Is there an ‘emboldenment’ effect: Evidence from the insurgency in Iraq

ABSTRACT

Does wartime debate in democracies during counterinsurgency campaigns embolden insurgent adversaries? Despite the historical frequency of this claim, there is little direct evidence assessing this ‘emboldenment’ hypothesis. This paper develops a novel test of this argument during the US counterinsurgency campaign following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We find that following spikes in US domestic debate over the Iraq war, there is no evidence that insurgent attacks on military or civilian targets increased in regions of Iraq with greater access to US news compared to regions with less access. Overall, these results offer no support for the emboldenment claim.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• insurgency
• resolve

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jack Blumenau, Ben Lauderdale, Tom O’Grady, Michael Plouffe, the members of the Conflict & Change working group at University College London, and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on this article. We thank Jacob N. Shapiro and the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University for their generous provision of data. We would also like to thank Andreas Juon for preparing Figure 1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For a historical overview of this claim in past U.S. wars, see Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company 2005).

² Richard E. Welch, ‘American Atrocities in the Philippines: The Indictment and the Response’, The Pacific Historical Review 43/2 (1974), 233–253.

³ Dale C. Walton, The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam (New York: Taylor and Francis 2002), 40.

⁴ Peter Beinart, ‘Speech Impediment’, The New Republic, 11 Oct. 2004, 6.

⁵ Michael Abramowitz, ‘War’s Critics Abetting Terrorists, Cheney Says’, Washington Post, 11 Sept. 2006, A12.

⁶ Zachary Cohen, ‘Lindsey Graham Says Trump’s Syria Statement Emboldened ISIS’, CNN Wire, 16 Jan. 2019.

⁷ For qualitative evidence on the impact of perceptions of counterinsurgent resolve on insurgent violence and recruitment in Iraq and Vietnam, see Carter Malkasian, ‘Signaling Resolve, Democratization, and the First Battle of Fallujah’, Journal of Strategic Studies 29/3 (2006), 423–52; and Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press 1972).

⁸ On the advantages of democracies in war-selection and war-fighting, see Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002); and David Lake, ‘Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War’, American Political Science Review 86/1 (1992), 24–37. For critiques of this view, see Alexander B. Downes, ‘How Smart and Tough are Democracies? Reassessing Theories of Democratic Victory in War’, International Security 33/4 (2009), 9–51; and Michael C. Desch, ‘Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters’, International Security 27/2 (2002), 5–47.

⁹ On democracies and military victory in counterinsurgency, see Anna Getmansky, ‘You Can’t Win If You Don’t Fight: The Role of Regime Type in Counterinsurgency Outbreaks and Outcomes,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 57/4 (2013), 709–734; Jason Lyall, ‘Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents? Reassessing Democracy’s Impact on War Outcomes and Duration’, International Organization 64/1 (2010), 167–92; and Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003). On the role of resolve in international politics, see Roseanne W. McManus, Statements of Resolve: Achieving Coercive Credibility in International Conflict Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017); Joshua D. Kertzer, Resolve in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016); and Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press 1996). On the inability of democracies to conceal their level of resolve, see Branislav L. Slantchev, ‘Feigning Weakness’, International Organization 64/3 (2010), 357–388.

¹⁰ Malkasian, ‘Signaling Resolve, Democratization’.

¹¹ See, for example, George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Reaffirms Resolve to War on Terror, Iraq and Afghanistan,’ White House Press Release, 19 March 2004.

¹² John A. Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya to Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (New York: Praeger 2002); and David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger 1964).

¹³ Jacob N. Shapiro and Nils B. Weidmann, ‘Is the Phone Mightier than the Sword? Cellphones and Insurgent Violence in Iraq’, International Organization 69/2 (2015), 247–74; Eli Berman, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Joseph H. Felter, ‘Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq’, Journal of Political Economy 119/4 (2011), 766–819; Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, ‘Rage Against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars’, International Organization 63/1 (2009), 67–106; Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006); and James Fearon and David Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, American Political Science Review 97/1 (2004), 75–90.

¹⁴ See, for example, Naomi Sakr, ‘From Satellite to Screen: How Arab TV Is Shaped in Space’, in Lisa Parks and James Schwoch eds., Down To Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press 2012), 143–155; Shibley Telhami, Reflections of Hearts and Minds: Media, Opinion, and Identity in the Arab World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press 2006); Marc Lynch, Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today (New York: Columbia University Press 2006); S. Abdallah Schleifer, ‘The Impact of Arab Satellite Television on the Prospects for Democracy in the Arab World’, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 16 May 2005; and Fouad Ajami, ‘What the Muslim World is Watching’, New York Times, 18 Nov. 2001.

