Iraq strategy aimed at home audience: 'Americans would support a war with mounting casualties if they believe it would ultimately succeed'

NY Times
Dec. 05, 2005

WASHINGTON — The 35-page document released this week by the White House before President Bush's speech at the U.S. Naval Academy is called "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." But a more immediate goal appeared to be victory at home, as the administration attempts to turn around flagging support for the war.

The document strongly reflected the public opinion research of Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the National Security Council staff as a special adviser in June.

Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented to administration officials their analysis of polls about the war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties if they believe it would ultimately succeed.

That finding was reflected in Bush's speech, in which he used the word victory 15 times.

Christopher Gelpi, Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research, said: "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

Gelpi said he had not discussed the document with Feaver, who declined to be interviewed.

A lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, Feaver, 43, is the author of three books on civilian-military relations. He worked on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff in 1993 and 1994, but he has written critically of Clinton and other Democrats and sympathetically of Bush in The New York Times and other publications.

Based on their study of poll results from the first two years of the war, Gelpi, Feaver and Jason Reifler, then a Duke graduate student, took issue with what they described as the conventional wisdom since the Vietnam War — that Americans will support military operations only if U.S. casualties are few.

They found that public tolerance for the human cost of combat depended on two factors: a belief that the war was a worthy cause, and even more important, a belief that the war was likely to be successful.

Feaver's role in preparing the document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view, the plan posted by the White House showed the document's originator, or "author" in the software's designation, to be "feaver-p."

According to Matt Rozen, a spokesman for Adobe Systems, which makes the Acrobat software used to prepare the document, that entry indicated that Feaver created the original document that was eventually posted on the Web. There is no way to know from the text how much he wrote.

Asked about who wrote the document, a White House official said Feaver had helped conceive and draft the plan, though the official said a larger role belonged to another NSC staff member, Meghan L. O'Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and her staff.