its is much clearer because is only one work, the war in iraq. I do not want to spend too much time with it, but one thing that ought to be put into consideration, there is a decline and stabilization of sorts. One of the things that is the killer and one of the things ive been interested in more lately, the unpredictability of american Public Opinion area this gives you a bit of a consideration. Why do people do certain things . After the fact, you can sort of explain it. Out they did by the loop. Will they buy a new coat, no. Can see, there are ups and downs in various places and seem to be associated with things that associate with the work. For example, you can see there is a drop in support. Then it bounced back to more or less where it was previously. After these london bombings, there is a spike upwards. A big terrorist attack in london caused support or seems to have caused support for United States efforts in iraq to go up. But it did not go up when the majority terrorist attack took place about one year earlier. Katrina caused support for the war to go down. The argument was basically, why do we have a bunch of soldiers in iraq when they should be helping americans . There was basically a spike upward, on the fifth anniversary of 9 11. It reminded people what the war was about, but it is not necessarily something you would overall predict. Ok. So that is the basic outline of things we will be talking about nas on nations will very, as you can see. I want to deal with how these can be reversed. Basically, if i am right about the way it happens, the mechanism, it is extremely unlikely you could get support to go back up. The reason for that is americans, if you make a calculation, the war has cost too much, if the were then you stillo go better, do not think the war is a good idea, because you already said it was not worth the cost. You have basically reached a point where you say it was not worth it. A is basically like buying car and paying four times more than it is worth. You may later come to like the car. It is a good car. But you still make you still think you made a bad deal. Issue ofbility is the what happens if the war does go well. To my surprise, that actually happened. 2008, there was a time of the surge, which cause people to think war was going better. Having no impact went down. The United States was winning the war ended when up by 16 Percentage Points. At the same time, support for the war did not change much at all. Orwho favor the were was the right decision, surging 32 down to 39. Should we stay as long as it takes 12626 area even approving bushs handling of the work, you would think if people are not saying the words going better, you would think they would say, bush is in charge of the war. Thats enough go up either. That is my first point. Let me go back. There is no way to skip past this. Here is basically having to deal with trying to sell ideas to try to go to work. The evidence is pretty good it is hard to do so. It is hard to move Public Opinion. It seems to me overall, the way i look at the marketing of ideas, people come up with ideas and they tried to sell them to the public and the public eyes them or they do not. Most of the time, they do not. 90 of new products, no matter how many no matter how brilliantly marketed, failed. 95 of hightech. People are out there and putting things on the shelf. We shouldbomb syria, not bomb serious. People then relate to it one way or the other and then by and accept the argument. If they do accept the argument, it means it struck a responsive court, it seems to me. It is not clear whether they are being manipulated. They are being offered this and it turns out it sells. But is not easy to tell in advance if that will happen. Let me give you a couple of illustrations of how this may be happening. To compare two things fairly precisely. The runup to the war, the first gulf war, that george bush the in 1990, 1990, this is a trend line, do you think you should go to work, essentially, and in the beginning and middle of this, 1998, november, 1990, the Bush Administration really started to sell going to work. Basically,see, nothing much happened. It stayed pretty much the same as it had been before. The same thing happened for george bush the seconds were in 2002 and into 2003. The question had been asked for a long time, would you favor invading iraq with u. S. Ground troops in an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power . Before 9 11, the position was that. Lly, about 51 said it went up very high with 9 11 and then came down and basically stayed pretty much the same the rest of the way through. What is interesting about this is there was a huge partisan division. What happened in the first gulf war was there was an intense partisan leadership split on whether support should be used, and for the second one, the Democratic Party basically folded and accepted going to war. In 1991 and 5247 7723 in the second one, indicating basically that the democrats were now on the same side. Nonetheless, the partisan differences were much bigger in the second work, even though democratic leadership was saying , we do not want to go to work. Me turn finally to the end thing here. Im going to far. There you go. Thist to conclude with point. Basically, the situation we are are in a situation now of debacle. Statesing the united fought for, died for, spent four, trillions of dollars, has gone down the tubes in the last year. Basically, what is the likely reaction to that to be . A usefulto me comparison, as with the previous debacle, which took place with vietnam in 1975. In 1975, the communists took over south vietnam, completely ofiterating the efforts 55,000 dead americans and the huge amount of money spent on that work. Everything went down the tubes. Virtually overnight, and 55 days. The question, what was the public reaction to that, i think there are lessons that could potentially be drawn and other people may want to comment on this, from that lesson. There were basically three lessons. First of all, the americans accepted the debacle with grandeur, with grace. Basically, they shrugged it off. So what. In other words, it was , joe mccarthy did not rise again or anything else. They wanted to continue the cold war. He continued to support the basic idea of opposing communism, including keeping a big Defense Budget going. The big change, they no longer wanted to use one tactic, which was ground war against it. Vietnam had demonstrated that was a bad idea. Part of that was they were willing to say, i do not care if communism advances. Willinge, but im not to use groundwork to stop it. If i have to use groundwork, i prefer to let it advance. Communism did advance in several countries. Those three lessons probably hold today as well. Theeems very likely American Public will be able to accept this debacle with good grace and go on to other things and shrug it off. The other two things i also think hold, we will continue to support the war on teller the war on terror. They still want to do it and there has been very little change in opinion about the war on terror since 2001. Usetheyre not willing to groundwork to stop the advance of communism. Frome conclude with two the same poll. The question was, as a result of the recent violence in iraq, do you think the threat of terrorism against the United States will increase, decrease, or stay the same . 