¹⁵ On the spread of satellite television in Iraq following the US invasion, see Deborah Amos, ‘Confusion, Contradiction, and Irony: The Iraqi Media in 2010, Shorenstein CenterDiscussion Paper D-58, June 2010; Paul Cochrane, ‘The “Lebanonization” of the Iraqi Media: An Overview of Iraq’s Television Landscape’, in Media on the Front Lines: Arab Satellite TV in Iraq (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press 2006), 9–19; Gaiutra Bahadur, ‘Critics Say Satellite TV Beams Western “Poison” Into Iraq’, Knight Ridder, 12 May 2005; and Donna Abu-Nasr, ‘Iraqis Snatching up Satellite Dishes’, Associated Press, 27 June 2003. On increasing consumer demand and changes in the commercial satellite market in the region in this period, see Mark Holmes, ‘The Middle East Remains Hotbed of Opportunity for Satellite Players’, Satellite Today, 1 Sept. 2008; Peter B. de Selding, ‘Two-Firm Race for Mideast Satellite Television Market’, Space News, 18 March 2008; and Monroe E. Price, ‘Satellite Transponders and Free Expression’, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 27/1 (2009) 1–35.

¹⁶ US Department of State, ‘Iraq Television Viewership Poll’, 16 October 2003, accessed at http://www.stanhopecentre.org/iraqmediapoll.shtml.

¹⁷ United Nations Development Program, Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004 (Baghdad: Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology, Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation 2005).

¹⁸ World Bank, Iraq Household Socio-Economic Survey, Volume I: Objectives, Methodology, and Highlights (Washington, DC, World Bank 2007), 28.

¹⁹ In addition, in February 2004 the United States created its own regional satellite television station, Al Hurra, to serve as an Arabic language news channel that would counterbalance what US officials viewed as biased news coverage provided by other regional satellite news stations. Al Hurra’s coverage was heavily tilted towards US news content, including interviews with and speeches by US officials in the United States and Iraq translated into Arabic. Although Al Hurra was tarnished by its association with the United States, media survey research has found that it was a widely watched channel. According to a 2007 survey, for example, Al Hurra’s daily audience share ranked behind only Al Arabiya among satellite news channels in Iraq. See Dunia Andary, ‘International Broadcasting in Iraq’, InterMedia Media Market Report 3457/08, Sept. 2007, p. 19; and Anne Marie Baylouny, ‘Alhurra, the Free One: Assessing US Satellite Television in the Middle East’, Strategic Insights 4/11 (2005).

²⁰ Schleifer, ‘The Impact of Arab Satellite Television’.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Shibley Telhami, ‘Hearing on the Broadcasting Board of Governors: Finding the Right Media for the Message in the Middle East,’ US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 29 April 2004.

²³ Teresa Watanabe, ‘War with Iraq: Arab TV Shows A Different Conflict’, Los Angeles Times, 5 April 2003.

²⁴ BBC Worldwide Monitoring, ‘Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya Carry Petraeus-Crocker Congressional Testimony,’ 11 Sept. 2007; BBC Worldwide Monitoring, ‘Round-Up of Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya Coverage of US President’s Speech on Iraq’, 14 Sept. 2007.

²⁵ Bahadur, ‘Critics Say Satellite TV Beams Western’. There is also evidence that insurgent groups in Iraq paid close attention to media coverage of US policy debates. Kimmage and Ridolfo, for example, report that ‘Iraqi insurgent media … demonstrate an acute awareness of policy discussions and political battles in the United States and Europe’ and that ‘insurgents have regularly quoted and commented on battles between the White House and the US Congress over Iraq policy, often in real time.’ Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo, ‘Iraq’s Networked Insurgents’, Foreign Policy, Nov./Dec. 2007, 90.

²⁶ On the decentralised character of the Iraqi insurgency, see Shapiro and Weidmann, ‘Is the Phone Mightier than the Sword’; Benjamin Bahney, Howard J. Shatz, Carroll Ganier, Renny McPherson, and Barbara Sude, An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2011); Ahmed S. Hashim, ‘Iraq’s Sunni Insurgency’, The Adelphi Papers 48/402 (2008); Brian Fishman, ‘Dysfunction and Decline: Lessons Learned from Inside Al Qa’ida in Iraq’, Combatting Terrorism Centerat West Point, 2009; Seth G. Jones and Martin C. Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa’ida (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2008); International Crisis Group, ‘In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency’, Middle East Report No. 50, 15 Feb. 2006; and Michael Eisenstadt and Jeffrey White, ‘Assessing Iraq’s Sunni Arab Insurgency’, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dec. 2005.

²⁷ Bahney, Shatz, Ganier, McPherson, and Sude, An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records, 12. Even if this were not the case, this research design would still test the causal effect of emboldening information via the population security mechanism, which turns on the response of Iraqi civilians. There is substantial evidence that many Iraqi civilians relied on international satellite television as an important source of news, based on both opinion polling and consumer market research. See Andary, ‘International Broadcasting in Iraq’’; Schleifer, ‘The Impact of Arab Satellite Television’; and US Department of State, ‘Iraq Television Viewership Poll’.

