Via the folks at PRWatch, a fascinating tidbit about what might be behind the administration’s baffling confidence that things will work out just fine in Iraq:
The theme of “victory” was chosen, in fact, at the advice of Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who had joined the National Security Council as a special adviser. Feaver’s research at Duke focused on a problem he called “casualty aversion” or “casualty phobia” – his terms for the negative attitudes that Americans develop upon seeing their soldiers killed in war. He had analyzed opinion polls showing that public support for the war was slipping. Conventional wisdom suggested that the growing death toll and economic costs of the war were the reasons for the change in public opinion, but Feaver believed that this was only part of the story. According to the New York Times, he was recruited by the White House “after he and Duke colleagues presented to administration officials their analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believe it would ultimately succeed.”
So they may not believe it, but they think we can’t handle the truth. Too late, though.
