Why Leaders Lie (17 page)

24
. Bob Woodward,
Plan of Attack
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 173.

25
. For example, George Tenet, the head of the CIA in the run-up to the war, said in a speech on February 5, 2004: “We believe[d] that Iraq had lethal biological agents, including anthrax, which it could quickly produce and weaponize for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives. But we said we had no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons, agent or stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.” For a transcript of the speech, see “Tenet Defends Assessments of Iraqi Weapons,”
New York Times
, February 5, 2004. The Defense Intelligence Agency reported in September 2002 that there was no “hard” or “direct” evidence of chemical and biological stockpiles or production facilities. See Joseph Cirincione’s comments in
Conference Call Briefing on Iraq’s Weapons
(Washington, DC: Arms Control Association, February 3, 2004). See also
Iraq on the Record
, 15–16; Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, “Bush, Aides Ignored CIA Caveats on Iraq,”
Washington Post
, February 7, 2004; Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Postwar Findings about Iraq’s WMD Programs
, 26–43.

26
.
Iraq on the Record
, 7.

27
. Jackson, “Powell’s Shrinking Credibility.”

28
. See Joseph Cirincione, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, and George Perkovich,
WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications
(Carnegie Endowment Report, January 2004), 86,
http://carnegieendowment.org/files/Iraq3FullText.pdf
.

29
. Ibid., 18, 95.

30
. Ibid.,
WMD in Iraq
, 20;
Iraq on the Record
, 16.

31
. Cirincione, Mathews, and Perkovich,
WMD in Iraq
, 21.

32
. See Pincus and Priest, “Bush, Aides Ignored CIA Caveats”;
Iraq on the Record
, 10–13; Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Postwar Findings about Iraq’s WMD Programs
, 17–21; Murray Waas, “What Bush Was Told about Iraq,”
National Journal
, March 2, 2006.

33
. See Ackerman and Judis, “Deception and Democracy,” 15; Cirincione, Mathews, and Perkovich,
WMD in Iraq
, 21–28; Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Postwar Findings about Iraq’s WMD Programs
, 10–26; “Tenet Defends Assessments of Iraqi Weapons”; Greg Thielman’s comments in “Conference Call Briefing on Iraq’s Weapons”;
Iraq on the Record
, 7–15.

34
. See Ronald Brownstein, “Support of U.S. Military Role in Mideast Grows,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 5, 2003; The Gallup Organization,
Approval for Handling of War in Iraq Jumps
, Poll Analysis, December 19, 2003; Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, “Growing Number in U.S. Back War, Survey Finds,”
New York Times
, March 11, 2003; Tom Zeller, “The Iraq-Qaeda Link: A Short History,”
New York Times
, June 20, 2004; Tom Zeller, “Making a Simple Link of Faith,”
New York Times
, March 2, 2003. At least one reputable polling organization found in September 2003, two years after the Twin Towers fell and almost six months after the start of the Iraq war, that “seven in ten Americans continue to believe that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks.” See Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane, “Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds,”
Washington Post
, September 6, 2003.

35
. See “Cheney: No Link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11,”
CNN.com
, June 1, 2009,
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/01/cheney.speech/
; Rebecca Christie, “US Rumsfeld Concedes No WMDs or September 11 Ties in Iraq,”
Dow Jones Newswires
, September 17, 2004; Cirincione, Mathews, and Perkovich,
WMD in Iraq
, 44; Milbank and Deane, “Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers”;
Greg Miller, “No Proof Connects Iraq to 9/11, Bush Says,”
Los Angeles Times
, September 18, 2003; Paul Reynolds, “Rumsfeld Weakens a Pillar of War,”
BBC News Online
, October 5, 2004,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3717024.stm
; David E. Sanger, “Bush Reports No Evidence of Hussein Tie to 9/11,”
New York Times
, September 18, 2003; Susan Walsh, “Rumsfeld Sees No Link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11,”
USA Today
, September 16, 2003. An article in the
National Journal
reports that “ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.” Murray Waas, “Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept from Hill Panel,”
National Journal
, November 22, 2005.

36
. Transcript of testimony of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld before the Senate Armed Services Committee Regarding Iraq, September 19, 2002.

37
. Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, March 18, 2003.

38
. “Bush Makes Historic Speech aboard Warship,”
CNN.com
, May 1, 2003,
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/05/01/bush.transcript/
. See also Jim Rutenberg and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Bush Says G.O.P. Rebels are Putting Nation at Risk,”
New York Times
, September 16, 2006; David E. Sanger and Robin Toner, “Bush and Cheney Talk Strongly of Qaeda Links with Hussein,”
New York Times
, June 18, 2004.

39
.
New York Times
, “What the Bush Administration Said,” June 20, 2004; Christopher Scheer, Robert Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry,
The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq
(New York: Seven Stories, 2003), 42.

