Strategy can trump sad images

Last week, in lifting a long-standing ban on photographs of the casket ceremonies at Dover Air Force Base, President Obama walked a tightrope, balancing public opinion and the costs of war.

Antiwar activists have lobbied to lift the ban, believing presidents blocked photographs as a way of hiding the human cost of war. 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, where he will deploy an additional 17,000 combat troops.

Obama's policies on Dover and Afghanistan would appear to conflict with each other. But that's only because there is a lot of mythology in the conventional wisdom about how casualties affect public support for war.

Our research has found that the public does not respond reflexively to news or images of casualties. The public does not blindly tolerate casualties in what it considers a "good war," such as Afghanistan. Nor is it automatically averse to casualties in what it has determined to be a "bad war," such as Iraq.

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On the contrary, the public approaches casualties based on a cost-benefit calculation. It holds retrospective views of whether a war was right in the first place, as well as prospective views of whether the war is winnable. Both affect the public's willingness to continue a war and accept its costs, but the prospective attitude has a bigger impact.

So Americans tend to tolerate casualties if they believe a war was the right decision and that we will win. And they tend not to tolerate casualties if they believe a war was wrong and that we will lose.

However, the public may believe a war was the wrong decision, but that we can still prevail. Or it may believe that a war was the right decision, but that we are destined to lose. Call the former a "Pottery Barn" view - we broke it, we bought it - and the latter a "Noble Failure" attitude.

It turns out that the Pottery Barn crowd has much greater resolve to continue a war, even with a mounting human toll, than does the Noble Failure contingent. That is, the likelihood of future success trumps the past justness of the cause.

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This is not necessarily good news for Obama's war policies.

Obama clearly wants to shift American resources from a war on which the public has firmly negative retrospective views (roughly 60 percent say invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do) to one on which the public still has fairly positive retrospective views (roughly 60 percent say sending forces to Afghanistan was not a mistake).

We suspect the public is likely to continue to believe the war in Afghanistan was right. But its opinions on prospects for success in Afghanistan are headed in a negative direction. In one recent poll, the public was evenly split between optimism and pessimism.

A majority feel the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting, but a majority also believe that we are not winning there.

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

For now, Obama should concentrate on devising a path to victory in Afghanistan and not worry about the public relations of Dover. The Afghanistan issue will be decided by strategy more than by imagery.