Why Leaders Lie (11 page)

Consider, for example, the fifteen states that emerged from the wreckage of the former Soviet Union. There was
little need for the elites in any of those countries to invent false stories about how they came into being in 1991, largely because the breakup of the Soviet Union was remarkably peaceful. (All of those remnant states, of course, have powerful incentives to lie about other aspects of their long histories, and they do.) Contrast that set of cases with the founding of Israel and the United States, both of which involved serious crimes against the peoples who lived on the lands that were overrun and colonized. Not surprisingly, Israeli and American elites have gone to substantial lengths to whitewash this cruel history. But there is little hand wringing about this issue in the United States today, mainly because the controversial events happened so long ago that it seems like ancient history. Israel’s creation, on the other hand, is much more recent, and how it happened is a remarkably contentious subject, not just because the Palestinians have a growing voice in the discourse, but also because a handful of scholars (many of whom are Israeli) have challenged Israel’s founding myths. As one might expect, most Israelis and most of their American supporters have not changed their thinking about Israel’s birth, but instead have redoubled their efforts to sell the myths.

There is a well-developed body of norms that prescribe acceptable forms of state behavior and proscribe unacceptable conduct in both peacetime and wartime. These norms are closely linked to just-war theory and liberal ideology more generally, and many of them are codified in international law.

Most statesmen claim that they accept these liberal norms and invariably emphasize their commitment to the rule of law. Nevertheless, leaders sometimes conclude that their national interest compels them to act in ways that contradict these rules. This behavior includes invading other countries for strategic gain and launching preventive wars, as well as waging war in vicious ways that violate just-war theory. For example, Duke political scientist Alexander Downes shows in his seminal book
Targeting Civilians in War
that “desperation to win and to save lives on one’s own side in costly, protracted wars of attrition causes belligerents to target enemy
civilians.”
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Indeed, he shows that “democracies are somewhat more likely than non-democracies to target civilians.” Remember that the United States purposely killed about 900,000 Japanese civilians in the last five months of World War II, not because it feared losing the war, but because it wanted to win the war without having to invade the Japanese homeland.
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General Curtis LeMay, who was in charge of that murderous bombing campaign, once remarked, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
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Such brutal state behavior, however, is not restricted to wartime. The United States, for example, played the leading role in getting the UN to impose economic sanctions on Iraq from August 1990 until May 2003. That financial and trade embargo helped create a humanitarian disaster, killing about 500,000 Iraqi civilians according to UNICEF estimates.
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Statesmen also form alliances with particularly odious countries when they believe that it makes good strategic sense. To defeat Nazi Germany in World War II, both Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt worked closely with Josef Stalin, who was not simply a tyrant, but was also one of the greatest mass murderers of all time.
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When states act in ways that run counter to liberal norms or international law, their leaders often invent false stories that are designed to mask what they are doing. Not surprisingly, both British and American elites—including academics, journalists, and policymakers—went to considerable lengths during World War II to portray Stalin in a favorable light, so that it would not appear that Britain and the United States were run by ruthless statesmen who would cooperate with one tyrannical mass murderer to defeat another.
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Thus, he was frequently described as friendly “Uncle Joe,” while the stark differences between the American and Soviet
political systems were sometimes played down, giving the impression that the Soviet Union was a democracy too.

The Western allies’ efforts to portray Stalin as something he was not was put to a severe test in the spring of 1943, when it became apparent to both Churchill and Roosevelt that the Soviets had murdered thousands of Poles—most of whom were army officers—in the Katyn Forest three years earlier in the spring of 1940.
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As one British policymaker remarked at the time, “It is obviously a very awkward matter when we are fighting for a moral cause and when we intend to deal adequately with war criminals, that our Allies should be open to accusations of this kind.”
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Nevertheless, the British government went right to work blaming the killings on Nazi Germany, knowing that the Soviets were actually responsible. The Foreign Office maintained that “the story should be treated as a German attempt to undermine allied solidarity,” while the Political Warfare Executive, a key government unit involved in the propaganda war, issued a directive saying: “It is our job to help to ensure that history will record the Katyn Forest incident as a futile attempt by Germany to postpone defeat by political methods.”
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Another case of liberal lies involves Nazi Germany’s efforts to blame Poland for starting World War II on September 1, 1939. On that fateful day, Hitler told the Reichstag that he had been patiently waiting for two days “for the Polish government to send a plenipotentiary” to talk with him, but none arrived.
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The clear implication was that he was interested in finding a diplomatic solution to the dispute between the two countries over the future of Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but Poland would not cooperate with him, because its leaders were not interested in peace. Then, after mentioning his “love of peace,” Hitler claimed that Poland had fired the first shots at targets in Germany, and that the Wehrmacht was merely “returning the fire.” Germany, in
other words, was acting in self-defense. In fact, Germany had staged a series of border incidents on the evening of August 31 that were designed to make it look like Poland started the war, when it was actually the victim of Nazi aggression.