42 said it would increase their that is a bad thing. Poll, the question is, would you use ground force to stop it, and only 19 said it seems to me the same thing will happen, even people are not willing to use groundwork to stop the advance of terrorism. They are still opposed to it as we are opposed to communism, but they have not changed their strategy. They have changed their tactics. Let me end on that and thank you for your attention. [applause] i will keep track of how long i am. This was always one of my favorite buildings, ishitecturally, from it fun to see the inside. Today,ortion of the talk i will try to make three main points. The few with my of the importance of perceptions of success in foring public support willingness to use military force. The second is to rebut some of the criticisms that have been made of our work, particularly those adam will make following me. Make the caseto in a modest way that citizens engage in some form of costbenefit approach when thinking about decisions of using force. So one of the goals for today is to really try to maximize our different perspectives. Friends who sort of study things related to the area say, dont you all mostly, more or less, agree . T some level, certainly it would make for a better panel if we say we disagree more, but it is important to try and push each other to make the work as good as it possibly is. It is very it is a very important topic, under what conditions will the public support military force. It is important we understand and push each other really hard to try to make the work as good as it can. The halflife for any social research is probably fairly short anyway. With worth discussing it as much friendly engagement as we can. So, it is hard to understate the importance of John Muellers this wholeping Research Agenda and what people the importance of casualties shaping Public Opinion about war. I think, sadly, inside the beltway policy, the community has misinterpreted some of his work. Largely, the public will immediately oppose war once the body bags start coming home. I am not exactly sure that is what his work says but that became the conventional view and often times was attached to him. There are several real difficulties in studying how casualties affect Public Opinion. The main way we pub we study Public Opinion is to do surveys. How thewant to measure public might be sensitive to casualties, one of the problems is any given survey is to billy conducted over a short window, 2, 3, 4 days. Interviewedlled or for that survey in some capacity, basically experiences the same number of casualties. Changese not dramatic in numbers that change from the first day of a survey to third, fourth, or fifth day of a survey. Leaves ustunately with several imperfect ways to measure how sensitive the public is to casualties. We can try to use aggregate data. We can take overall poll results, support for a particular mission, a variety of different questions we could use, and we can try and see how support may decrease over time as casualties increase. One problem with that is it is perfectly correlated with time. Casualties cannot go down and time cannot go backwards. We are stuck with always observing increasing casualties at the same time we are observing increases in the amount of time of a conflict. Approach is to ask people a variety of questions in a given survey. This is what my coauthors and i do, among other things. And we use the question very similar to the one john insented from the l. A. Times 2002, in which, how does the public respond if you tell them, would you still support it if there were this many casualties . That is problematic because people may not be able to experience those casualties. They may not know under what conditions those casualties were experienced. One of the main criticisms adam will make is if we use this as our measure of war support and measuring sensitivity to possibles, it is very that measure of your ability to measure casualties will be endogenous to overall war support already. It is a difficult measure. The third approach would be to use experiments, similar to this pproach, and give people similarly worded questions and change the number of casualties involved and see how that changes support peer those end up having to be hypothetical missions. We are not necessarily tied into realworld scenarios like, what inuld the United States do iraq right at this moment and how the public response. Responds we have a problem with a very ethical measurement problem. Chrisrk i have done with and peter, and i keep mentioning them in the hopes some of the hate mail we will generate will go to them and not just to me,eter was on a different panel televised by cspan this morning, and he showed me the death emails hes received since then. If you want to send a death threat, send it to them and not me. Really important themes of our work is the importance of success. We argue people are much more likely to support missions that will be successful. A consequence of this is that people are willing to tolerate even extremely large numbers of casualties for a successful mission. Unwilling to tolerate even small numbers of casualties for missions they think will not be successful. One of the things i think is particularly important about is the percent tuition people Pay Attention to wars and conflicts, embedded in this is an assumption that people are able to have sons some sense of what is going on in the world, or how the progress of a war is proceeding. This is another major point of between my work and in particular adams work. Think this ise perfectly consistent with an overall cost and benefit approach. You have costs of work, benefits of work, and we should probably discount the potential benefits of war by the probability of success. If the prospect of success is really low, than whatever benefits there may be from winning a war have to be discounted by the low probability of success. We find that it works. Now to address some of the common critiques of our work. Our emphasis on the importance of perceptions of success is misguided because it relies on people being able to have unmediated knowledge of battlefield events, what is actually going on in the war. Extent, i think this is a strawman argument. There is nothing that we write that says knowledge of the situation on the ground and the conflict has to be unmediated. Or that it even necessarily has to be accurate. People can believe a war will be successful and support it, even when evidence on the ground may suggest it will not be. And vice versa. Critique is that success or perceptions of success, are endogenous to support peer people who already support it were think it will be successful. People who oppose a war think it will be unsuccessful. It is a perfectly reasonable work himof some of our , that they are let more likely to be more successful were less successful, and they have effects to the extent to which people support the use of force. Another common critique of our work is, what if casualties are