British Public Opinion after a Decade of War: Attitudes to Iraq and Afghanistan

Abstract

Using data from the 2011 British Social Attitudes survey (n = 3,311), this article compares British public opinion of the purposes and successes of the Iraq and Afghanistan missions. Public acceptance of military deaths/injuries, the accuracy of public estimates of military fatalities and how these differ according to opinions of the missions are determined. It is found that the British public is doubtful of the missions' achievements and cynical about their purposes. Perceptions of the campaigns were associated with the accuracy of estimations of UK military fatalities, and the acceptability of military deaths/injuries. Implications for social and political theory and British foreign policy are discussed.

Militarization, stigma, and resistance: negotiating military reservist identity in the civilian workplace

“…The FR2020 consultation document Reserves 2020: The Independent Commission to Review the United Kingdom's Reserve Forces (MoD 2011) contained a series of claims around support for an armed forces generally held in high regard by the host population (Gribble et al 2014), but which was felt to flow from 'sympathy' rather than 'understanding' (MoD 2011, 10). What was required was a 'strategic narrative … to reestablish popular understanding of Defence and the rationale for the Nation's Reserves' (MoD 2011, 11).…”

“…At the same time as they maintain distance from an institution that is tasked, as we argue above, with the otherwise proscribed act of taking life when ordered to do so, reservists experience the need for the wider public to support them. In recent years the political calculations underpinning the emergence of risk-transfer militarism (Shaw 2002) have brought into sharp relief armed forces' dependence on a robust degree of support without which overseas interventions are quickly delegitimated (Shaw 1991;Gribble et al 2014). As a new generation of military and civilian elites have attempted to render the armed forces and their personnel 'familiar, yet exceptional'a process more advanced in the US context through Catherine Lutz's notion of the 'military normal' in the context of counterinsurgency warfareso they have fallen foul of the increasingly blurred lines between the two chiming with Howell's (2018) martial politics that stresses the indivisibility of the civilian and military spheres.…”

Homes for heroes? Assessing the impact of the UK’s Military Covenant

“…The Covenant appears, therefore, at a moment when the British government had been innovating around defence as a public policy areaboth in high-level strategic terms and also in bringing the defence realm closer to being a tool of a new and emergent form of foreign policy. Indeed, speaking in 2006 the Chief of the General Staff, Richard Dannatt, described the army as 'running hot', and suffering from over stretch in the face of the imminent upsurge in troop numbers in Afghanistan at the time (Norton-Taylor, 2006) (Gribble, et al, 2015). The public's concern around the duty of care, correlates closely to the perceived progress of the British military in the operational theatres of Afghanistan and Iraq and of course the actuality of casualties and injuries sustained.…”

The impact of practical support on parental bereavement: Reflections from a study involving parents bereaved through military death

“…For example, Provost (1989) argues that the Vietnam War created a conflicted social environment that contributed to prolonged early grief phases and to struggles to resolve the loss about which families felt ambivalent. In the UK, the deployment of UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq did not command substantial public support for whom there were concerns about the objectives of the lengthy and often controversial missions (Gribble et al, 2014). Nevertheless, despite this lack of commitment to what remains a controversial conflict, attitudes towards the sacrifice of Armed Forces personnel and their families began to change during this period.…”