Study: After U.S. antiwar outpouring, insurgent attacks go up 7-10%
Radha Iyengar and Jonathan Monten, two economists at Harvard, just published a new study titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect in Iraq? Evidence From the Insurgency in Iraq." (You can buy the paper here).
In a story summarizing the paper, U.S. News & World Report presents the main findings:
--In the short term, there is a small but measurable cost to open public debate in the form of higher attacks against Iraqi and American targets.
--In periods immediately after a spike in "antiresolve" statements in the American media, the level of insurgent attacks increases between 7 and 10 percent.
--Insurgent organizations are strategic actors, meaning that whatever their motivations, religious or ideological, they will respond to incentives and disincentives.
Here are the caveats to these provocative topline conclusions:
--The city of Baghdad, for a variety of reasons, was excluded from the report. The authors contend that looking at the outside provinces, where 65 percent of insurgent attacks take place, is a better way to understand the effect they have discovered. Other population centers like Mosul, Basra, Kirkuk, and Najaf were included in the study.
--The study does not take into account overall cost and benefit of public debate. Past research has shown that public debate has a positive effect on military strategy, for example, and, in the case of Iraq, might be a factor in forcing the Iraqi government to more quickly accept responsibility for internal security.
--It was not possible, from the data available, to determine whether insurgent groups increased the overall number of attacks against American and Iraqi targets in the wake of public dissent and debate or simply changed the timing of those attacks. This means that insurgents may not be increasing the number of attacks after all but simply changing the days on which they attack in response to media reports.
I quickly read through the study and it seems pretty solidly researched. Perhaps a subject matter expert will find something objectionable about the methodology, but to me it looked legit.
Get ready for the PR offensive from war supporters citing this study as proof that opponents of the war who voice their dissent are unpatriotic traitors who aid and abet the terrorists. Of course, war opponents will be mounting a PR offensive of their own this week to mark the 5th anniversary of the invasion, so tempers would have been flaring anyway.
A few reactions from me after reading through the paper:
I wish they would have included Baghdad in their analysis. By omitting Baghdad, they omitted 35% of insurgent attacks, which is not an insignificant chunk of data.
The second caveat offered is key: the authors did "not take into account overall cost and benefit of public debate." The argument advanced by NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman and others, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is that debate in the United States about withdrawal keeps Iraqi leaders' feet to the fire. If they think U.S. troops might pull out soon, they have more incentive to pass important legislation and get their house in order; otherwise, when we leave, they may not be prepared to govern on their own and will have no one left to protect them.
This study provides more evidence that insurgents in Iraq (and elsewhere for that matter) are rational actors that respond to incentives and disincentives like the rest of us. Sometimes these insurgents are presented as evil Muslim caricatures in the United States, representing pure irrational evil that must be defeated by the United States in typical Manichean fashion.
Not that it's time to sit down and have tea with these guys, but by creating the right mix of military and political pressure, the United States can achieve significant victories without having to pursue a scorch the earth eradication strategy of trying to kill every single terrorist wherever they may be in the world (which sounds great politically but is a practical impossibility). So, I think this paper by Iyengar and Monten contributes something to the idea that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations should be modeled more on law enforcement operations than on all out state-to-state wars/invasions/occupations.
Those are just my immediate reactions. I've spoken and blogged about my opposition to the war repeatedly in the past, so I'll likely be cast as "aiding and abetting the terrorists" by this study as well. Oh, American politics.
AI