simply the metric of success people look at . That they measure a war based on how many castles casualties there are, and if there are many counties, where is inherently unsuccessful and too few, the world is inherently successful. In the work we have done, we find there is little evidence that this is the primary metric people look to toward success. It does not mean that it is at aed, but at them minimum, it is not the primary metric people use. Our core argument is that people are more willing to support missions when they think they and thatuccessful, successful missions, people will tolerate even large numbers of casualties and for unsuccessful missions, people will be opposed, even when there are really small numbers of casualties. Other competing elitees out there is that cues are really important in understanding public support. That the public response to what responds to a there told. What they are told. There are a few important areas where this could be pushed and refined peer that is a friendly way of saying i think it is wrong. I know will i know adam will come up with a friendly way to say he thinks i am wrong. Maybe not so friendly. We are friends when we are not doing Something Like this. Have a terribly strong. Of which cues people attend to or why. A number of queues out there, people could attend to. It does not sufficiently separate the persuasive arguments that he leads make in terms of supporting or opposing war versus just who says it. It unfortunately does not support forcratic the iraq war, before the iraq war, very well. There is majority opposition to the iraq war among democrats prior to the iraq war in 2002 and 2003, yet all leading democrats were either for it or at least tacitly not against it. Most troubling aspect, the area i would like to see push to the most, is that it does not tell us that much about it lead level decisionmaking. One of the nice things about the theory of success is that it also might give us some insight into how political elites and military planners think about war. Seems to me not unreasonable to think those in the military would be resistant to missions that they think are going to be unsuccessful, and more supportive of missions they think will be successful. Whereas an elite skew. Does not give us any potential insight into the main reasons why it leads are supporting or missions andicular the use of force. I have exceeded my allotted time already by about three minutes. That felt super fast. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you. It is great being here. I have been on different panels through the years with john and jason. We have had these kinds of back and forth and it is really nice. We are generally friendly. It is good. Before i begin, because i think we are on cspan. If my kids are watching, i want to say hi and get your hands off each other. Good. I will start with a story. This gets to something jason concluded his presentation with. Here. Ory is told we have two parties. We will not call them what they are. Cartier is the party of the president , a president who, at is considering intervention in a foreign country. Cartier is the opposition to the president , making particular are talkingnd we about the quality of the arguments here, not just who is saying it, but what they are saying. Americans will be killed and they will come home in body bags. They will be killed in a were congress has not declared. Says, i am senator afraid we might be here for years and years and years. Party b is the party of the president as expresses support, saying we should have an intervention area my colleagues believe strongly the misdirection has not been forced ofcannot let these kinds atrocities and humanitarian disasters continue if we have in our power the power to stop them. In Public Opinion, i am very interested in how the mass public response to these contrary arguments. We can see the public generally falls behind their particular leaders. Asked, at the same time in this debate, considering everything, do you think the u. S. Did the right thing in getting iraq in military conflict . Do you think is a mistake . 46 says it is the right thing. Party b, party of the president , 66 say it is the right thing. It sounds very much like the rhetoric, the kinds of arguments marshaled before the iraq war and the reaction after the iraq war era but this is not the iraq war. This is the spring of 1999 and we are talking about kos about. And the party supporting the , here we have these kinds of arguments here that the marshaled in support of coast intervention, but by the different parties. Consider in theory the kinds of arguments people are making. My the argument i make in book is that if we just look at who says it and not what they it, just, they say who is taking the position, who is supporting the war, who is opposing us, that helps explain the majority support for war. In my book, the essential argument im making is what we learned in about 75 years of study of american Public Opinion can and should be applied to , not justlicy as well about domestic politics. The opinion about were his just like the opinion about the mystic politics. Im not saying events do not matter at all. Think about pearl harbor and 9 11. These can change opinion. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Public Opinion, same attachments we see on the domestic sage. Time talkingnd my making the argument i make in my book here. It is pretty simple. The avenue and flow of partisan clinical raced conflict. In my book, i talk a lot about world war ii. I argue that citizens understand war and not for a costbenefit analysis. Here is where i do differ from john and jason. Through opinion ingredients. Partisanship and attachment to particular political leaders are the driving force of Public Opinion about were. War is notbout willynilly. There was a time in politics where we talked about a mood of Public Opinion shifting to and fro. We are not saying that. There is a structure but it is a simple one that follows this. Citizens take cues from political leaders. Information matters. People need to know where leaders stand in order to take cues from them. Republicanou are a and you want to take cues from party leadership. You need to have some attention to politics. You need to be paying some attention to know who stands where in some in what issue. These cues can be negative or positive. Something brought up is, how can we explain democratic opposition to the iraq war when democrat politicians were largely silent . In the book i argue polarization, the difference between the parties, can occur even in the absence of local opposition. If cube givers take strong and the stink positions. Think about in the case of iraq war, george bush. I live now in massachusetts. I grew up on the Upper West Side of middeath of manhattan. I can tell you from experience, talking to my friends, tortured bush was a very strong cue giver in those cases. Bush likes something, according to many people i grew up with comet had to be wrong. You do not need to have democrats saying, this is a bad war. You just have to have people, especially in the wake, george bush in the 2000 election, that it is something that basically, for