...What do these numbers tell us about Iraq? For one thing, that the public may be less fearful of casualties than America's political and military elites assume -- and, indeed, less fearful than the elites themselves. In 1999 a massive opinion poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates for the Triangle Institute for Security Studies asked various groups what level of casualties they would be willing to tolerate in the event of war with Iraq. The survey found that military leaders consistently show less tolerance for casualties than civilian leaders, who in turn show less tolerance for casualties than the public at large. (In Iraq, the survey showed the public would tolerate, as a mean figure, 29,853 American fatalities; civilian elites would tolerate 19,045; and their military counterparts would tolerate 6,016.) The data have obvious implications abroad, where Osama bin Laden boasted that the collapse of American resolve in Somalia "convinced us that the Americans are a paper tiger," and at home, where 78 percent of officers and a nearly identical percentage of their civilian counterparts agree with this statement: "The American public will rarely tolerate large numbers of U.S. casualties in military operations."

If this assessment contains a kernel of truth, it is because, as Christopher Gelpi and Peter Feaver detail in their recent book, "Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force," the public takes its cues from above. Hence, when leaders telegraph the message that America's sons and daughters are dying for nothing -- as presidents Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton did -- there follows an understandable reluctance to place those sons and daughters in harm's way. This is why it is so important that President Bush broadcast his determination in Iraq...