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PDF FormatAs early as January 2000—a few months into the conflict—the BBC was quick to announce that Russians were “losing faith in the Chechen war.”50 But in spite of broad support, in theory, for negotiation,51 and in spite of the majority belief that the Russian government could not or did not want to stabilize the situation in Chechnya,52 and even though the number of Russian dead had already reached somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand—a level four to six times greater than during the war in Afghanistan, relative to population size53—despite all this, Russians re-elected Vladimir Putin twice after the beginning of the war: First in 2000, and then in 2004 with a decisive majority of 71 percent, after four years of bitter fighting.54
Considering the broad-based opposition in Russia to the first Chechen war, it is difficult to explain the Russian support for the second war only by the absence of democracy or the control Putin’s regime had over the media. Opinion polls show that the Russian public does not accept as gospel everything that Putin tells them about Chechnya.55 The explanation for the marked difference in support for the two Chechen wars seems to reside in other factors, such as differences in leadership and objectives.
What Putin offered his people was a consistent, clear message: The war in Chechnya was not being fought for economic reasons, such as control over oil resources. It was a defensive war, a struggle of Russia against Islamic terrorism. This description of the war has been accepted by a Russian public that now sees the conflict as a just war.56 Public support for the war has only increased following Putin’s various pronouncements on the subject, such as the speech he delivered after the terrorist attack in Beslan in September 2004, in which hundreds of schoolchildren were slaughtered. Putin, like President Johnson’s speech after the Tet Offensive in 1968 (about which more further on), expressed a willingness to end the war peacefully, but in contrast with the American president, his rhetoric was aggressive and hawkish:
We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten.… This is a challenge to all of Russia…. Terrorists think that they are stronger, that they will be able to intimidate us, to paralyze our will, to erode our society. It seems that we have a choice: to resist or to cave in…. to give up and allow them to destroy and to take Russia apart, in hope that eventually they would leave us alone…. I am convinced that in fact we do not have any choice…. We are dealing… with total and full-scale war.… Such wars do not end quickly, in these conditions, we simply cannot, we should not, live as carelessly as before…. Terrorists meet the most effective rebuff where they confront not only the power of the state but also an organized and united civil society…. We have to be together. Only thus we shall defeat the enemy.57
Putin did not offer to compromise and did not promise his citizens an easy time; he demanded from them inner strength, unity, and a willingness to continue the struggle. Forty-eight percent of Russians endorsed the president’s speech; only 9 percent opposed it, some of them probably because of Russia’s inept handling of the crisis, and others due to their shock at the sight of so many murdered children. Fully 61 percent of Russians continued supporting Putin’s policies, while only 16 percent opposed them.58 After five years of Putin’s war leadership, Russian public opinion had only hardened against allowing Chechnya to secede: Just 20 percent of the Russian public favored granting independence, whereas 64 percent supported a solution that would keep Chechnya part of Russia.59 The public was convinced that Russia’s small war was important enough to continue,60 in no small part due to Putin’s ability to explain it clearly to Russian citizens.
What emerges from the cases of Northern Ireland, Gaza, and the second Chechen war is that even in the case of a prolonged, brutal, and bitter campaign of terror, victory is a possible thing. But if democracies such as the United Kingdom and Israel, or quasi-democracies like Russia, have successfully defeated guerillas in small wars, why in other cases have they so often failed?
The reason militarily superior democracies suffer defeats at the hands of weaker enemies lies not in the level of force they are willing to exert, nor in the weakness of the popular will, but somewhere else. A closer look at three important cases—the French war in Algeria, the American war in Vietnam, and Israel’s war in southern Lebanon—reveals that the Achilles’ heel of those powerful democracies was not a lack of staying power on the part of the public, but instead, enfeebled decision-making on the part of their leaders.
In 1954, a widespread rebellion broke out in Algeria, which had been a French colony since 1830. The Algerians demanded that their French rulers leave the country and allow its independence. French governments tried to settle the dispute in different ways, but failed. In 1958, Charles de Gaulle, ex-general and hero of the Second World War, was elected president on a platform of “French Algeria.” In a public opinion poll conducted in September 1958, about 80 percent of French voters supported de Gaulle’s stance against Algerian independence. Moreover, de Gaulle’s position was supported by an absolute majority of Algerian Muslims.61 French public opinion was clearly against withdrawal and was even opposed to compromise; the feeling was that the conflict was worth the cost.62
However, in September 1959 de Gaulle changed his mind and declared publicly that Algeria had a right to self-determination.63 The war had provoked opposition from the French public from the very outset, but before de Gaulle’s apostasy, support for withdrawal had not succeeded in becoming the dominant public view.64 In fact, most of the mass demonstrations and protests against the war occurred after the president’s declaration, as support for the war was quickly dissipating. The famous “Manifesto of the 121,” in which intellectuals called for insubordination in Algeria, was published in 1960, the year following de Gaulle’s about-face. François Maspéro, one of its signatories, declared in the preface to the 1961 edition of the Manifesto that 1960 had been the “turning point” in the French people’s attitude toward the war.65 In 1961, a majority of the French public—in a similar percentage to those who had expressed the opposite opinion three years earlier—voted for separation from Algeria, even though the French military had succeeded in quelling the rebellion. The French followed their president and reversed their support for the war, not because of escalating violence, but because of his announcement that there was nothing to be gained from fighting and that Algeria should be “Algerian.”66
The American war in Vietnam presents another striking example of how public opinion can be shaped by the pronouncements of democratic leaders. There are many who believe that the war came to an end because of the widespread protest against it and negative press coverage.67 Yet a closer look at the course of events shows that it was the political leadership, not public opinion, that was first to falter in the face of heavy fighting.
As in the case of Algeria, there was no shortage of Americans who opposed the war from the outset and expressed their views in various ways, such as protest songs68 and the march on the Pentagon in October 1967.69 But protests did not lead to any decisive change in American public opinion or in the attitude of politicians. In December 1967, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, made a speech to Congress and was applauded from both sides of the aisle. Public support for the war and for the president gradually fell in comparison to the beginning of the war, but at the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968, a clear majority of Americans still felt that Westmoreland’s performance was satisfactory, the war was being properly managed, and that it even should be escalated.70
In early 1968, broad support for the war continued despite mixed messages coming out of the White House.71 Previously, Johnson had refrained from calling the conflict a war, and regularly spread easily refutable disinformation about it.72 Moreover, as scholar Dale Walton points out, the American government “offered no satisfying ‘one paragraph’ (let alone a one-line bumper sticker) explanation of why the effort in Vietnam was important to U.S. national interests.”73 In France it had at least been possible to sum up the objective of the war in two words: “French Algeria.” In 1968, British general Robert Thompson, an expert in counterinsurgency warfare,74 said that he had asked many Americans why the United States was fighting in Vietnam, but did not receive one clear answer. “The replies,” he said, “varied from containing China, preventing aggression and defeating the Vietcong to giving the people of South Vietnam a free choice.”75 And yet, despite the fact that three years of war in Vietnam had cost the lives of more than fifteen thousand Americans, there was twice as much support for the war at the beginning of 1968 as there was opposition to it.