a majority of democrats, anything george bush was for, they were against. Jacobson,ok by gary looking at polarization in american politics. There is a question that says, is george bush a uniter or divider . Because 50 quoted say he was a uniter and 50 say he was a divider. If you look among democrats, 85 said he was a divider and republicans, 80 city was a uniter. We where you stand pens on where you sit. We can see this in Public Opinion. I have not updated this, but it is more of the same. There is no happy ending where everyone comes together. Throughout the iraq war, you had huge partisan gaps. That partisan gap remains strong. Way to a very simple show the impact of partisanship. I want to show it a little more subtly. Information matters. How much attention people pay to politics matters. What i do in my book and what others have done before me, is to look at what happens if we compare for publicans who pay a lot of attention compare republicans who pay a lot of attention to politics to democrats who pay the most attention to politics. These are the people who should be the most divided. If you do not Pay Attention to wherecs, you may not know they stand. Hightech graph you can see here. To draw you to the bottom here. This is the first iraq war. This is the percent that say congress should approve military action against iraq. It is right before the war starts. You can see among the people of the lowest political awareness, these are people who do not pay any attention to politics. No differences between republicans and democrats. If we look at the highly informed, people who pay the most attention, you see a large split. I want you to take the visual frame here, diversions versus here, the middle graph, which is october, before the 1990 election, there was a delicate dance, where democrats did not want to say they were. Pposed to the war here, you see convergence. There is still differences, but the more attention you pay to politics, the more likely you are to support work. To visually, convergence, divergence. If we look at the iraq war, this is one of the many i have. We see diversions. In the book, i talk not just about iraq. I talk about world war ii. Polling donet of during world war ii that was largely unexamined for many years. When i was doing research for my book, the only person who mentioned these, there was a nice section talking about these old polls. You think in all of these literature on Public Opinion and more, people would have looked at world war ii, which, i was not around for that, but im told it was an important work. But they did not, so i was able to write the book. Berkeley,lleague at we resuscitate a lot of the opinion polls that had not been looked at for many years. I want to show you a couple of things that support this theory about convergence and divergence. Let me show you one thing here. Even before the war, there is a notion that before u. S. Entry, publicpearl harbor, the was strongly opposed to war. Should we declare war, a lot of people said no, but if you asked the question that was relevant at the time, do you think we should help england or stay out of the work, what is more important, you can see steadily increasing support for this position. This was especially true among democrats. Convergencehis versus divergence, we would expect before entering world war ii, the democrats who paid more attention to politics, would be more likely to endorse this position. People post would be less likely. I will skip ahead. This is to show, if you look at politicians in congress, we are talking about it. You saw a divergence before imar ii i mean sorry. Before world harbor between democrats and republicans. After, there is a convergence. We are talking about that. We see this reflected in the public. Here are a number of questions asked, various measures of support for intervention. November, 1939, do you approve of changes to the neutrality law. , the more attention you pay to politics, more likely you are to support this position. Among republicans, less likely. Republicans are flat, supporters of fdr are increasing support. Mid1941. S through the more engaged you are, the more likely you are to support that. This changed after pearl harbor. This not just in the level of sport among republicans and democrats, we see this in the convergence. One interesting thing about world war ii is the kinds of support questions john mentioned. This question was never asked after world war ii the closest was in 20 years, do you think other people think it was a mistake to enter the work. In part, it is a sign of the high level of what it was in world war ii. Pollsters were not asking the kinds of questions today. Questions in unconditional surrender. The bunch of times, would you support fees, making peace with the german army . Army making peace, more popular than making peace with hitler. The mean level of support is very hard hi. Very high. Get the same messages. After u. S. Entry into pearl convergence of how political elites and politicians are talking about that. We see it in mass public as well. That is really interesting. We do not see this more generally. This is one of my favorite questions. Is it more important to work with businesses or taking care . F people it is one or the other. If we take the premise, which, maybe we do not want to do in this building, you can see diversions. It is not this great happy family where everyone comes where yousays, have divergent rhetoric, you still have divergent opinion. That is very important. Let me skip this. Something which , whichsed most directly is my book. My book is 320 pages, which my publishers that is too long as it is. I dont dealngs with. What determines the flow of discourse . Given. Ng that is just a the question is, how do elites decide on their position . What are the conditions . ,hat i say in my conclusion perhaps arguments have been made , and i think about cross benefit analysis. These make sense applied to political elites. This is their job. As a scholar of Public Opinion, i know most people most of the time do not Pay Attention to politics. Are disinterested in politics. Politicians, it is their job to Pay Attention to politics and make these kinds of decisions. Variation in casualties during the vietnam war affected the position senators took on the work. There is something there. I think there are important normative questions. The thing about domestic and international politics, in a book, they argue democracies are hesitant to enter work. Theyll enter war. They show this observationally, you see this history. But the mechanism for that is really important. They say it is casualty sensitivity. Worried leaders are about casualties. Is elite, thesm elites are making these decisions, it is the fuss ability to interpret the meaning of ambiguous events. Think about the search. A lot more troops go in. Is it a good thing or a bad thing . There is a lot more potential of thate manipulation potential reality. War gets filtered matters. Individuals, individual citizens are the ones doing the costbenefit analysis. The onesl citizens are looking at casualties, then democracy is on a good route. If leaders choose policies that lead to bad results, where