40
. Another lie that served the same purpose was President Bush’s claim—which he made on three separate occasions—that Saddam Hussein refused to allow UN inspectors into Iraq in late 2002, and therefore he had no choice but to remove the Iraqi leader from power. Joe Conason, “Saddam Chose to Deny Inspectors,”
Salon
, March 31, 2006,
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joe_conason/2006/03/31/bush_lies
.
Of course, Saddam allowed the inspectors into Iraq and gave them free reign to look for WMD. However, Bush pulled them out before they finished the job, and then invaded Iraq. For an excellent overview of the Bush administration’s deception campaign in the run-up to the Iraq war, see David Corn, “Can the ‘Bush Lied’ Deniers Handle the Truth?”
Politics Daily
, March 17, 2010,
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/17/can-the-bush-lied-deniers-handle-the-truth/
; David Corn, “Charges and Countercharges: Did Bush Knowingly Mislead the U.S. into War with Iraq?”
Politics Daily
, March 30, 2010,
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/30/a-long-war-did-bush-knowingly-mislead-the-u-s-into-iraq/
.

41
. Woodward,
Plan of Attack
, 296; Brian Knowlton, “Diplomacy Won’t Be Given ‘Months,’”
New York Times
, January 31, 2003. See also Bush’s comments in Scheer, Scheer, and Chaudhry,
Five Biggest Lies
, 80.

42
. Scheer, Scheer, and Chaudhry,
Five Biggest Lies
, 80.

43
. Nicholas Lemann, “How It Came to War; When Did Bush Decide That He Had to Fight Saddam?”
New Yorker
, March 31, 2003. See also Richard N. Haass,
War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 4–6.

44
.
Times
(London), “The Secret Downing Street Memo,” May 1, 2005. See also Michael Smith, “The Real News in the Downing Street Memos,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 23, 2005.

45
. Woodward,
Plan of Attack
, 269–74. For other evidence that Bush had decided to go to war before the end of January, 2003, see ibid., 95, 113, 115, 119–20, 169, 178. Also, there was evidence in the media during 2002 that the Bush administration had decided to remove Saddam by force. For example, see John Walcott and Mark Danner, “The Secret Way to War: An Exchange,”
New York Review of Books
, July 14, 2005, 48–49.

46
. Note that in this instance the Bush administration was engaging in both fearmongering and inter-state lying, which reminds us that a particular lie can be directed at multiple audiences and serve multiple purposes.

47
. For an excellent discussion of why and how leaders inflate threats, see A. Trevor Thrall and Jane K. Cramer, eds.,
American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation since 9/11
(New York: Routledge, 2009).

48
. Steven Casey, “Selling NSC-68: The Truman Administration, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Mobilization, 1950–51,”
Diplomatic History
29, no. 4 (September 2005): 655–90. In fact, the Truman administration’s rhetoric was so alarmist that there was “a very real fear that the popular mood could easily overheat, thereby reducing officials’ freedom to maneuver and perhaps even pushing them toward excessively radical and dangerous policies” (ibid., 661). See also Nancy E. Bernhard,
U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947–1960
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall,
America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

49
. Leslie Gelb with Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati, “Mission Unaccomplished,”
Democracy
, no. 13 (Summer 2009): 24.

50
. The classic brief against the Articles of Confederation is Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay,
The Federalist Papers
, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987), 145–84. For critiques of American policy-making machinery under the Constitution, see Theodore J. Lowi, “Making Democracy Safe for the World: National Politics and Foreign Policy,” in James N. Rosenau, ed.,
Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy
(New York: Free Press, 1967), 295–331; Theodore J. Lowi,
The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States
, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1979); E. E. Schattschneider,
The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America
(Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). See also Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki,
The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission
, Triangle Papers 8 (New York: New York University Press, 1975); and David Donald’s essay, “Died of Democracy,” in David Donald, ed.,
Why the North Won the Civil War
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), 79–90, in which he argues that the South lost the Civil War because it was too democratic.

51
. Alterman,
When Presidents Lie
, 210.

52
. Richard Cohen, “A War without Winners,”
Washington Post
, November 3, 2005.

53
. James Burnham,
Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism
(New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1964); Donald Kagan and Fredrick W. Kagan,
While America Sleeps:
Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today
(New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Donald Kagan,
On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace
(New York: Doubleday, 1995), 572–73; Robert G. Kaufman, “To Balance or to Bandwagon? Alignment Decisions in 1930s Europe,”
Security Studies
1, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 417–47; Norman Podhoretz,
The Present Danger: Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power?
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980); Jean-François Revel,
How Democracies Perish
, trans. William Byron (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984).

54
. Quoted in Ronald Bailey, “Origins of the Specious: Why Do Neoconservatives Doubt Darwin?”
Reason
, July 1997.

55
. Walter Lippmann, “Why Should the Majority Rule?” in Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, eds.,
The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy
(New York: Random House, 1963), 6–14; Walter Lippmann,
The Phantom Public
(New York: Macmillan, 1927); Walter Lippmann,
Public Opinion
(New York: Free Press, 1965).

56
. Ian Kershaw,
The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3.

57
. Great powers that act as offshore balancers are invariably “insular states” as opposed to “continental states.” See John J. Mearsheimer,
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
(New York: Norton, 2001), 126–28. On the “stopping power of water,” see ibid., 114–28.