Wikileaks’ Influence on the Iraq War Public Opinion

It is tempting to say the releases turned people against the Iraq war. They did not, and the reason matters: by 2010 that job was long finished. What changed was something harder to measure and probably more durable.

Opinion had already moved

By 2010 majorities in the United States and the United Kingdom had regarded the invasion as a mistake for several years. Public support had drained away over the absence of the weapons that justified it, the insurgency, the casualty figures and the cost.

The releases arrived at the end of that process, not the start of it. Anyone claiming a video in April 2010 turned the public against a war that had lost majority support around 2005 is arguing backwards.

Why the timing matters

Support had drained away years earlier, around the middle of the decade. Anyone claiming a video in April 2010 turned the public against the war is arguing backwards. What changed was the texture of the objection, not its direction.

What actually changed

Three things, none of which shows up in a support-or-oppose poll.

1. What people pictured. Before, the war was a set of arguments about intelligence and strategy. After, a great many people had a specific image attached to it. Footage does this and statistics do not.
2. The numbers. The Iraq field reports produced roughly fifteen thousand previously uncounted civilian deaths, which moved the historical record rather than the opinion polls. The detail is here.
3. What people believed about disclosure. The lasting shift was a suspicion that the public account of a war is systematically smoother than the internal one.

From a policy objection to a conduct objection

Those are different criticisms with different implications. The first is about a decision made in 2003 by a small number of identifiable people. The second is about thousands of decisions made by ordinary soldiers under rules nobody outside had ever read, and it is much harder to resolve by changing a government.

The effect on policy: essentially none

This is the part that disappoints everyone. No inquiry was opened into the airstrike. No rules of engagement were rewritten. No withdrawal timetable moved. Nobody was charged over anything in the recording.

The measurable institutional response was tighter information security and more leak prosecutions. What changed and what did not is set out here.

The effect that took a decade to show

The durable change is a default assumption, and you can see it whenever a conflict produces a contested incident now.

The first question the public asks is no longer what happened. It is where the footage is, who has it, and why it has not been released. That habit did not exist before 2010, and it exists now regardless of what anyone thinks of WikiLeaks, most people asking it having no idea where the habit came from.

Where the effect was different

Almost all writing about this measures opinion in the United States and Britain, which is a narrow way to ask the question.

In Iraq, the footage did not reveal that civilians were being killed in airstrikes. People in Baghdad had known that since 2003, often from their own street. What the release provided was documentation of something already believed, and a rare instance of an incident being named, dated and attached to an identifiable aircraft rather than disappearing into rumour.

Across much of the wider world the effect was closer to confirmation than revelation too. That difference is worth holding on to, because it changes what the release actually was. In Washington it looked like a disclosure. In Al-Amin al-Thaniyah it looked like the rest of the world finally being shown something the neighbourhood had watched happen.

What WikiLeaks could and could not move

A fair accounting is modest. The releases did not end a war, did not produce an inquiry, did not change a rule, and did not shift a poll that had already shifted.

What they did was replace an abstraction with a street, a date and four names, and leave behind a public that now expects to see the record rather than a summary of it. Whether that was worth seven years of one person's life is not a question this archive can settle. What can be said is that sixteen years later the expectation is still there, and the accountability it was supposed to produce still is not.