the cost outweighs the benefits, the public will sanction and kick them out of office or at least say they do not board worse. Since the elites are making these calculations, we are in a beh more where it could the public is the one misled here. Important. Really are as jason said, there is potential there for future work. Slidessaid, i have other that i can bring on. I just wanted to lay out my position and i am looking forward to more discussions about that. [applause] all right. Welcome, everybody. Justin, thank you for the invitation to be here. A great discussion already. Quiz. With a how many of you have ever written out a pro and cons list . Maybe you are trying to make a tough decision like whether to take a new job, or ask your girlfriend to the prom, which house to buy, that sort of thing. The idea behind the list is that it is supposed to help structure thinking and make sure you have decided all consider all the consequences and made the best decision you can with the information at your disposal. If youre like me, you write down a nice long list of print of pros and cons and you stare at it and realize there is no help at all. You might wind up more confused than when you started. The reason is not because you cannot think of any pros and cons. You have a whole list of pros and cons. The reason you cannot make up your mind is because you do not have a good reason for options a or b. As is obvious if you think about it. You never bother making program cons list when you already know what to think. If you are crazy in love with a girl or you know it is time to go to the big city, you do not need a pro and con list. This is pretty interesting when you are talking about your love life. It gets trickier when we are talking about foreign policies. Face,rst problem people just like your typical pro and cons list, there are lot of reasons on each side of the coin. Are evenabout war more, get it. All these are different difficult to compare. A lot of apples and oranges on the list. Ofen missing or kind sketchy. The brainpower and the time it would take you to consider this row and cons list in all its glory, it is staggering. People get paid to do this fulltime. Nonetheless, i think as you have think a couple of people the problem is coming up with the work. Not vote jason and his colleagues from before but essentially, you weigh the pros and cons and about a 50 chance and you come up with an opinion. My coauthor here in the audience with us today, i do not think people actually use this idealized model to come up with opinions. That peopleargue rely on one good reason to support wars and foreign policies. The acquisition and adoption of one good reason can serve to motivate the opinion in the potential confounding considerations from competing sources of information. That does not mean that you might not agree with other reasons or something, but that that single reason is doing the heavy lifting and it does not need the others to help you figure out what it thinks. I hope that seems fairly provocative, but i think there is a good chance that it sounds a bit extreme, so at the risk of working against my own cause, let me give you three good reasons after i said one is all you need. First, the most fundamental reason to think that people humansn one good reason, are cognitive misers. We are always looking to cut corners when it comes to thinking hard. If you have read the book thinking fast and slow, you have an excellent history of the long line of research in this tradition. The search for the maintenance of the single good reason is an awful lot easier on your brain then what would be required for you to continually update your thinking on a wide range of factors that are interdependent and interconnected. The second reason to suspect that one is the right number is that one resonates more powerfully with our psychology them complex, logical inputs. You have probably heard the famous quote attributed to stalin. When one man ties it is a it is a tragedy, when thousands diet is statistics. He is right on. People respond more significantly to numbers two mentions of individuals rather statistical. More broadly at think it is just the case that it is our nature to treat the first, the best of the worst, or the most extreme class of things very differently from the way that we treat other things. We give them more weight and are thinking and are more easily roused to action when competes confronted with a single or personal reason. That one to six backed is the magic number is the powerful role of predisposition is shaping opinion and how often it seems to point people to one specific reason. People rely very heavily on moral views, Party Identification, religion, both to simplify the complex environment that they face and form opinions. How much people how much more do people need to know other than party i Party Identification to pick a president . In many cases the very nature of peoples beliefs in fact requires that only one reason matter. Are still with me, the next question what is this that people gravitate towards, this one good reason with opinion formation in Something Like the iraq war. To answer that we need to consider the fact that good reasons are not all created equal. Some good reasons are what we might call just good enough for now. Others are essentially live proof. Of them depend a lot on context, others dont at all. Contextual reasons depend on the specific facts of the situation. A contextually good reason can be strengthened or weakened, or even abandoned as new information comes to light. For example, if i supported the war in iraq because i was worried about wmd program, my good reason probably got at or after i saw the speech from powell in 2003. Later on it lost strength as we uncovered no evidence of iraqi wmds. Eventually he may have stopped being a good reason entirely, meaning i should change my opinion about the war altogether. Fundamental reasons are reasons that are moral. Partisan loyalty or group identity. Unlike contestable reasons, these are not contingent on objective or observable criteria. For example, we would not expect a quaker who is religiously pacifistic to support a war no matter the conditions. This means that new information is unlikely to have an impact on the folks with fundamental reasons. Given all of this, we expect several things when we turn to Public Opinion about war and Foreign Policy. Just to keep on the topic of iraq, the first thing we would expect is to see a patchwork will of good reasons for and against the war thanks to the interplay of peoples predispositions and context of information, all of which has been mentioned already. Peopletom line is that can support something, but for a very wide range of reasons. Unlike the discussions so far, where we focused on wmds and terrorism. My wife and i, we both bought a minivan, but we did it for very different reasons. She wanted cupholders and i wanted to make her happy. [laughter] two very different reasons. Just like minivans, there was a very wide range of doing this. Looking at the poll questions, people had a chance to come up with their own reasons, openended whole questions. In an abc news poll from march 9 of 2003, 13 