Why Leaders Lie (8 page)

Second, the architects of the war often claimed that the United States knew with absolute certainty that Iraq had particular WMD capabilities, when, in fact, that was not true.
There were, of course, good reasons to suspect that Saddam might have chemical and biological weapons, but there was no direct evidence that he possessed those capabilities. Indeed, when Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks briefed Bush on September 6, 2002, Franks said, “Mr. President, we’ve been looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for ten years and haven’t found any yet, so I can’t tell you that I know that there are any specific weapons anywhere. I haven’t seen Scud one.”
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Nor did the intelligence agencies have hard evidence that Iraq possessed WMD.
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Moreover, the UN weapons inspectors were unable to find any evidence of WMD between November 2002 and March 2003, despite having the freedom to look anywhere they wanted inside Iraq. And, of course, if the U.S. government knew where those weapons were, they could have alerted the UN inspectors and helped them find the WMD.

Despite this lack of hard evidence, Vice President Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in late August 2002 that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
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Secretary of State Powell said one month later that “there is no doubt he has chemical weapons stocks.”
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On February 5, 2003, he told the UN, “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to produce more, many more.”
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Following suit, President Bush said on March 17, 2003: “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
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That same month, Secretary Rumsfeld went even further by saying that the United States knew Saddam had WMD because “we know where they are.”
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Another example of this line of deception was Vice President Cheney’s claim on September 8, 2002 that “we do
know, with absolute certainty, that he [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.”
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The equipment that Cheney was referring to was the widely discussed aluminum tubes that Iraq had procured from abroad. However, there was sharp disagreement within the intelligence community about the ultimate purpose of those tubes. Some analysts argued that they were designed for centrifuges that would help make nuclear weapons. But others, including experts in the Department of Energy, the agency with the greatest technical expertise on the subject, believed (correctly) that they were designed for artillery rockets.
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More generally, there were serious doubts within the intelligence community about whether Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program.
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In short, we did not know with “absolute certainty” that Iraq was trying to procure aluminum tubes to enrich uranium.

Third, the Bush administration made numerous statements before the war that were designed to imply that Saddam was in part responsible for the attacks on September 11. But the president and his advisors never explicitly said that he was linked to those events. The aim, of course, was to lead the American public to draw a false conclusion about Saddam without plainly stating that conclusion. It is no accident that when the war began in mid-March 2003, about half of the American people believed that the Iraqi dictator had helped bring down the World Trade Center.
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There is no evidence, however, that Saddam was involved in the September 11 attacks, as President Bush, Vice President Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz have all admitted when directly confronted on the matter.
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That evidence notwithstanding, the administration went to great lengths to foster that false connection in the minds
of the American people. For example, when Senator Mark Dayton (D-MN) asked Rumsfeld on September 19, 2002 to explain what was “compelling us now to make a precipitous decision and take precipitous action” against Iraq when the United States did not feel compelled to do so earlier, the secretary of defense replied, “What’s different?—what’s different is 3,000 people were killed.… What’s new is the nexus between terrorist networks like al Qaeda and terrorist states like Iraq.”
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In his March 18, 2003, letter to Congress laying out the justification for invading Iraq, President Bush wrote that the United States was within its legal rights “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons whom planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
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Even after Baghdad fell in April 2003, Bush and his lieutenants continued to imply that the war in Iraq was directly linked to September 11. For example, when the president spoke on the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln
on May 1, 2003, he told his audience, “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001 and still goes on.” He went on to say, “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaida and cut off a source of terrorist funding.… We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th, the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got.”
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Vice President Cheney, who has also played a key role in spreading this falsehood, said on September 14, 2003, that if the United States prevails in Iraq, “We will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under
assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”
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Again, there is no evidence that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden, much less that the Iraqi dictator helped Al Qaeda in any way on September 11. The Bush administration was undoubtedly still pedaling this bogus story to sustain support for the Iraq war, which had begun to go badly in the late summer of 2003.
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Fourth, in the year before the war, President Bush and his advisors frequently said that they hoped to find a peaceful resolution to the Iraq crisis, and that war was an option of last resort. For example, Bush told Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi on January 30, 2003, that he had not made a decision on whether to use force against Iraq, and then told the American people, with Berlusconi at his side, that it was still possible to avert war, although time was running short.
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The following week in Munich, Rumsfeld said publicly, “We still hope that force may not be necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein.… Let me be clear: No one wants war.”
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In fact, the Bush administration was bent on war by the summer of 2002, if not earlier, and the decision to deal with Saddam by going to the UN in September 2002 was designed to provide diplomatic cover, not to avoid the war. For example, Richard Haass, the head of policy planning in the State Department, says he knew that war was inevitable after meeting with Condoleezza Rice in early July 2002. He asked the national security advisor whether it made sense “to put Iraq front and center at this point, given the war on terrorism and other issues. And she said, essentially, that that decision’s been made, don’t waste your breath.”
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At roughly the same time, British policymakers concluded that Washington was bent on war against Iraq. Their thinking is summarized in a summary of a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002. It reads: “C [the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service] reported on
his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” It went on to say: “The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided.”
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Finally, Bush met with Colin Powell on January 13, 2003 and told him that he had decided to go to war against Iraq.
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That meeting took place a few weeks before Bush told the American public and Berlusconi that it might still be possible to avoid using force against Saddam and a few weeks before Rumsfeld told a Munich audience that war was not inevitable.
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Leaders engage in fearmongering when they think they recognize a serious threat to national security that the public does not see, and that the public cannot be made to appreciate with straightforward and honest discourse.
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They reason that the only way to mobilize their citizens to do the right thing is to deceive them for their own good. Fearmongering, which is a straightforward top-down form of behavior, is antidemocratic at its core, although leaders do it because they think it is in the national interest, not for personal gain.