²⁸ We thank the Empirical Studies of Conflict project at Princeton University for their generous provision of data.

²⁹ Berman, Felter, and Shapiro, ‘Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought’.

³⁰ Luke N. Condra and Jacob N. Shapiro, ‘Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of Collateral Damage’, American Journal of Political Science 56/1 (2012), 167–87; and Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks et al., ‘The Weapons That Kill Civilians – Deaths of Children and Noncombatants in Iraq, 2003-2008, New England Journal of Medicine 360/16 (2009) 1585–8.

³¹ A full description of the search terms used to construct this measure is available in Appendix A. For similar approaches to measuring news media content, see Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, ‘What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers’, Econometrica 78/1 (2010) 35–7; and B. Dan Wood, ‘Presidential Saber Rattling and the Economy, American Journal of Political Science 53/3 (2009), 695–709.

³² To confirm that US news coverage corresponds with the content of Arabic satellite television news, we use the same keywords to construct an additional media measure using an archive of a sample of transcripts of Arabic satellite station news broadcasts collected and translated by the BBC Worldwide Monitoring service (although because these archival sources represent a limited sample, we do not use this measure in our main analysis). To identify the sources for this measure, we use a media market survey of Iraq reported in Andary to identify Arabic satellite television news stations with a high daily audience share (Andary, ‘International Broadcasting in Iraq’). Appendix Figure B1 confirms that this measure is correlated with our measure of US media coverage, with similar spikes in April and October of 2004. Appendix Table B4 replicates Figure 2 using the BBC Worldwide Monitoring measure, which confirms the absence of an effect.

³³ One concern with this approach is whether insurgent groups and Iraqi civilians pay more attention to the relative change in the level of withdrawal-related US debate, rather than the absolute level of debate. A ‘high media’ month may carry little additional information about US resolve if it immediately follows a previous high media month. We confirm that the main findings are also robust to a first differencing approach to the US news measure, which tracks the change in the number of withdrawal-related articles from the previous month. See Appendix B.

³⁴ See Appendix Figure B1.

³⁵ Tom Raum, ‘Cheney Says Terrorists Win if U.S. Loses Nerve in Iraq’, The Associated Press, 6 Dec. 2005.

³⁶ United Nations Development Program, Iraq Living Conditions Survey.

³⁷ The absence of an effect holds when replacing the high satellite television access indicator with a continuous measure of satellite television access in the interaction terms, suggesting that the results in Figure 2 are not dependent on a particular cut-off for defining a high satellite access district. See Appendix B.

³⁸ These results are robust to several other plausible alternative data choices and model specifications, including when including district-level covariates that might plausibly affect insurgent violence rather than district fixed effects; when including a continuous rather than binary measure of satellite television access in the interaction term; when using a direct of sample of Arabic satellite station news broadcasts; when first-differencing the media measure to capture the relative rather than absolute changes in the level of withdrawal-related reporting; and when controlling for the presence of US military forces in a district. See Appendix B. The results also hold when matching low and high satellite districts on key covariates. See Appendix C.

³⁹ An additional concern is that this study’s design does not have sufficient statistical power to conclude that there is evidence for a null effect, and instead may have failed to detect a positive effect. To address this concern, we determined the minimum effect size this sample would have sufficient power to detect, for our preferred specifications and assuming 80% power on a standard two-tailed t-test (Appendix B). For military attacks, these specifications have sufficient power to estimate a 28% and 22% change in the mean difference between high and low satellite access districts, when including and excluding districts in Baghdad, respectively. For civilian attacks, we would require effect sizes of a 29% and 25% change in the mean difference between high and low satellite access districts for meaningful detection, when including and excluding Baghdad. The specifications including Baghdad have more limited power to detect an effect, likely due to the greater variance in monthly violence introduced by the districts in Baghdad. This study therefore has sufficient power to detect effect sizes of a similar magnitude to those previously reported in the literature using data from the civil conflict in Iraq (e.g., Shapiro and Weidmann, ‘Is the Phone Mightier than the Sword’).

⁴⁰ This substitution effect across both the time and type of illegal action has been observed in research on crime. See, for example, Radha Iyengar, ‘I’d Rather Be Hanged for a Sheep than a Lamb: The Unintended Consequences of California’s Three Strikes Law’, NBER Working Paper No. 13784, Feb. 2008.

⁴¹ Hashim, ‘Iraq’s Sunni Insurgency’, 24.

⁴² Barbara Elias, ‘The Big Problem of Small Allies: New Data and Theory on Defiant Local Counterinsurgency Partners in Afghanistan and Iraq’, Security Studies 27/2 (2018), 233–262.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Monten

Jonathan Monten is Lecturer in Political Science at University College London.

Radha Iyengar Plumb

Radha Iyengar Plumb is Adjunct Economist at the RAND Corporation.