said the most important reason to support the war was the iraqi connection to terrorism. Opponents did not mention wmds or either. The second thing is that because war by its nature engages in moral and other deeply held values, we expect the number of people who will find a fundamental reason to support or oppose a war will be relatively high. Given this, then, we expect to see a lot of consistency in the opinions that people hold. We each spend a lot of time trying to explain its late opinion change, but we are talking about consistency. In iraq this is very clear. Do you favor or oppose the invasion, that question. The lowest level the war has ever received in support is 36 and the lowest opposition it ever had at its peak was 25 . Our interpretation of these, i think, is straightforward. At the beginning you had a hardcore group of conservatives with a fundamental reason to support the war. On the other side of the spectrum you had a hardcore group of liberals in nathan and adams neighborhood, apparently, who opposed the war from a fundamental outset and never wavered. I come from one of those places, too, so i know its true. That means that as many as 60 of americans never change their mind once about what is going on in iraq, more than Hillary Clinton and john kerry can say. [laughter] i actually even find that surprising, thinking about this stuff a lot. We third thing is that expect the number of People Holding a strong good reason, one that is resistant to Additional Information will grow over time. As adam mentioned, many people pay lip very little attention to foreign affairs. Many peoplening will have no reasons whatsoever to support or oppose a policy, but over time they will learn more. People with no good reasons will probably get one. People who did not have that great reasons will get better once. As johns chart showed, eventually we get to a point where opinions stop changing. It does not matter what happens and it does not matter what is being said, at some point we are done. By that point people have pretty much all acquired a reason, a good reason, strong enough, that it is essentially permanent. In the case of a racket happened a fairly long time ago in the case of i rock in the case of iraq, it happened a fairly long time ago. Is that possible . It sounds like a stretch, but i will conclude by arguing from and pointof authority out that john is actually making an argument that fits very neatly and his notion of one good reason. The argument he has been making for a long time now is that mounting casualties, no matter your good reason for supporting the war originally, you will eventually replace the reason with too many casualties as the single reason to oppose the war. Reading from his book, briefly, another way to look at the trends is to see some groups in the population dropping off sequentially as casualties mount. In the early stages the support of those with considerable misgivings is easily alienated. In later stages the only advocates left are the ardent supporters whose conversion is more difficult. This argues in a nutshell the one good reason model operating. My only thing with that is that i dont think that casualties are the only reason you could have to turn against the war. Disastrous failures could also do some of that work. But casualties are a pretty darn good reason, it seems to me. To sort of wrap it up, we have a war, a majority of people in this case start off with a fundamental good reason to oppose or support it and they are done. Other people start off with a varying level of goodness and some of those are weak enough that they collapse on first blood. Others, it takes a great deal of information to make it clear that the information was not so good anymore. Tothe interest of sticking roughly 12 minutes, before i sit down i will put it back to you guys tom a what is your one good reason . Thank you. [applause] thanks a lot for that, trevor. If there are any graduate students in the audience or watching on cspan, you have just done what is called a lit review, covering a broad swath of the literature on a subject and know a lot about it now. We have about 20 minutes left and i know that everyone is practically pouring at the ground to get it each other on the panel, but i think what i will ask people to do is take their responses and shoehorn them into answers to questions from the audience. A lot of smart people here would like to pick your brain. As you hear questions, use them as jumping off points to claw at each others faces or whatever suits your fancy. We will ask you to wait for a microphone, which will be brought around to you to identify yourself, your affiliation, and to ask a short, pointed question. How about the gentleman in the blue shirt on the aisle . My name is joe gill, i am a retired soldier and civil servant. I just wonder how does the panel consider the impact of the transformation of the u. S. Military from draftee to all volunteer . Role. Scription and its in terms of Public Opinion, you talking about . There is a debate about that in the other panels. Seems to me it doesnt make much difference. The fact that volunteers are dying in iraq, not draftees, i dont think that animates people were thethan if it other way around. Overall i think it doesnt seem to make much difference in terms of public response. Americans are dying. They may have volunteered to go there, but no one is saying that they asked for it. I dont think it makes much difference in terms of public support. Conscription . On no . Lets go to the other gentleman in the other blue shirt on the other aisle. I dont project that well. Thanks. I come from the Atlantic Council and am a graduate university in texas graduate student in texas. I want to followup on the question about conscription. I have a sense that that might have been different in europe in decades past. There are still a handful of European Countries that. Borders, this is different. Do we have the sense that sentiment for war in European Countries is lower amongst those ,ho have overseas ventures lets put it that way, lower in countries where there are large numbers of conscripts in the i dont know of any, particularly. If this we did dies, the swedes would be equally outraged whether he was a volunteer or a draftee. Or a canadian or something. As far as i know. Right, what about the gentleman in the back in the dark blazer . Yes, you. You just turned around. Yes. Robert is right over there. We have another theory, we call it the red cape theory. Every once in a while there is immediate event that seems to elicit revenge or the feeling of revenge. We just saw one with the execution of a journalist, for example, but there have been other cases. Keynote stories from the press that seemed to really provoke anger on the part of the American Public. Do any of you feel that there are those kinds of incidents that trigger a change in public sentiment . Yes. Guy. The advance the rest of the panel, not so much. Yes, they can, but it is very hard to predict what will happen. In looking at the support for the war in iraq, there were events like abu ghraib that cause the huge flurry. They did cause opinion to change, but then it sort of went back to where it