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51 J. Conflict Resol. 3 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/jcfltr51 and id is 1 raw text is: U.S. Elite Support for journal of Conflict Resohution the 1991 Persian Gulf War Peter Liberman Department of Political Science, Queens College and Graduate Center City University of New York There is a substantial moralistic streak in U.S. elite attitudes about war against states perceived as evil. Among opinion leaders, death penalty supporters were substantially more likely than opponents to support the 1991 Gulf War, condone the Iraqi death toll, and favor escalating the war to topple Saddam Hussein. These relationships persist after controlling for ideology, nationalism, and instrumental beliefs about force and thus probably result from individual differences in retributiveness and humanitarianism, moral values known to underlie death penalty attitudes. Foreign policy expertise mod- erated this effect only on the regime change issue, and ten only moderately, suggest- ing that moral punitiveness might also influence the thinking of decision makers. President George H. W. Bush evidently felt real moral outrage during the crisis about Iraq's aggression, but he refrained from escalating the war to punish Saddam more severely for it. Keywords: 1991 Persian Gulf War; retribution; death penaly; Foreign Policy Leadership Project; opinion leaders; George H. W Bush D o states go to war to exact retribution for international crimes? Some scholars have noticed that political leaders' rhetoric and policies appear to seek revenge for past defeats, affronts to honor, or violations of international norms (Harkavy 2000; Nossal 1989; Offer 1995; Rosen 2004; Sherry 2005; Steinberg 1991; Welch 1993). But research on norms and security has generally focused on humanitarian motives and policies, such as the abolition of the slave trade, decolonization, human- itarian intervention, human rights and foreign aid policies, nuclear and chemical weapons taboos, and noncombatant immunity. This emphasis results partly from the preeminence of humanitarian values in contemporary moral discourse. But it is also due to the difficulty of differentiating the retributive from instrumental aims of mil- itary punishment. States often punish to deter, coerce, and weaken others, and it is hard to show that moral outrage had any real impact. It is thus perhaps understand- able that some scholars simply assume that rational self-interested calculation under- lies punitive behavior (e.g., Gelpi 2002). 3

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