Why Leaders Lie (9 page)

One might surmise that fearmongering does not pay because the liar will eventually get caught and be punished by his public. He might lose credibility with his citizens or maybe even be voted out of office when he comes up for reelection. These possibilities are not much of a deterrent, however, mainly because leaders who lie to their publics think they can get away with it. For starters, it is not clear that the lies will be unmasked anytime soon. It took more than thirty years before it became public knowledge that President Kennedy had lied about how he settled the Cuban missile crisis. As discussed in the next chapter, he agreed to a secret deal with the Soviets in which the United States would remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets
taking their missiles out of Cuba. But Kennedy and his advisors denied making that deal during and after the crisis.

Furthermore, perpetrators are likely to think that even if they get caught, they will be able to rely on smart lawyers and friends in high places to help them craft a clever defense so that they can escape punishment. Finally, and most importantly, leaders who engage in fearmongering invariably believe that their assessment of the threat is correct, even if they are lying about some of the particulars. They think that they are in the right and what they are doing is for the good of the country. Thus, their lies will matter little in the long run if they expose the threat for what it is and deal with it effectively. The end result, in other words, will justify the means.

This line of thinking surely underpinned the Bush administration’s deception campaign in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and it probably would have worked if the United States had won a stunning victory, like it did in the 1991 war against Iraq. A comment by
Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen in November 2005, when the second Iraq war was going badly, illustrates the cleansing power of military victory: “One could almost forgive President Bush for waging war under false or mistaken pretenses had a better, more democratic Middle East come out of it.”
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Regime type influences the likelihood of fearmongering. In particular, it is more likely in democracies than autocracies, because leaders are more beholden to public opinion in democratic states. Of course, not all democratically elected leaders will surmise that their people need to be deceived because they cannot assess the facts of a situation correctly or handle the truth; but some will. There is actually a rich
tradition of this kind of thinking on the right in America, where it is widely believed that democracies are at a disadvantage when they compete against nondemocracies, because the broader public is an obstacle to developing a smart and bold foreign policy. This line of thinking was evident during the Cold War, especially among neoconservatives and other hardliners like James Burnham and Jean-François Revel, who thought that the publics in the democratic West were prone to appease rather than confront their dangerous adversaries.
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Neoconservative thinking about the broader public’s inability to handle truth is captured in the following comment by Irving Kristol, one of the founding fathers of that movement: “There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”
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This perspective, however, is not restricted to conservatives, as is evident from reading
The Phantom Public
by Walter Lippmann, who was not a man of the right.
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This kind of behavior may be more prevalent in democracies, but it is not limited to them, because in the age of nationalism, even the leaders of nondemocratic countries pay attention to public opinion. Hitler, for example, closely monitored the German people’s thinking about all kinds of issues, and went to great lengths to ensure that his policies enjoyed widespread public support. His regime, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, was “acutely aware of the need to manufacture consensus.”
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Nevertheless, the more autocratic or the more firm the autocrat’s grip on his society, the less likely the need for fearmongering.

Geography also influences the likelihood of fearmongering. States that share a border with a menacing adversary usually have little need to exaggerate that threat, mainly because it resides next door and is in easy striking distance. In such cases, the public is likely to recognize and fear its next-door neighbor. On the other hand, countries that do not share a border with a dangerous opponent are more likely to have cause to rely on fearmongering. A distant enemy is likely to appear less frightening than a nearby enemy and thus give leaders reason to inflate the threat. States separated from their main adversaries and allies by large bodies of water—I call these states offshore balancers—are especially prone to fearmongering, because water is a formidable defensive barrier.
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Comparing the amount of threat inflation in each of the major powers during World War I illustrates how geography influences the rhetoric that leaders employ to describe their adversaries. There was much less fearmongering about the German threat in France and Russia than there was in Britain and the United States. This is hardly surprising, since the two Anglo-Saxon countries are offshore balancers; in contrast, France and Russia not only shared a border with the
Kaiserreich
, but they were also fighting the German army on their own territory. Germany itself had little need to threat-inflate during the war, since it was fighting against adversaries located on both its eastern and western borders.

Finally, leaders promoting wars of choice—especially
preventive wars
—are likely to engage in fearmongering. It is difficult to motivate the public to support a preventive war, which is when one country attacks another that is not an imminent threat to it at that time, but might be sometime in the future. Because the threat is not serious at the moment, the public’s sense of danger is unlikely to be high. Moreover, given the difficulty of predicting the future, many citizens are
likely to think that the threat might not ever materialize for one reason or another. Preventive wars are also prohibited by international law as well as just-war theory, which make them a hard sell in many countries around the world. For these reasons, many people—including experts—will want to adopt a “wait and see” policy, and hope that trouble never shows up. To counter this foot dragging, the advocates of war will fearmonger to create the impression that the country is facing an immediate threat and that they are advocating
preemptive war
, which is when a country attacks an adversary that is about to attack it. Preemptive wars, which are essentially a form of self-defense, are widely recognized as legal as well as just.
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Regarding the run-up to the current war in Iraq, it is worth noting that the United States is a democracy as well as an offshore balancer, and it was attempting to sell a preventive war. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration told lies and engaged in other kinds of deception to create the impression that Saddam was an imminent threat and that the United States would thus be fighting a preemptive war, not a preventive war.
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Strategic cover-ups can take two forms. Leaders can lie about a policy that has gone badly wrong. The motivating reason for the falsehood is to protect the country’s interests, not to shield the individuals who are responsible for the policy failure, although that is usually an unintended consequence. Leaders can also lie to hide a controversial but smart strategy, because they fear that it will meet serious public resistance and not be adopted. The aim in this instance is not to conceal a bungled policy from the body politic, but to implement a particular policy without arousing strong opposition. In both cases, however, the leaders believe that there are sound strategic reasons for the cover-up. They are lying for what they judge to be the good of the country.