There are a number of reasons why average citizens might not be able to comprehend a particular threat. They might not be sufficiently interested in international affairs to appreciate that their country is facing a lurking danger, even when their leaders give them unvarnished evidence of the threat. Moreover, they might not be collectively smart enough to recognize a specific threat. It is also possible that
those citizens might get weak-kneed when confronted with a menacing threat. In short, the broader public might be prone to some combination of ignorance, stupidity, and cowardice. When that happens, according to this logic, the governing elites have to light a fire under their people so that they will rise up to meet the challenge.

A good example of this kind of thinking in action was the way the Truman administration attempted to sell a major increase in defense spending to the American people in the spring of 1950.
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The president and his senior foreign-policy advisors believed that the broader public would not fully support the proposed buildup, and therefore it would be necessary to initiate a “psychological scare campaign.” Of course, when policymakers take a country down this road, they will inevitably face pressure to tell lies to scare their people enough that they enthusiastically back the government’s planned policies.

It is much harder to argue that educated elites who dispute the seriousness of a threat are either ignorant or dim-witted. This is especially true when you are dealing with experts on the issue at hand. It might be the case, however, that those educated and interested dissenters are perceived to have a wishy-washy view of international politics, and therefore some threat inflation is necessary to stiffen their backbones. It might also be the case that they are simply misreading the available evidence about the danger facing their country and drawing overly optimistic conclusions about the threat environment. If leaders cannot solve this problem by providing the misguided dissenters with more detailed information, the only solution left is fearmongering.

Bamboozling those recalcitrant elites is unlikely to work, however, because those dissenters are by definition knowledgeable about the issue at hand and thus hard to fool. An alternative approach, which is more likely to work, is to use
fearmongering to mobilize the broader public in ways that make it suspicious, if not hostile, to those stubborn experts. They would then be isolated and feel suspect, and maybe even worried about their careers, which would make them more likely to temper their criticisms or remain silent, or maybe even shift gears and support the government’s policy. Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, candidly acknowledged that this kind of fear caused him to support the 2003 Iraq war: “My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”
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There is an alternative explanation for why leaders sometimes turn to fearmongering that is less contemptuous of the public. It is possible that a country’s political system might be prone to paralysis and thus unable to respond in a timely manner to a serious threat. The fledgling American government under the Articles of Confederation certainly fits this description, and some even argue that the system of checks and balances set up under the Constitution is not conducive to recognizing and dealing with external threats in a timely manner.
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Leaders will have powerful incentives to fearmonger when the governmental machinery is sclerotic, because rousing the people might be the only way to force the political system into action to meet the looming danger.

It is reasonably easy for policymakers to lie to their publics. For starters, they control the state’s intelligence apparatus, which gives them access to important information that the public does not have and cannot get, at least in the short term. Policymakers, therefore, can manipulate the flow of information to the public in various ways, and most people will be inclined to trust what their leaders tell them unless there is hard evidence that they are being deceived.
Furthermore, the head of a country can use the bully pulpit to manipulate the discourse about foreign policy in different ways, including lying to the public. American presidents have significant power in this regard.

Lying to the public is relatively easy for another reason. As noted, it is difficult for statesmen to lie to each other about significant matters, because there is not much trust between countries. Anarchy pushes states to be vigilant in their dealings with each other, especially when national security issues are at play. But that is not the case inside most states, where large numbers of people, including educated elites, are predisposed to trust their government, whose most important job, after all, is to protect them. Robert McNamara once said that it is “inconceivable that anyone even remotely familiar with our society and system of government could suspect the existence of a conspiracy” to provoke a war.
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Many Americans would readily endorse McNamara’s claim, as they expect their leaders to be straight with them. This trust, of course, is what makes the public easy to fool, and this is why the behavior that McNamara describes is not just thinkable, but we have evidence of it.