A Tale of Two Wars: Public Opinion on the U.S. Military Interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq

Abstract

U.S. military forces have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. The two conflicts have differed sharply in scale, human cost, salience, timing, premises, trajectories and elite politics. These differences have generated distinctive patterns of popular support, assessments of progress, and partisan division, which are documented and analyzed using aggregate survey data and data from a module in the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey specifically designed to compare the public’s opinions on diverse aspects of the two wars. The configurations of opinion on the wars that had developed by the time Barack Obama took office in early 2009 provided surprisingly broad and bipartisan support for his initial policies regarding both conflicts.