Inter-state lies are directed at other states, while fearmongering is directed at the home front. Strategic cover-ups, in contrast, are usually aimed at both of those audiences. To be more specific, a leader bent on covering up a controversial or failed policy will always seek to deceive his public and
will frequently try to deceive another country at the same time. In other words, the intended audience for a strategic cover-up can either be the home front alone or the home front plus a foreign audience. But the target of this kind of falsehood cannot be just another country, because that would be an inter-state lie.

Strategic cover-ups, it should be emphasized, are not examples of concealment, which is when leaders deceive their intended audience by hardly saying anything about an important foreign policy problem. With strategic cover-ups, leaders are dealing with international issues that have a public face and are certain to prompt hard questions that the government will have to answer. In those cases, however, leaders will tell lies because they believe that it is in the national interest to deceive their fellow citizens, and often other states as well.

One reason that leaders sometimes seek to hide failure and the incompetence that caused it is because they do not want to convey weakness to an adversary who might exploit it, or because they think that it might damage their relationship with other countries. Of course, they also worry about the home front, where news about botched operations and ineptitude can undermine national unity, which is especially important when fighting a protracted war that is not going well.

During World War I, for example, Marshal Joseph Joffre, the commander-in-chief of the French army, bungled the planning for the battle of Verdun (1916) and then mismanaged the battle itself. He was clearly incompetent and most French political leaders knew it. But they could not tell the
public that he was inept when thousands of French soldiers under his command were being wounded or killed each week. They feared that revealing the true facts about Joffre would badly weaken morale on the home front and possibly undermine the war effort. So the politicians concealed their critical discussions about Joffre from the public and falsely portrayed him as an able leader. “Concern for morale,” as the scholar Ian Ousby writes, “prevented him falling into official disgrace.”
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It also would have been foolish to reveal to the Germans that the French forces facing them at Verdun were in serious trouble because they were under the command of an inept general.

Israel’s behavior in the aftermath of the infamous Qibya massacre is another case of a state covering up a failed policy for what its leaders felt were good strategic reasons.
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On October 14, 1953, a commando force headed by Major Ariel Sharon went into the West Bank village of Qibya and murdered sixty-nine Palestinians, roughly two-thirds of whom were women and children. The attack was in retaliation for the killing of an Israeli woman and her two young children a day earlier. The orders from Israel’s central command, which oversaw the raid, stipulated that the objective was “attacking the village of Qibya, temporarily occupying it, and maximal killing in order to chase the inhabitants of the village from their houses.”
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There was a huge outcry around the world—including from the American Jewish community—when it became known what the Israeli commandos had done in Qibya. Oxford scholar Avi Shlaim writes that “The Qibya massacre unleashed against Israel a storm of international protest of unprecedented severity in the country’s short history.”
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News about the raid was also causing problems for the Israeli government on the home front.
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Fully aware of the potential for further trouble at home, not to mention the
damage that was being done to Israel’s international standing, Israeli leaders tried to rescue the situation by lying. “On October 19,” Israeli historian Benny Morris writes, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion “went on the air with a wholly fictitious account of what happened.” He blamed the massacre on Jewish frontier settlers and said, “The Government of Israel rejects with all vigor the absurd and fantastic allegation that 600 men of the IDF took part in the action.… We have carried out a searching investigation and it is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Qibya.”
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But Ben-Gurion’s lying did not work, and on November 24 the UN Security Council passed a resolution expressing “the strongest censure of that action.”

Leaders might also lie to cover up a controversial policy that they believe is strategically sound, but that they want to hide from their own public and possibly other countries as well. The underlying assumption is that most of their fellow citizens are unlikely to have sufficient wisdom to recognize the policy’s virtues. Therefore, it makes sense for the leaders to adopt the policy but conceal that fact from their people; otherwise, public opinion might force the government to abandon the policy, to the country’s detriment. The same harsh assessment of the public’s ability to think wisely that underpins fearmongering underpins strategic cover-ups.

President John F. Kennedy’s efforts to bring the Cuban Missile Crisis to a peaceful conclusion provide a good example of a leader lying to cover up a controversial policy.
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To end that crisis before it escalated into a war between the superpowers, Kennedy agreed to the Soviet demand that the United States pull its nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles out of Turkey in return for the Soviets pulling their missiles out of Cuba. The president understood that this concession would not play well with the American public, especially with the
political right, and would also damage Washington’s relations with its NATO allies, especially Turkey. So he told the Soviets that they could not speak openly about the deal, or else he would have to deny it and ultimately renege on it. Still, there were suspicions in the West that such a deal had been cut, and the Kennedy administration was queried on the matter. The president and his principal advisors lied and denied that there had been an agreement to take the Jupiters out of Turkey. In retrospect, it appears to have been a noble lie, since it helped defuse an extremely dangerous confrontation between two states armed with nuclear weapons.