Newswise — Americans will likely judge the war in Iraq as a failure, says Dominic Tierney, a political science professor at Swarthmore College, even if Al-Qaeda's back is eventually broken and a fairly stable Iraqi government is in place. Once the war changed from a regime-change mission to a civil war intervention, he says, the American public increasingly began to see our role in it as a lost cause.
"Public confidence about the war was very high until the moment Baghdad fell," Tierney says. "Then, literally overnight, when the war became a nation-building, counter-insurgency operation, confidence took a nosedive."
In his upcoming book Failing to Win: Perceptions of Success and Failure in International Politics (co-authored with Dominic Johnson of Princeton University), Tierney explores why popular judgments about success and failure in war often have little or nothing to do with the results on the ground. "Countries that win battles or wars are regularly seen as having lost, such as the U.S. in the 1968 Tet Offensive or the Israelis in the 1973 Yom Kippur War," says Tierney, who is British.
American public opinion is particularly harsh when the United States intervenes in anything resembling civil war, including the humanitarian operations in Haiti, Bosnia and Somalia. "Intervention in Somalia has gone down in history as the greatest failure since Vietnam—at least until Iraq—but it saved the lives of perhaps 100,000 Somalis at the cost of only 43 American lives," Tierney says.
"America's record in civil war interventions is much more successful than most people seem to believe," he says. "But the polls clearly demonstrate that Americans judge these missions as failures. The question is, why?"
One reason is that memories of the Vietnam War lurk in the back of American minds, Tierney maintains: "When they see conflict that resembles Vietnam, confidence starts to plummet." Another reason has to do with media presentation. "In nation-building missions, the fact that electricity production is up or unemployment is down is rarely reported, but dramatic events like bombings are front-page news," he says. "It's easy to turn on CNN, see that ten Iraqis died, and get the impression that the whole country is lawless and the insurgency is dominating."
But the most subtle and interesting reason, in his opinion, relates to American values and ideas about democracy. "Americans judge the success of nation-building relative to their own standards of democracy and stability instead of looking at how much progress has been made since U.S. forces arrived," Tierney says. "So a situation is judged as a failure for falling short of U.S. democratic standards, even if the country involved never had a democratic system and was incredibly unstable and poverty-ridden to begin with."
The effect of all these factors is a defeatist attitude toward civil war intervention, what Tierney calls the "quagmire mentality."
American presidents play into these inflated expectations, he says, by using "grandiose rhetoric" to mobilize support for a war, promising to transform the target society and build a democracy. When the outcome inevitably falls short of the president's words, the public turns against the effort. "But success in civil wars is often a slow, patient process involving incremental change," Tierney says.
The danger of the quagmire mentality, he claims, is that it may cause policy makers to withdraw prematurely from a civil war mission or avoid a useful humanitarian intervention in the future. "A classic example is the perceived failure of Somalia," Tierney says. "After troops were pulled out, genocide broke out in Rwanda. The number one reason the U.S. did nothing was the ghost of Somalia. America did not want another failure."
Before coming to Swarthmore this fall, Dominic Tierney taught at The Olin Institute at Harvard University.
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