was before. The supporters, like elections that seemed to go well in iraq. But then it simmers back down. Frequently they are not game changers. They tend to be blips. Some events, like 9 11, pearl harbor, they are anything but. So, opinion on 9 11 still continues to resonate very strongly, as did pearl harbor, all the way through the war and even after the war. On that,ay piggyback in addition another person who has read a lot about war but is not on this panel, peter thatrman, has argued fundamentally, support for war is based on contributed nests. Punishing people who deserve to be punished for them orally bad acts. This is probably fairly consistent with the big red letters of Saddam Hussein being a bad guy, which trevor had in his line. What about the gentleman in the front in the not blue shirt . Good afternoon. Libertarian. Andidate, martin malls and what do you think of the opinion about the release of the abu ghraib photos and whether that was done to protect people overseas or shape Public Opinion or affect Public Opinion at home . You mean the motivations of why the photos were released . People, this fed right into their argument about the obscenity of the war, etc. There is no real study of the revelations, which were stunning at the time. They were vivid, they had pictures that were horrible, etc. , etc. , but the data that they showed seemed to be that temporarily through the war it was a game changer in the sense that it caused people to think less well of the war and that continued down from there, it a sickly bounced back up. That, even horrible ones, might be better. In the case of the soldier who was just killed, the journalist, you could consider that to be fairly minor given the horrific nature of this war. Just one horrible thing happening to one single person, but it can cause people to really change their minds in some cases. The gentleman down here in the front. Need to find a lady with a question, too. Hello. I am bert weiss, pro bono advocate, but i have wrestled with these issues for 60 years in this town. Excellent panel. Starting with mcnamara in vietnam, working with congress for two dozen years and more recently working with people at cato to get out of afghanistan. This is an excellent panel. There was some discussion about how people regard the wars afterwards, how they might react afterwards. I wanted to ask mr. Miller your reaction to the following. Have been to countless discussions, strategy sessions of liberals about getting out of afghanistan. They keep emphasizing that they have to explain to congress that the Public Opinion polls shows that a majority want us to get out. I tried to explain to them that the people in Congress Read the same newspapers, but know that if they get out, if we do get and things go south, an opponent can run against them as having voted in a way that we lost the war. And in terms of your research visavis how Congress Reacts the Public Opinion, i wanted to know what your thoughts are. Adam . I think as sort of my last point, basically they are wrong. It is not going to be a who lost iraq syndrome. There is not going to be another joe mccarthy. It is not as though they are going to be pilloried over this. Essentially people are just going to forget about it. They were forgetting about it as fast as they could, just as quickly as they stopped thinking about vietnam. They are wrong to think that there will be retribution. Furthermore, there is a very good preoccupation in saying that you lost iraq, so saying the only way to save it is to send troops back in, are you willing to do that . Are you in that group . That will tend to shut them up substantially. It is a very strong argument. The administration has already been using this a little bit on some of the issues, including the issue of bombing iran. That has worked to their benefit in terms of dampening the opposition. A very good point, this question of how do politicians decide the positions to take . There has been some very good work done in International Relations on this question of latent opinion. Think about politicians, not just follow opinions today, but in the next election. If i do this, what is the public going to do . There is a person that george has done really interesting work in the context of vietnam. Typically the audience cost theory has been applied to the public. Politicians dont want to back down because theyre worried about how the public will react. Congress has done some interesting work around vietnam showing that johnson was not worried about the public, he was worried about politicians, opposition within the Democratic Party and their reactions. But the fundamental issue here is that politicians do worry about reactions, be at the mass public or other politicians, and it will constrain their actions moving forward. Something that we need to spend more time thinking about. Other people have disagreed, but there is a mechanism there a politicians thinking ahead, not looking at the impulse today. The flipside of what i looked at, how does the public react, it is how do the elite incorporate Public Opinion into decisions . That is more forward looking. Nothing about opinion today, but what will it look like in six months or a year . Can i add one thing . Please. One thing that should be brought up is the situation in syria from last summer. The elites, all of them, were in favor of bombing syria because of the chemical attack. They went home and found out that their followers were trying to say are you trying to get us into another stupid war in the middle east . That has had a very powerful impact. Everyone now is no longer willing to talk about boots on the ground, even john mccain. That unfortunately because of Public Opinion they cant do this. Sometimes it can have a very strong restraining effect. This time you have republicans and democrats going against their main party. Sidesrty leaders on both in the congress, you know, they basically said go ahead. There was unanimity alone among the elites. To a degree, that has also happened in the iraq war. What has happened is that in many respects this is the same as adam saying something is the other way around. The people are influencing the elite. Thathappened in 2004 was when they tried there was a Huge Movement to try to get out coming out ofiraq the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party leaders who had voted for the war did not really want to talk about it. The Movement Towards howard dean and john kerry as a stalking that leaders not were manipulating the people, they were at least manipulating the main activists and rank and file of that artie. That kept going on throughout the decade. Finally the Antiwar Movement got the guy that they wanted, barack obama. Sons out it did not work well from their standpoint, but they got the only politician opposing the war in iraq into the white house. I wonder if adams response to that would be that it is a. Ad idea right there. Thank you. Difficult toy believe that Public Opinion shapes the decisions of the elite to go to war. Simply on the basis that congress hasnt officially declared war since i think world war ii. Trend toan increasing the president unilaterally getting us into war. The