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Flagging Ratings=War (?)
One of the most predictably prevalent ways unpopular leaders rally their citizens into supporting them is by engaging in military conflict with other, usually weaker, countries.
We saw this in the 1980s when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher started a 10-week war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands and the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands.
It was so “successful,” our own president at the time, Ronald Reagan, decided to try to boost his own flagging poll numbers the following year with an invasion of the small Caribbean island nation of Grenada.
Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush’s approval rating spiked after American-led forces drove Iraqi soldiers out of Kuwait. (It’s interesting to note that we had been previously allied with Iraq and supplied its then-leader Saddam Hussein with weapons he was using in his war against Iran — which we were also arming at the same time. See the history of the Iran-Contra scandal.)
To his biographer, Bush’s son, George W. Bush, criticized his father’s decision not to occupy Iraq, admitting in 1999 — before running for president:
One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to…
