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Quagmire: Why the United States "Loses" Against Insurgencies
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QUAGMIRE: AMERICAN DEFEATISM IN
CIVIL WAR INTERVENTIONS
Dominic Tierney
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The American public exhibits what I term the “quagmire mentality”: the belief that the U.S. fails when it intervenes with ground troops in civil wars. Based on an analysis of U.S. civil war interventions since the end of the Cold War, this paper tests two competing explanations for the quagmire mentality. The first explanation holds that such beliefs are a reasonable reflection of reality: the U.S. performs poorly in civil wars due to the intractable nature of such conflicts, tactical and strategic errors, and the American democratic system. While there is some truth in this argument, a second, and more compelling, explanation is that often the U.S. does not meaningfully lose or fail in civil wars, but is nevertheless perceived as having lost or failed. The quagmire mentality results in large part from three factors that are independent of the civil war missions themselves: (1) U.S. values promote metrics for success that are hard to achieve; (2) memories of Vietnam engender the historical “lesson” that the U.S. loses in “quagmire” wars; and (3) elite and media pressure encourages negative perceptions. Usually in a civil war intervention, win or lose, America will be seen to lose.
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The quagmire mentality is crucially important because Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi have shown that perceptions of success strongly condition the American public’s
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It is surprising that Americans hold defeatist attitudes towards civil war interventions because they are
such a famously confident people. “Probably the only people who have the historical sense of inevitable victory,” wrote British historian Denis Brogan “are the Americans.” Stephen Budiansky. Air Power: The Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II. (New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2004), p. 376. Psychological studies indicate that Americans are particularly predisposed towards expectations of success and positive outcomes, especially in comparison to Asians. According to psychologists David Armor and Shelley Taylor: “Americans are widely regarded as the most optimistic people on earth.” David A. Armor and Shelley E. Taylor, “Situated Optimism: Specific Outcome Expectancies and Self-Regulation,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 30 (1998), p. 361.
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| | Authors: Tierney, Dominic. |
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1
_____________________________________________________
QUAGMIRE: AMERICAN DEFEATISM IN
CIVIL WAR INTERVENTIONS
Dominic Tierney
_____________________________________________________
The American public exhibits what I term the “quagmire mentality”: the belief that the
U.S. fails when it intervenes with ground troops in civil wars. Based on an analysis of
U.S. civil war interventions since the end of the Cold War, this paper tests two competing
explanations for the quagmire mentality. The first explanation holds that such beliefs are
a reasonable reflection of reality: the U.S. performs poorly in civil wars due to the
intractable nature of such conflicts, tactical and strategic errors, and the American
democratic system. While there is some truth in this argument, a second, and more
compelling, explanation is that often the U.S. does not meaningfully lose or fail in civil
wars, but is nevertheless perceived as having lost or failed. The quagmire mentality
results in large part from three factors that are independent of the civil war missions
themselves: (1) U.S. values promote metrics for success that are hard to achieve; (2)
memories of Vietnam engender the historical “lesson” that the U.S. loses in “quagmire”
wars; and (3) elite and media pressure encourages negative perceptions. Usually in a civil
war intervention, win or lose, America will be seen to lose.
1
The quagmire mentality is crucially important because Peter Feaver and Christopher
Gelpi have shown that perceptions of success strongly condition the American public’s
1
It is surprising that Americans hold defeatist attitudes towards civil war interventions because they are
such a famously confident people. “Probably the only people who have the historical sense of inevitable
victory,” wrote British historian Denis Brogan “are the Americans.” Stephen Budiansky. Air Power: The
Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II. (New York, N.Y.:
Viking, 2004), p. 376. Psychological studies indicate that Americans are particularly predisposed towards
expectations of success and positive outcomes, especially in comparison to Asians. According to
psychologists David Armor and Shelley Taylor: “Americans are widely regarded as the most optimistic
people on earth.” David A. Armor and Shelley E. Taylor, “Situated Optimism: Specific Outcome
Expectancies and Self-Regulation,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 30 (1998), p. 361.
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