A final example concerns the British aerial-bombing strategy against Germany during World War II. Beginning in the early spring of 1942, Bomber Command began a sustained area-bombing campaign, which guaranteed that many German civilians would die. The British government did not want to tell its public that it was purposely killing civilians, because this was a gross violation of the laws of war. Instead, officials lied and said that the attacks were confined to military targets, because “the intentional bombardment of civilian populations, as such, is forbidden.” As the historian Max Hastings notes, “From beginning to end of the war, ministers prevaricated—indeed, lied flatly again and again—about the nature of the bomber offensive.”
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One might think that there is little need to tell liberal lies, since most people intuitively understand that international politics is a nasty and dangerous business, and that countries sometimes have good reason to act in ways that are contrary to liberal norms or international law. While there is an element of truth in that argument, the fact is that most people still prefer to think—whenever they can—that their country is acting justly while their adversaries are not. Thus, leaders sometimes lie to cover up their country’s ruthless behavior because their publics simply do not want to hear the truth. The logic here is similar to the one that underpins nationalist mythmaking. Of course, leaders themselves are often moved to lie because they want to portray themselves as responsible and law-abiding members of the international
community, and sometimes because they fear being brought to trial down the road. Even Osama bin Laden felt the need to explain why Al Qaeda was justified in killing thousands of civilians on September 11.
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The fact is that many people around the world identify with the well-established body of liberal norms and rules that are supposed to guide state behavior, and they want to believe that their government acts in accordance with them. Political theorist Michael Walzer captures this point when he writes: “The clearest evidence for the stability of our values over time is the unchanging character of the lies soldiers and statesmen tell. They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice.”
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Furthermore, as with nationalist mythmaking, leaders tell liberal lies to gain legitimacy abroad. But the payoffs here are likely to be just as small for the same reasons. Outsiders are likely to have a good appreciation of what actually happened in the events that are being lied about and therefore be hard to fool. Of course, it might occasionally be possible to deceive a lot of people in a friendly country who have strong incentives—be they ideological or strategic—for believing certain liberal falsehoods. In short, liberal lies are hard to sell abroad, especially when they involve recent events.

Virtually all leaders—whether they head up autocracies or democracies—are wont to justify their behavior in terms of liberal norms and international law, even when their actions are principally motivated by the kind of hard-headed strategic calculations identified with realism. However, this penchant for liberal rhetoric does not create problems as long as a country’s behavior is consistent with both realist and liberal
dictates, as it often is. For example, America’s participation in the fights against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in World War II was easily defensible on moral as well as strategic grounds. The same could be said of the United States’ decision to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or to go to war against Iraq in 1991.

Problems arise, however, when realist and idealist imperatives are at odds with each other. In those cases, elites will usually act like realists and talk like liberals, which invariably necessitates deception, including lying.

Up to now, I have focused on the potential benefits of international lying. The emphasis has been on showing what leaders might gain for their country by telling lies to other countries or to their own people. However, there are costs as well as benefits associated with the different types of international lies that I have identified. There can even be a price to pay when a lie works as intended.

To assess the negative aspects of international lying—and please remember that I am looking at the matter from a strictly utilitarian perspective—it is necessary to consider how each of the five kinds of lies affects a country’s domestic politics as well as its foreign policy. Different criteria are needed to evaluate the possible negative effects of lying in each realm. Let me start by describing the main criterion for domestic politics.

Pervasive lying will inevitably do grave damage to any body politic, because it creates a poisonous culture of dishonesty.
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Therefore, it makes eminently good sense for leaders
and their fellow citizens to work to minimize the amount of lying that takes place in their country. This is not a simple task, however, because there are sometimes powerful incentives for individuals to lie and cheat to get ahead, even though such selfish behavior is bad for the society at large. Just think about Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street investor who defrauded thousands of clients of billions of dollars. Of course, he is not lacking for company, which is why governments monitor and regulate the behavior of their citizenry in various realms, and why the elites in most societies routinely condemn lying about domestic political and economic matters.

Given this situation, telling international lies raises a potential danger that is deeply worrisome. Specifically, there is the possibility that lying about matters relating to foreign policy might have a blowback effect on everyday life inside a country’s borders. In other words, lying about international politics in a visible way—even if it makes good strategic sense—might spill into the national arena and cause significant trouble by legitimizing and encouraging dishonesty in daily life. Too much concealment and spinning can also have unfortunate consequences, but those kinds of deception are not nearly as dangerous as rampant lying.

Routine lying has at least four dangerous consequences for life on the home front, all of which are especially serious for democracies. Widespread lying makes it difficult for citizens in a democracy to make informed choices when they vote on issues and candidates, simply because there is a good chance that they are basing their decisions on false information. How can a voter hold a politician or leader accountable when it is impossible to know the truth about that person’s actions? Democracies operate best when they include a reasonably efficient marketplace of ideas, which can only work when citizens have reliable information and there are high levels of transparency and honesty.

Lying by government officials—to each other or the public—can also cripple a state’s policy-making process, whether it is a democracy or not.
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The main reason is that the transaction costs in a world of deceit are enormous, because policymakers cannot trust each other, and thus they have to devote extra time and resources to making sure that the information they have at their disposal is accurate. But even when they perform due diligence, they still might not get all of their facts correct, in which case their decisions will be based on false information, which would greatly increase the chances of pursuing wrongheaded policies.