premise of Public Opinion ,haping Something Like war which should be based on strategy, not on opinion, in my it is a bit hard to believe. We have seen one of the speakers mentioning circumstantial reasons. These were being put forward and used by the public to say yes, i support this or dont. If anyone could comment on the trend . The creation, potentially fabrication, of circumstantial reasons to get into a conflict nato versus russia. Couple ofises a points. Salience. Is there any evidence that that is should ever fear what the public thinks . If the president pounds the table hard enough, to the folks fall into line . I will leave it to you to jump off from there. Few points one a that, we are seeing it now. Every politician is saying we cant have boots on the ground. They do feel constrained, at least thats what they say. It is the case that the president can do it anyway. He could have bombed syria and waited to see what happened later. In terms of the arguments that they use, politicians are constantly trying to come up with arguments to make you like them. Do it. Uld do a poll to Saddam Hussein, wmds, we wont push the argument about jobs. They are constantly trying to manipulate in that sense and trying to come up with the arguments that were best for their side. In other words, to a certain degree the response from the public influences what they are doing. They do it all the time. They go in front of audiences to say i am against immigration. People say yeah, yeah. Then they go on it. They say they are in favor of doing something on the drug issue and sometimes they get a big reaction that they follow. The question is who is manipulating who . They put these things on the table, just like the new coke, and seeing if anybody buys it. If no one buys it, they go on to something else. Trevor . I will say that having written some stuff about how dangerous president s are in terms of conflating threats through manufacturing reasons, essentially i think that iraq got a lot of people worried about how easy it might be for showednt to lie, as john thursday earlier, charts and opinion before 2003, bush tried a lot of stuff to convince you to happily go to war and he failed, miserably, for the most part, in doing that. Does not mean that president s are not dangerous, it just means that their words are not dangerous. It is their accident actions that are dangerous. If we look back at the gulf war and the iraq war the bump and opinion was not when he said lets go to war, it is when he goes to war. It is when you send the troops, when you give someone an ultimatum. Those have the real power to move opinion. As john pointed out, we are in a constant marketplace of ideas going back and forth. You already have a polarized mindset and it is hard for president s to convince the other team to support something, but when they do stuff that engages the, the story is different. [inaudible] lets take another question. Bush . What barely survived the first term, barely won that election, impressive if he had not done the iraq war, he would have slammed through that easily because of the huge favorable impact that came out with 9 11. It destroyed tony blair. Thank you. Your curious what respective studies of Public Opinion how have they informed your views of democracy and how functional it is . Jason, you start us off. Thats a simple question. [laughter] in the three minutes that we have left. So, my view is that while it is true that lots of citizens dont pay super close attention to politics i dont think anybody on this panel would dispute that. And that there are some decisions that are probably particularly bad, like the iraq democracy is fairly responsive. We dont have lots and lots of really bad decisions. There are lots of wars that maybe we could have gotten into but didnt. Sadly not all, but most of the wars we have gotten into have gone reasonably well and we have achieved reasonable names from them. I dont know, maybe i am too much of a pollyanna about gay democracy, yeah but i dont have a horribly disguised falling dim view that we should just give up on democracy and just trust our elite overlords. John, you dont miss new coke, do you . Know, or the edsall. [laughter] record, new coke actually wins and blind taste tests. Does it . Thats why they put it out there. The crappy form of government just turns out to be better than all the alternatives. Certainly it is the kind of government i would like to live under, selfcorrecting very clumsily sometimes, as jason says. It is fun and exciting and interesting. He cant conceive of why that would be the case, but i have learned to live with it. Some of them have at least learned to live with me. We may have consensus on this point area trevor . I will say that i have again yang answer to that. Jason, butll on like i think that democracy works reasonably well. In terms of the opinion Foreign Policy connection, the yang side is because i dont think we are reasoning or good at through these things. We are lucky that we have two Political Parties that enjoy roughly equal support from both sides of the public, so when we fight to polarize, we dont come to agreement over anything important and we instead compromise, keeping us from doing extremely stupid stuff. Better lucky than good. So, to add to that on the dimmer note [laughter] i wanted really dim, but i have spent the last 20 years studying Public Opinion. Whenever i teach my Public Opinion classes i always say that the two things that i know are that most of the people most of the time dont Pay Attention to politics and that people will answer any question that you give them on the survey. Together that can be very dangerous. People who dont think hard guess whiletion, i rejectsagree, i strongly the cost policy framework. Is thatier side of that people who are given good material to work with, if they take these from politicians who have fought hard about an issue and taken decently considered positions with other cues in the book i talk about ethnic holiday from these other group mechanisms. People can do well there. Ishink that the story there that peoples decisions are only as good as the politicians that they listen to. If we are going to fall democracy, it is not the mass public, it is the politicians we need to talk about. I was like to close events on antidelete note. Thank you for that. It is too late for lunch, but i am irish so it is not to early for a glass of wine. Thank you to the panel for a terrific forum guys. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] the next washington journal, victoria stillwell talks about the economy and unemployment. From the center of American Progress we have an examination on the state of unions in this country. The president of the national right to Work Legal Defense Foundation talks about right to work laws. As always, we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. Live at 7 a. M. Eastern on cspan. Now, a discussion on how to Digital Innovation is changing how campaigns are run. We will speak to to former Technology Strategist from the obama and romney campaigns. They looked at the future of campaigning and what was learned from the 2012 race. This is just under an hour and a half